Imbalance is fun to exploit

By spamfest | Published: March 3, 2010

Everyone knows that the air support in Modern Warfare 2 is ridiculous. However, it often feels daunting for the average player. And I don’t mean getting killed by it — I mean getting to use it.

I am a prime example of this as I’m new not only to the game but to online gaming via console as well. My overall kill-death ratio sits at 1.33 at the moment; it’s nothing too impressive but it has been steadily rising as I’ve gotten more and more accustomed to the damned thumbsticks. For the first 40 or so levels of MW2 multiplayer I had a negative ratio. Yes, I’ve got skills.

When players like me look at these assholes getting chopper gunners and AC-130s again and again, the one thought on our mind is “How do they do that?” Well, that’s probably the second thought as the first is something like “God fucking dammit! That guy got another chopper gunner?!”

The idea of managing 11 kills without dying is a daunting one, and as a result many people do not run such high kill streaks. Instead they tend to stick to the lower ones like UAV, predator missile, and harrier. That’s a nice setup — it’s one I stuck with for quite some time — but it’s not going to get you a chopper gunner.

You see, thinking that you’re not good enough to get a chopper gunner is the very thing preventing you from getting a chopper gunner. It certainly kept me from getting one legitimately (i.e. not from an air drop) until just the other night. And upon getting one I realized the truth — it’s really not that difficult to pull off. You know, assuming your team isn’t full of bad players who are getting beaten to a pulp.

Just like in CoD4 air support kills count toward more air support (provided you don’t die which is unlike CoD4). This means that with the proper kill streak setup you can basically coast your way to a chopper gunner once your air support starts rolling in. The setup I and many others like to use is 5-7-11 — predator, harriers, chopper gunner. It’s quite efficient and in many cases you only need to get about half of your kills with your gun and/or equipment as the air support will take care of the rest.

The hard part, of course, is going the initial five for the predator. Once you’ve got it odds are good that it’ll get at least one kill. About half the time I get two or more (I got at least five the other day!) which gives me my harriers straight away. Yes, that’s at least as unbalanced and stupid as CoD4 air strikes getting you a heli. Harriers are quite strong. The initial bombing run cannot be stopped via stingers so it generally gets a couple kills if you’ve placed it well. From there it’s likely the last one will zap a couple more enemies with its minigun before getting blown out of the sky. And just like that you’ve gotten a chopper gunner.

It’s simply not as difficult as it sounds. If your predator strike gets two kills and your harriers aren’t shot down, you’re guaranteed a chopper gunner by only having to get five kills with your own talent. Dumb? Yep. But you might as well take advantage of it if others can and will do so against you. Of course, it’s entirely possible that your predator and harriers miss the mark and then that last harrier is shot down before getting any kills. That’s annoying as hell but, hey, it happens.

My best example thus far of the power of this setup happened last night. I was playing Ground War Domination on Scrapyard with a silenced TAR-21. The enemy team wasn’t bad and did a good job of stealing the B point from us constantly but I was in a zone and they couldn’t do much against me. I actually managed to call in two chopper gunners in the same game and ended with a kill-death of 53-12. That’s a normal score for me in CoD4 on PC; this was a stand-out performance and the best game I’ve gotten thus far on my PS3. And the only reason it happened was because I decided to enable the chopper gunner kill streak a couple rounds prior.

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It’s not a party; it’s a funeral

By spamfest | Published: February 22, 2010

Like many pieces of Modern Warfare 2, the party system is not fair. While it can provide a good deal of fun to those within the party, those outside of it can suffer for no good reason at all.

Generally those grouped into a party are using voice chat to coordinate amongst themselves. This gives them a very apparent edge, because while it’s true that anyone can chat within the team, in my PS3 experiences most people do not. Those who do chat are usually too busy being off topic, singing, or calling the various players and game components “gay.”

Three Domination games I played yesterday prompted this post. Of course, I use “play” in the broadest of senses as I wasn’t playing as much as I was hiding, shooting down air support all on my own, and generally being as much as of an annoyance to the partied-up enemy team as I could be.

The problem

On the enemy team there were at least three high-level guys in a party. They weren’t that good, all things considered, but they were far better than the incredibly bad players I had on my own team. Their consistent coordination and usage of UAV and Counter UAV effectively stymied the young and clueless players with whom I was so unfortunately partnered up.

