CoD Ghosts: Single Player

Let's face it, we all knew it was gonna be shit. I have disposable income so I went and bought Ghosts. I decided to play through the single player and within the first 5 minutes of the game, had decided I needed to make a list of all the things wrong with it. While not everything on the list is unique to Call of Duty (many can be seen in other FPSs), it does show to me that triple A titles are fucking abysmal when it comes to being a fun and engaging player experience.

I'll leave out major spoilers. I also played the game on Hardened, because I know that Veteran, while entirely do-able, is just a word that causes the enemy AI to spam grenades in a cheap attempt to increase difficulty.

1.       Infinitely spawning enemies. Sweet teats Activision. Have you not worked out that infinitely spawning enemies is nothing but sub-standard, third-world game design. I mean, you had fucking millions of dollars, and yet every year you grunt out another abortion of a game with infinite waves of enemies, then you gobble up the afterbirth in an attempt to recycle it for next year's ovulation cycle.

2.       The AI is fucking autistic and can't make up its mind. It runs back and forth and jumps between animations.

3.       The infinite enemies run to exact same positions, lie in the exact same poses, and are the exact same models. Despite one of the major "features" of the multiplayer being customisable faces and gender. I didn't see a single fucking vagina in the entire game except for the token role at the start. The helicopter pilot doesn't count either because you never see her, and she's such a minor role. On that note, why do AAA FPS game designers think gash is only good enough to be a pilot? Halo, BF, CoD, MoH(?)

4.       Unconvincing voice acting that isn't even suited to situation at hand (panic in non-dangerous situations). I swear I even heard "team up with the team" at one point

5.       One of the features of the game was that you were an "underdog":

"A New Call of Duty Universe: For the first time in franchise history, players will take on the underdog role with Call of Duty: Ghosts; outnumbered and outgunned, players must fight to reclaim a fallen nation in an intensely personal narrative. Gamers will get to know an entirely new cast of characters and visit locales in a changed world unlike anything seen in Call of Duty® before." 

I was more on an underdog as the foot soldier in CoD4. In this, I'm a highly trained operative inducted into what is claimed to be the most elite and feared soldiers in the world. The only "intensely personal" thing about the narrative is the we get to run through some cliché-as-fuck father-son moments. Overall, the story is painfully predictable.

6.       The "new" game engine Activision appears to be a lie. The game looks marginally better than every single previous CoD game only when on the highest settings. Lighting is admittedly a bit better (lol, see below screenshot stolen from reddit), but I'm not seeing any wondrous new graphical morsels. Level design is as fucking bland as ever it was and game locations are not special at all. The general themes are the same as any previous games and, *tinfoil hat on*, I'm beginning to think that Dice and Activision share design notes because both games have an aircraft carrier level, a rainforest level, collapsing skyscrapers and a contextual lean mechanic.

7.       Mediocre collision detection on debris, but half of it is 2-D

8.       Models clip into textures. Stairs are notorious for this. Though I guess same could be said for every game ever.

9.       There are particle debris in "clean" air in the space station.

10.   Dead bodies in space have collision detection but bullets zip straight through with no blood or contact sound.

11.   Guns sound as weak as a fart from a gay man's arsehole

12.   Bullet flinch is fucking huge, which means you miss, which means you get shot and flinch more, which means you die. The only advantage this had, was that I drank my beer quicker due to dying unnecessarily and using the respawn and unskippable cut-scene to take a mouthful.

13.   If you don't do exactly what the game wants you to you die, and have to sit through an unskippable cut-scene. This includes the time I strayed too far from the objective and was told "No dog left behind". Fuck the dog, Activision can't make me care about it no matter how many millions they spent researching dog behaviour and programming it to be "realistic"

14.   ACOG seem to have a large amount of waver, making single headshots all but impossible (assuming bullet flinch is taking you up the arse without lube already), but DMRs on the other hand are perfectly stable

15.   Red Water.

16.   Actual in game water is buggy as fuck. Screenshot didnt save, but imagine blinding white light where water should be. When you're walking up a river.

17.   Helicopters are only vulnerable when the game wants them as a set-piece, and then, with varying degrees of vulnerability (some can be shot down with light weapons, others only with explosives. Otherwise, there is no fucking way you're allowed to shoot them down. They must drop off their payload.

18.   Recoil from laser guided launchers means you can't aim at target fast enough and rocket overshoots

19.   View bobbing is sickening but vehicular transit is on-rails smooth

20.   First person dog-control. How that could possibly be achieved realistically I have no fucking idea. Dog can apparently insta-kill without them yelling out.