The enemy team was playing Domination as Domination should be played — they would capture and hold two points and then proceed to literally dominate via spawn trapping. That’s the way Domination works — you spawn at one of your held points and if you don’t have a point you spawn randomly. So, by letting us keep a point they knew where we were spawning for the duration of the match and guarded our exits accordingly.

Between the constant harrier strikes, pave low runs, and chopper gun rapes, there was nothing we could do. One guy on the enemy team was even using a javelin to pound the area around the spawn into submission. We weren’t getting out this alive.

The setup

  • P90 + silencer
  • Stinger
  • Semtex
  • Stun grenades
  • Marathon Pro
  • Cold-Blooded Pro
  • Ninja Pro

It’s pretty self-explanatory — Marathon and a submachine gun for quick relocation, Ninja to stay quiet, a silenced weapon to avoid pinging the radar, and a stinger to take out enemy air support. The stuns and semtex are interchangeable with whatever you’d rather use. I enjoy stunning enemies so they can’t escape my semtex. You could also employ the UMP for three-shot kills at a distance but I don’t really enjoy that gun. Its recoil, slow rate of fire, and pretty terrible iron sights have turned me off of it.

Cold-Blooded is fantastic in that it prevents you from being targeted by automatic air support. It also prevents you from being highlighted by a red box for predator missiles, the chopper gunner, and the AC-130, so if you stop moving and hide intelligently (often as far away from your teammates as possible), odds are these weapons of usually impending doom will not kill you. This makes the perk an essential part of your repertoire if your team is being constantly harassed by air support.

I joined the first game in the middle of a match on Estate and I started out using a silenced FAMAS since it’s a good setup for distance shooting. Pretty soon, however, I realized that things were going very, very wrong. We were trapped at C and we were getting destroyed. After my first death via harrier I switched to the stealth class I showed above. I tried sprinting or sneaking out of harm’s way on several occasions but never made it very far. It was then that I decided to do the only thing I could do — be annoying.

I don’t know about you but getting my hard-earned air support shot out of the sky ticks me off. That in itself is kind of sad because taking out air support should be a given. However, lots of people simply try to ignore it — “someone else can deal with it.” And then they wonder how they got beaten so badly? Gee, I wonder!

Knowing full well that the entire enemy team had its sights trained on and around the C-point area, I hid in the corner behind the garage or whatever that building is and shot down enemy air support. I couldn’t do much else. Although I did manage a few kills here and there as people tried to sneak around back of the point to capture it.

The play style

That match ended with a score of 200 to sub-100. The guys in the party seemed very impressed with themselves after the game and had a nice circlejerk. Next we found ourselves on Afghan. I’m not too big a fan of this map due to the lack of routes around it — it’s very easy to hold down defensively.

As a result, my inept team could never hold more than one point at a time. Thus, I did what I could once the never-ending stream of air support started to roll out — I shot it the hell down. I kept to our one point (either A or C; never B), guarded it, and shot as many planes and choppers from the sky as I could. I even managed to get some air support of my own a couple times. Having run out of stingers I was forced to take out an enemy chopper gunner with one of my predator missiles on more than one occasion!

I managed to walk out of that match with a score of 18-6. My all-star teammates had scores like 4-19 and 5-26. Thanks for the help, guys! The next match was on Wasteland and followed a similar path to the Afghan match. Once again I found myself doing nothing but taking out air support and hiding from it. In one instance I found myself trying to wedge my prone player as far under the broken tank tread as I could to avoid an AC-130. Those take more missiles to destroy than one player’s got and no one else was helping, so it was all I could do to hide from the explosions. I was hidden from the plane via Cold-Blooded but then my stupid teammates started spawning right next to me. I didn’t die but it got a little tense there for awhile as I watched them get blown up right in front of me.

And that’s pretty much how it all went down. I played sneakily, tried to capture points when I could, shot down another chopper gun with a predator missile, and took out quite a few UAVs and Counter UAVs. In both of these last two matches I was the only person on my team with a positive kill-death ratio.

The solution

There’s no reason at all to subject randoms to the torture of playing against a coordinated team. The very nature of pubbing goes against allowing this. Couple the unfairness there with the unbalanced remainder of the game and the resulting matches are not fun for the casual bad player. Unless, of course, the party guys all suck too, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

The best way to handle parties would be to have mercenary modes for all gametypes rather than only TDM. I don’t care that TDM is the most-played gametype. Some people don’t like TDM as the other game modes are generally more dynamic and often last longer. But if you’re hell-bent on avoiding coming up against a coordinated party, you have no other option but to play TDM.

Rather than a distinct gametype, “mercenary mode” could be an option to enable if you ever didn’t want to play against parties. Sure, that might lessen the party-goers’ pool of available games but who cares about those guys? Anyone who teams up against random baddies in order to boost their ego is an idiot not worth catering to.

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The Hardline perk isn’t that good

By spamfest | Published: February 7, 2010

The MW2 perk Hardline sounds good in theory — it reduces the number of kills you need to get a kill streak reward by one. UAVs come in after two kills, chopper gunners fly overhead after 10, and so on.

The problem is that it’s ultimately not that useful. At best it reduces the number of kills required to get a perk by 33% — at worst it’s only a 4% reduction. The lower your rewards the higher the percentage of kills you save by running Hardline. Conversely, the higher your rewards the less Hardline actually helps you. It’s simple math. Here are some handy charts so you can see this visually.

UAV Predator missile
UAV Predator missile
Chopper gunner Nuke
Chopper gunner Nuke

Since Hardline is most useful with low level rewards, it’s best to run a class that isn’t designed for big kill streaks. Use something annoying to pester the enemy team — something with Marathon, for instance, so you can flank the other team and put constant pressure on them.

Strive to get a least two kills for every death so your team will have constant UAV coverage. Let your team worry about camping and getting the big kill streaks. A 2:1 ratio is certainly nothing to scoff at, and with UAVs overhead for most of the match, you’re much more likely to do better than that.

Less pew-pew power

Running Hardline means, of course, that you won’t have access to Stopping Power to lessen your burden in killing enemies. Whenever I’m not using using Stopping Power I tend to run a gun that can kill in 3-4 shots or one with very manageable recoil.

Any assault rifle will probably suit you fine with the possible exception of the F2000. The others are either heavy-hitting (SCAR-H, TAR-21, etc.) or easy to use (M4A1, ACR). Well, I guess the FAMAS and M16 were really designed to be used with Stopping Power but they’re still pretty strong. The MP5K is a decent choice for flanking duties as it takes three shots at close range and sports a high rate of fire. Similarly, the UMP will kill with three shots at any distance and is thus a nice choice. Just be aware that it shoots as slowly as the SCAR-H (which shoots noticeably slower than the AK-47).

If I were running Hardline I’d probably use Marathon and Ninja and go for the SCAR-H or TAR-21 with a noob tube or a silent UMP. Then again, I probably wouldn’t actually run Hardline. Stopping Power is quite good and doesn’t lessen in usefulness due to the kill streak rewards I’ve chosen. And if I were running a silenced UMP I might as well stick Cold-Blooded on there for the full ninja effect. Like I said, Hardline just isn’t that good.

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Modern Warfare 2 musings

By spamfest | Published: February 1, 2010

I am now level 27 in MW2. I’m not very good yet but I have managed to figure out how to go positive in most games. Sadly, this involves a lot of playing the opposite way I played in CoD4. However, I’m generally okay with this as my biggest flaw is my inabilities in aiming with a thumbstick. I almost feel annoyingly gimped since I’m so used to 1:1 aim translation that you get with a mouse and I’m actually good at that. It’s been a moderately humbling experience going from always 2:1 (and sometimes something crazy like 7:1) in CoD4 on PC to being happy simply to go +1 on the PS3. My current kill-death ratio is a mind-blowing 1.03.

As expected there is no balance

MW2 has, at best, a basic semblance of balance. In reality it is every bit as unbalanced as I anticipated. Air support is as ridiculous as you’ve seen in various YouTube videos. But the upside of that is most people you’ll come across aren’t good enough to abuse it frequently.

And even if you do happen to be playing with someone going harrier, chopper gunner, nuke consistently, you can always leave the lobby and find new people to play with. That’s the biggest plus regarding a lack of dedicated servers — there’s theoretically an infinite number of places to play. No waiting in line on a full server and no waiting for someone to join an empty server ever again. In a dedicated environment, if someone is hacking or totally owning on your favorite server, there isn’t anything you can do but wait until he leaves or is kicked.

Less grenade spam overall

Grenade spam has been greatly reduced from CoD4 thanks to the absence of the 3x Frag perk and the much smaller throw trajectory. You don’t see people getting UAVs with only grenades much (if ever) anymore. That said, the game does allow for some abuses.

The One Man Army and Scavenger perks both let people restock their explosives — grenades, claymores, noob tubes, etc. In a douchebag’s hand this can cause serious trouble. However, it’s generally only one guy abusing it versus everyone in CoD4 spamming three grenades as soon as they spawn. It’s probably easier to deal with the MW2 guys, especially given the infinite “servers” available to you.