21.   Teleporting player after finished with dog control, or other special call-in (air strike etc.)

22.   Player gets stuck on  small bricks and debris

23.   Invisible walls blocking shots

24.   Sliding models, and jerking between programmed animations.

25.   If an ally gets ahead of you, and you can't squeeze past, there is a 95% chance that there is about to be some poor NPC who walks round a corner gets murdered by your NPC.

26.   You have to wait for the gatekeeper. Any corridor shooter has this I guess, and it's not as bad as BF3...

27.   Enemies playing ball in full combat gear including helmet. Because fuck changing the models.

28.   Enemies freeze when programmed sequence is finished but scene hasn't faded to black yet.

29.   Attacking the enemies during any given programmed sequence is largely optional. They'll probably blow up at some point on their own.

30.   A-10's have an impossibly wide cannon firing arc. Also doesn't matter if you miss the "critical" target, it'll blow up anyway when you return to player perspective. Then you can watch the A-10s pull out of a suicide dive impossibly low.

31.   The game designers show a complete and utter lack of comprehension of how hovercraft work

32.   Your NPC brother has retard strength - he can lift burning timber beams by himself just long enough for you to get through... oops, now he's trapped.

33.   Tank programmed to drive over jeep instead of around just because it looks cool

34.   Player character probably holds world record for holding breath underwater while also under fire from bad dudes

35.   For that matter, player character main also performs remarkably well for taking a bullet to the chest unarmoured.

36.   Relate that bullet point to your father too.

37.   I found a programmed helicopter piloted by superman. He must have been superman because he managed to see me through solid walls and was trying to shoot me.

38.   Teleporting allies. Actually this is even worse than bullet flinch. The only way to stop the infinite enemies is to move forward cover-to-cover. You barely even have to shoot anyone as your allies take care of that for you. But how do they do that? By teleporting of course! I should probably rename to Caboose seeing how many times I'd break cover to shoot at an enemy, only to find a friendly there, facing the wrong way. Often, they'd teleport ahead of stragglers and not bother to kill them so I'd think it was safe and just get shot anyway. Activision don't seem to know a moving front works in warfare.

39.   While in their "retreat" state, enemies will run through you while you stand in their exit path

40.   Underwater rifles can't kills sharks or even the much-vaunted fish that move out of your way. Sharks can also turn 180° in <0.1sec, lunge, and insta-kill you

41.   Some fish are 2-D

Wait! Let's actually have some pros to Ghosts:

1.       Length is similar to BF4 campaign, but more missions. Still completed on Hardened in <6 hours

2.       AGVs (automated forklifts) stop when you get close to them. Kind of cool I guess. Didn't really notice the fish.

3.       Better than MW3 and BlOps2

4.       Was super prepared for a clichéd ending and got super mad when I thought it was going to be. Was pleasantly surprised. Only with the outcome though. How they went about it was.... refer to number 35

5.       As horrible as the physics were, the space sequences were kinda cool, and definitely new to a PC shooter. The only other notable in-space level for an FPS that comes to mind is Halo.

...... yep.... that's about it.

Mad nerds (PC vs Console Wars)

As tends to happen with nerds, we get rather fanatical about our own opinions to the point where we get a bit hysterical. I'm not above this myself and regularly have to do a hubris-check to get back to reality. Have not made a post here in a long time due to forgetting I was meant to update this thing, and a lack of making time to post, but a recent Facebook thread devolved into a 50-comment Console vs PC flame war and before I knew it I'd started writing a long, meta-as-fuck reply that warranted a proper post. I realised it was one of my comments that actually triggered whole thing, so, time for that hubris-check...

 

The gist of the comments on the Facebook threadnaught were as follows:

• LANs are dead and a thing of the past
• Console players are not "gamers"
• PCs are superior to consoles
• PC gamers are elitist cunts

 

 

It's extremely easy to fall back on the whole "everyone is entitled to their own opinion" as an argumental defence, for both sides. Ultimately that is true, as the whole point of debate is discussion of opinions. Where we fall flat, is when we can no long back up our opinions with cold, hard facts, and we default to the image above.

 

Again: both sides of the argument (any argument) will probably get to this point because they don't want to change their opinion on the matter. Fuck, let's get philosophical and self-defeatist for a moment: even this post, despite my best efforts to ground it in logic and reason, is ultimately my opinion.