Pew-pew city

MW2 has more guns and many more ways to set up said guns than CoD4. As expected many of them are unbalanced. The number of guns and whatnot is nice and all but it makes the fact that you still only get five custom class slots all the more annoying. You get new slots as you prestige but who has time to level through the game multiple times?

My favorite gun setup right now is probably the FAMAS with a silencer. The M4A1 and SCAR-H are also quite nice. In a recent match I was going 3-9 with the UMP on Afghan, and after I switched to my FAMAS class I wound up going 13-10. Pretty good for a guy who hasn’t played a console since Halo.

Knife abuse is the worst part of MW2

Running the Marathon, Lightweight, and Commando perks whilst wielding an SMG is the most annoying part about MW2. It allows people to sprint an infinite distance faster than anyone else and do a magical knife warp from ten feet out. Sometimes people use the tactical knife with a handgun to increase the speed of multiple knife slashes. It’s all about cheap kills as this setup will easily overpower even SMGs with Stopping Power.

You’ll find at least one of these idiots in every game — someone who has dedicated his MW2 experience to running around extra quickly and knifing people. It’s pretty obvious they’re terrible at the game and this is the only way they can get passable scores. Sadly, there’s not much you can do about it except try and stay away from them. This can be difficult enough on its own, but if they switch out Commando for Ninja and thus don’t make any noise while they’re running around full speed, good luck.

As I seem to die an equal amount from guns as from these untalented knife bitches, I sincerely hope Infinity Ward aren’t too stupid to see the problems with so many people abusing this setup. It would be less of a problem with a mouse in hand; on a console it’s too much. Since I encounter these guys much more frequently than good players abusing air support, I’m calling this the most broken part of the game right now. In theory the air support system is worse but in practice the knife abusing seems to rule.

Internets buddies

If you have a PS3 you can friend me. My “gamer tag” or whatever it’s called is kylegetsspam. For now at least. Maybe I’ll change it later. But maybe not; I am pretty lazy.

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PS3 Adventures

By spamfest | Published: January 17, 2010

I am now the owner of a PS3 and have been so for more than three weeks now. I only started playing just over a week ago, however, given a slew of problems I encountered along the way. Join me as I relive my annoying quest to play my first console since the original Xbox.

I got the PS3 for Christmas. My mom, who likes buying me things and always hooks me up at Christmastime, was wondering what she could possibly get me. I’d been thinking about getting a PS3 for awhile but before I told her about it she mentioned she’d seen it in some store and thought it looked interesting. I said, “Sure, why not?” and thus ended up with a PS3 on Christmas morning.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t play it until I had an HDMI-capable TV or monitor. I took a couple days tossing ideas around — TVs are fucking expensive and I didn’t want to spend that much money. I also have no speakers for a good TV setup. I settled on a monitor instead and wound up purchasing a 24″ Samsung T240HD. The idea was that I could hook both my computer and PS3 up to it and switch between them at will. Then, once I had the proper type of adapter, I could also switch my speakers between the two.

It sounded like a plan, so I finally committed to a purchase on the 30th of December. I could have done it sooner, and looking back I definitely should have. Due to my order date I inadvertently ensured the delivery of my monitor would take the longest time possible. My order wasn’t processed until the next day, there was a holiday that Friday (the New Year), and then no one ships over the weekend. My monitor sat in Maryland for days on end while I amused myself with CoD4 and L4D the best I could.

The next Tuesday was its slated arrival date. Since I’d thought it might come sooner I had told NewEgg to ship it to my apartment rather than my office, and now it was going to arrive when I wasn’t there to sign for it. Luckily, my roommate’s friend was to be hanging around the apartment all day and he said he’d sign for it. Just in case, I left a note saying a neighbor could sign for it if no one was home. Everything was peachy. Wrong! When I got home there was a UPS slip on the door saying no one had been there to sign. The driver wrote his own note: “CANNOT LEAVE PACKAGE.” They’d try again the next day.

Why my roommate’s friend hadn’t been there to sign for it I’m not sure. He even said later that he had indeed been there all day. Whatever. Wednesday I hatched a plan and my bosses went with it. Since the new delivery time was set to be between 10:30 and 2:00, I could leave work after an hour, work from home during that time slot, and return to work after finally getting my monitor. I did just that and the UPS driver showed up at a punctual 1:58. The wait had started to cause me anxiety due to what my roommate’s friend had said — what if I somehow missed them again? If I missed UPS three times they’d ship it back to NewEgg and I’d have to buy the damn thing and start the process all over again.