 

LANs are dead

 

It's been argued that with Skype/Vent/Teamspeak/Mumble, the internet, and disappearing menu options, LAN gaming is a thing of the past. An old dinosaur of social gaming struck down by an internet meteor that blocked out the sky with trolls, squeakers and bads.

 
LAN gaming should not die.
 
I still prefer to go to a LAN than game via the internet. To hell with the hassle of shifting a rig or TV. To hell with back pain from sitting on shitty chairs and cramped, sweaty, smelly rooms. I want it. As one of the comments said: You can't high-five over the internet.
 
I organised LANs at high school and uni, for consoles and PCs, with and without internet access because I enjoy gaming with others more than playing single player, or not being in the same room as the people I'm playing with. The only reason everyone I regularly game with isn't sick of me dragging my rig around to their houses is because I'm in a different country.
 
The two games that have absorbed more of my time in the last 3-4 years than any other are Dota and Minecraft. Collective interest in both of those started out from LANs. To run through games I've gotten extremely invested in as a direct result of LAN parties and gaming nights at other's houses (note the MMOs):

• MOBAs (DotA into HoN into Dota2)
• Minecraft
• Terraria (albeit via VPN)
• WoW
• EVE Online
• Civ4
• Halo
• Supreme Commander
• could even make an argument for Call of Duty

 

"Console kiddies aren't gamers" / PC Gaming Master Race

I can't dispute PC gamers are the master race, but the console kiddies are gamers too. You have to accept that. The fact that consoles out-sell PCs attests to that. The fact that CoD out-sells BF attests that something in CoD triggers more fun in a pre-teen's brain than BF. Fighting games, JRPGs, sports, 3-D platformers (like the LEGO games): all better on console.

If you get excited about games and gaming, you are a gamer. Getting shitty about the definition of a word like "gamer" and who it is applied to as a label is like getting into a YouTube comments argument with someone named #YOLOSwag420 about whether "Best Bass Drop Evar!!!1!.mp3" is dubstep, brostep, DnB or [insert word here]step.

 

PC gamers end up coming across as massive cunts because we're all high on our own hubris when we start talking about how superior our hardware is. It's true - PC hardware is far superior to consoles, but that's because we sink a metric fucktonne more money into it. You can't make a profitable console without using dated-as-soon-as-it's-released architecture so of course your $3000 PC leaves a fat stinking turd on the console's performance scores.
 
You'd still call someone who plays 40h/week of Starcraft on a $300 rig with 10 year old hardware and a roller-ball mouse a hardcore gamer, so what makes the 40h/week console kiddies on their $300 consoles with inferior specs to your rig different?
 
Both sides start getting a little delusional as fanaticism takes over from cold, hard logic.

Logical Fallacies

Where you can feel justified in kicking up a stink in the whole PC vs Consoles debate is when one side starts grunting out "facts" that are about as solid as fresh ejaculate.

 

"Consoles are designed for TV's because HMDI" False. Mordern computers will integrate with a TV with better image quality and possibly a higher resolution. They also use them fancy HDMI cables. Software like Steam's Big Picture show this even more.

 

"Consoles are cheaper" False: PC's can be kept running for a long time with less upgrades than the cost of buying a new console every few years. Factor in TV cost, paying more for AAA releases, lack of a distribution platform like Steam and an order of magnitude less cheap/free indie games than on PC, then consoles don't actually come out that much cheaper. Of course if you spend $3000 on your gaming rig every 2 years you have enough disposable income that the point is moot.

 

"You can use a controller on PC anyway" True, but with the following caveats: You lose out on the fact that unless it was a console port to begin with, your game is designed for PC and keyboard/mouse controls. If it was a console port then you'll get a better experience playing on console because:

• Your console is probably already set up to be played on a TV from a couch
• The game is optimised for console hardware that is nice and consistent and heavily reduced chance of crashes
• You can actually play multiplayer (the downside to emulators on PC)

 

 "Consoles need aim assist" True, but it goes both ways. The console's player's fallacy is claiming it's not present. The PC player's fallacy is in thinking it matters. I'm guilty of the latter and I love to argue it with all sorts of colourful metaphors. (this almost deserves a seperate post!)

 

Aim assist exists. It is hardcoded into console FPS games to account for the fact that even with acceleration, you can't get the precise control possible with a mouse. No menu option will turn that off. You just get used to it and it becomes natural to how you play the game.

 

Ignoring business reasons, it's also why cross-platform games don't exist: To be fair, aim assist would have to be disabled for console, or enabled for PC. Disabled: console players get raped without lube because they lack accuracy. Enabled: PC player's jimmies get rustled because they can't aim where they want. In both cases, the cross-platform game alienates an audience because it doesn't conform with everything else out there.

 

Aim assist is also sneered at due to poor implmentation. Case in point: Call of Duty. teh 360°quickscopez squeakers makes any gamer that looks at aim assist logically want to start planning the Final Solution. Just because you're good at abusing broken game mechanics to secure kills doesn't mean you are pro. It means you are good at abusing broken game mechanics. Competitive console Halo players don't win matches by using the rocket-sword glitch. Same reason why I can't take "quickscopers" seriously. On PC it's called aim-botting.

 

And finally: let's wrap up this wall of text by addressing my conceit. If I detach my opinion from logic, consoles are not, in fact, "bad" because of aim assist. All console players are lumped together in the same game. With the same limitations. With the same broken game mechanics. With the same innate compensation for any shortcomings. They play their game and enjoy it. I play mine and enjoy it. Just because a mouse and keyboard is better, it won't stop a a dirty console peasant's brain from generating "fun" while playing with his dirty console peasant friends.

 

Ultimately this post won't change certain strongly held opinions, even my own, but I can appreciate arguments for both sides. It's the fiction-laden stuff I can't.

Starmade: WSAD Server, Month 1 Roundup

Bobb (the guy building the Enterprise the first Starmade post) and I have been busy on the WSAD Starmade server. I finally transferred the server to him, and he started his second "overly-ambitious project". Bobb can't do anything small. It's big or go home. Can't deny the results though...

The Enterprise NC1701-D (Galaxy Class Enterprise) exterior is about 90% complete. It's 1:1 scale. and dominates everything around it in terms of size. Check the shop in the image showing the underside

FULL IMGUR ALBUM

(has more views of each ship)

1:1 Enterprise NC1701-D

I've finished the Armageddon/Bhaalgorn. At a rough guesstimate using my eyechrometer, I'd say it ended up about 1:2 scale. Custom paintjob because I felt the yellow hull didn't match the original Armageddon, and the white-blood paintscheme of the Bhaalgorn is a bit hard to pull off. The Armageddon is about 50% combat worthy at the moment. The main cannons do 600 damage and the secondaries do 400. The antimatter cannon blocks for the primaries run the full length of the ship. It also has two powerful power drain beams (because of the Bhaalgorn's neuting role in EVE), but because of mechanics and balancing issues these don't function that well at the moment.

Then I started a Tempest but got bored and made a Drake instead:

 

Bobb meanwhile made the Defiant...

 

... and fixed the server so that pirates now spawn properly. The problem is that you can enable the pirates to use any ship you have saved in the catalogue. Thus, the buggers would regularly interrupt building sessions in ships designed purely for combat (mostly guns, no aesthetics). This lead to some rebuilding/re-buying....

KSP

If you have not heard of KSP then shame on you and you should YouTube it right away!

Blasting little green aliens into space has never been so much fun, and being able to customise your rocket from the ground-up is the whole reason why I play the game. There's a "get to the moon" component but that really takes second seat to me just playing around making cool looking ships that hopefully have functionality too.

Splaty and Pacific_War got me onto the game initially and it wasn't long before Pacific_War managed to make this:

 And in turn this: (out of square panels!):

It wasn't long before I decided I had to do something like it. My first attempt turned out like this:

 And eventually culminated in these:

Pacific_War and I decided to combine our efforts into a "Star Wars Pack" for KSP. Some ships and functional and others not-so-much. The full album, and the reddit thread that attracted some attention is linked below:

Imgur Album
Reddit post

Download link

Starmade

Starmade is a fantastically fun little game made by Schema. It's free to play (for now) and is in Alpha. By Alpha, I mean VERY alpha. It's basically Minecraft in space and has seen a lot of reasonable high-profile coverage recently including by the Yogscast. For the 3 people that have played Minecraft and don't know - they're pretty much the biggest partner on YouTube for Minecraft-related stuff, and even indie-gaming in general.

Starmade has MASSIVE scope for game that's only in alpha and if you played Creative Mode in Minecraft and enjoyed it, then Starmade is a great alternative for tackling creative urges.

I've touched on the creative possibilities that others have already explored on my EVE blog, but here's some more screenshots of what I and some of the guys I play with have been working on (click on each image for larger version):

 Rex_Starfucker decided to blow a hole in the shop. Logic dictated I needed to make a station to fill this gap. Currently powered by 2xAA batteries (houses shields and power), a factory for when crafting is fixed, and a dry-docks for two of my cruisers. The ship in the top-left is the Bhaalgorn which is WIP and can be seen below.

This is why you don't do PvP around the home station.... Stretch's glorious Vengeful_Spirit copped a wayward missile. Unfortunately I don't have a "before" shot, and he didn't save the ship in the catalogue!. FUUUUUUUUUUU.

You can save ships into a catalogue and buy them in at any time using in-game currency. Fantastic for PvP (test a ship and blow the crap out of it) but you have to actually save the ship first :(

 This is a WIP for Bobb. Pretty clear what he's working on* but shows the scale you can get to - it's MUCH easier to go bigger than Minecraft, and the game has symmetry planes and the ability to change your "brush size" which helps to no end with large ships.
* In case you really couldn't work it out - the Enterprise.

Lastly - a WIP of my Bhaalgorn - modelled after an Armageddon/Bhaalgorn from EVE Online.

I'll finish up with a copy/paste of my conclusion in the EVE blog:
Because of balance issues, getting to what currently passes for "end-game" content is faaaaar too easy. If you want to play it now, I'd recommend playing it as if it were Creative Mode Minecraft - use Dev commands for infinite resources. If you were more of a fan of Minecraft's Survival Mode or, say Terraria's PvE challenges, then maybe hold off until the game reaches Beta.

I'd definitely peg this as a game to keep an eye on.

Intro the second: A History of Multiplayer

Why Gaming? Why Multiplayer?

As I alluded to in my first post, my passion is multiplayer games. Don’t get me wrong; I love single-player games and gaming in general, but for me multiplayer is what I truly enjoy (even if it might seem otherwise WHILE I’m playing).  I’ll default to the standard response for why I enjoy gaming in general: I use it as an escape from reality. If I’m playing a game I don’t have to deal with the real world. It’s a fantastic relaxation, procrastination and isolation tool.

There are many more reasons why I love multiplayer:

·          The adrenaline rush of knowing you just beat another living person instead of a computer. Competition.

·          The feel-good effect from pulling off an epic play and having someone see it (or better, acknowledging it)

·          Having a good excuse for raging and letting off steam

·          But most of all it’s having fun and laughing with good friends.

For me, multiplayer is my social interaction. I’m awkward as fuck and a complete social retard, so internet anonymity is fantastic. I can type whatever I want on a blog like this and not give two shits what someone reading it might think. My friends might read this, but they all know I don’t two shits about what they think either. Likewise not a single fuck is given if anyone ever reads this*. I’d like to think that sometime in the future I’ll write posts waxing nostalgic about all the games I mention below, but chances are I’ll get sidetracked.

*Actually I do care if people read this blog. Not because of long-winded stuff like this, but because I want to share the content I’ve created – videos, KSP ships, etc.

Please take care when traversing slope

Halo on the original Xbox was what properly pushed me into multiplayer. It started with renting an Xbox for a birthday after hearing how much fun it was for my high-school friends at their party. That weekend of 4-player split-screen on a tiny TV started me down a slippery slope. From then on any excuse to hire out Halo was used. Birthday party? Halo. Public holiday? Halo. Going to stay at friend’s place who had an Xbox? Halo.

It’s hard to remember every being more ecstatic about a Christmas present than when my brothers and I unwrapped an Xbox of our own. The morning the stores opened after that Christmas we bought Halo and 2 extra controllers. Before long I was organising LAN parties in the local scout hall. I bought a 10Mb Ethernet hub and invited my brothers along so we could use their tiny 14” TV for the other 4 players. Many an 8-player Halo marathon was had throughout my high school years. Halo, Halo 2, and moving on the Halo 3 and Xbox360. We played other stuff sure, but Halo was what I remember. Mainly because I was less bad at it than other games. To this day I won’t play racing games because I’m terribad at them.

Somewhere amongst the junk food-fuelled Halo LANs, and after my first limited experience in EVE Online, I got into World of Warcraft. It’s a horrible, casual, soul-sucking force of evil, but by jebus does it hook people in. I persuaded my parents into helping me buy a stonking big Dell Inspiron laptop under the guise of eventually using it for uni. Halo marathons turned into WoW marathons if someone could persuade their parents to let us have a LAN party at their place (broadband was still only just becoming widely available in NZ). If we couldn’t run LAN parties with internet, I still organised joint Warhammer40K/LAN events at the scout hall and we played C&C Generals, or Civ4 instead.

I still have a soft-spot of Generals. Whenever I get talking with my highschool friend the same old stories always re-surface. Like the game that went for 2h of laggy build-up and super weapon cold-war between four players ended suddenly when one player’s computer crashed. Or another game where each of the 4 players has 20 super weapons ready to fire but we’re all in cold-war again. Until one misplaced elite unit results in a garbled string of “NuclearLaunchDetectedNuclearLaunchDetectedIonCannonFiredNuclearLaunchDetected”. I don’t even remember who won, but the build-up to that moment was so fun I’ll never forget it.

Broadband baby!

Highschool ended and university began. WoW swallowed another massive chunk of my life as I finally obtained free access to broadband internet and got into raiding. I was pegged as lead huntard in the guild but holidays back home with 56k dial-up interrupted. In hindsight this was DEFINITELY for the best. When my guild fractured a few months after this I started distancing myself from the game. At uni I made friends with other gamers who had one of the best gaming/multimedia set-ups I know of to this day. Their house became a second-home to me as I packed up my laptop, walked out of the dorm and went about playing unhealthy amounts of LAN games. Diablo 2, Supreme Commander (at half-speed because that game is so lag-tastic), AoE2 (I had only ever played single-player previously), and Counterstrike.

 In my second year of uni a game called Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released. I still played WoW casually but a CoD4 server hosted by my friends became my newest addiction. Because we could police hackers and abusing the advantage of 20ms ping, the server became known locally as being one of the best private servers there was. A couple times I would be talking to a random at uni and they would mention this “cool local server with some really good players on it”.

In second year I moved into a flat that would come to be known as “The Nerd Flat”. Our lounge-room was a sea of computers. We blew the fuse to the powerpoints on a regular basis and I’m pretty sure the landlord is still trying to remove the layer of Doritos dust from the carpet. Consoles took a backseat for me at uni, excluding the odd drunken Guitar Hero showboating. Now I was a fully converted PC fanatic. The laptop upgraded into a rig, and more CoD4 and World at War was played.

The Rage Years

My later years at uni were subsumed by rage. Modern Warfare 2 was released and the downfall of the CoD series had begun in earnest. Unbalanced gameplay mired in a stinking slimy scum of achievements and killstreaks, non-dedicated servers and a playerbase of clones using the Witch build*. Our gaggle of nerds also discovered DotA (WC3 map) and subsequently Heroes of Newerth during this time. The ultra-competitive nature of MOBAs introduced me to another group of friends I still play with years later. The MOBA genre is both one of the best, and simultaneously worst, multiplayer genres out there. Piling hormonal teenager and hardcore gamers into 5v5 teams that are inherently reliant on teamwork , co-ordination and not-fucking-up is a recipe for the most toxic communities on the internet and some of the most fun gameplay. I.e. it results in “teh epic plays” and thus a bigger dopamine release. It’s a funny thing when you become self-aware of being a cunt. I know I still rage, but I’d like to think I’m not as bad as I used to be, at least to my friends. Minecraft was a good, calming antithesis to rage towards the end of uni.

*Tactical knife, fast run/mantle, extra lunge, fast knife. Think of the Witch from Left4Dead. It was like a fucking Halo 3 sword lunge but 3 times as quick and no chance to counter with a shotgun because of host-induced lag. Seriously, my second game I randomly get assigned as host I managed a nuke. Fuck Call of Duty. Ok enough. Enough. Call of Duty rant in a different post...

Fuck growing up

I’ve graduated from uni, have a full time job, changed countries and I’m still a gamer, with the same group of friends. Vent/TS3/Mumble is magic, I swear. I’ve upgraded the rig twice, bought a brand new one, bought a new gaming laptop and far too many other toys with sudden disposable income, and continued to play MOBAs and Minecraft. Battlefield 3 came along at some point to very competently fill the FPS hole left by CoD4. Old Republic and EVE tumors developed in my MMO gland. Old Republic was malignant and has since been excised successfully. The EVE growth appears to be benign.

Like any true addict I can blissfully ignore that I might have a problem. I’d like to think I’m a high-functioning gamer – It’s not affecting anyone but me. Until real-life stages a proper intervention I’ll continue to be passionate about multiplayer gaming.