Now I was set. Or so I thought; it couldn’t be that easy. For some reason I had majorly brainfarted and hadn’t gotten an HDMI cable. On NewEgg the product images showed a bunch of cables and for some reason my dumb brain assumed HDMI would be one of them. Thus, I needed one as soon as possible, but faced with overpaying three to ten times more than necessary in a retail store, I decided to try online first. I’d waited this long; what was another two days? Well, turned out that the cable I wanted was backordered until Friday, so even if I paid the $4 for one-day shipping (Amazon Prime kicks ass) it would arrive Monday at the earliest. It was whatever at that point so I went ahead and ordered it.

I then tried my hand at hooking up the PS3 with the AV cables that come with it. Well, that was fucking terrible. For whatever reason the picture came through as black and white, so I was getting a blotchy, grayscale picture at 480i stretched to 1920×1080. It was fucking beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I couldn’t even get through the second Spec Ops section of MW2 on the easy difficulty because I couldn’t make out the enemies from the background. Sigh.

Come Friday, which is when my HDMI cable order was finally processed (but not shipped), I was tired of waiting around. I bit the bullet and headed to Walmart. Surely Walmart of all places wouldn’t try to gouge me with overpriced cables — it’s Radioshack and Best Buy who are famous for their $130 HDMI cables. Walmart didn’t have cables quite that expensive but my options were limited to a $19 3′ cable or a $30 6′ one. I went with the latter even though it was still at least three times what a good HDMI cable is worth. When I returned home I attempted to cancel my Amazon order for the other one but was unable to do so. The window for canceling is pretty small apparently.

No matter. My PS3 was finally playable a full two weeks after I’d gotten it. I played the MW2 campaign for a little while and admired it for all its ridiculousness. Seriously, that game is so far beyond ridiculous that it wraps around lame and ends up back at awesome. The HDMI cable I’d ordered previously arrived Monday and I’ve hooked that one up instead. If I ever make it back to Walmart I’ll return the $30 one. Then again maybe I should keep it for the next time I brainfart and leave myself cableless for no good reason.

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Borderlands on PC is pretty okay

By spamfest | Published: December 2, 2009

No, I don’t mean “pretty, okay?” I mean it’s pretty okay. Like, those two words together form one theoretical adjective. Oh, yeah, I’m getting all verbose up in this bitch.

Way back in the middle of October I got in a Steam four-way deal and nabbed Borderlands for about $33. I’ve been disillusioned about new games for a long time, so there was no way I was going to pay $50 for a game that was very likely to be a console port (I’m so done with that). However, since I was given the chance to jump in and get it for considerably fewer dollars, I decided to go for it.

I knew going into it that its console-centered development would probably affect its quality in multiple ways, but I was certain the co-op gameplay would be super fun. While this guy I talked to insisted that Borderlands’ development lead was PC, I knew this wouldn’t be the case because it isn’t economically feasible for most types of games anymore. Unless a developer is producing the next Diablo, Starcraft, or WoW — i.e. games that can’t be adapted to consoles very well — they’re going to bend to the will of the consoles and adapt the game to PC later. The money in consoles trumps PCs by an exponential factor.

But back to Borderlands. I wasn’t expecting much but I was greeted with something decent. The visual styling is neat and the gameplay is addictive. Unlike recent, more traditional FPS RPG games like Oblivion or Fallout 3, this one’s much more centered on the combat than talking to people — and that’s great because it means the action is pretty relentless. It makes the game good for a few quick killing sprees or a multi-hour OCD loot fest.

Of course, it’s not without its problems. Keep in mind, however, that all this is based on my single-player experiences as I haven’t yet put in any effort into getting a co-op game going (too lazy, time issues, etc.).

The user interface sucks.

The most obvious failing in the “this game was a console port” category is the interface. It was clearly designed for consoles and bogeys in many aspects:

  • You can’t use the mouse wheel to scroll in menus.
  • You can’t close menus without the Escape key.
  • You can’t get at many of the usual PC tweaks in the options (mouse smoothing, FOV, anti-aliasing, etc.).
  • You can’t see all of a weapon’s information because the font is too big (fixed in the first patch at least).

There are others but it’s pointless to continue listing them. Just get this config editor and fix the problems. And then hit up this list of tweaks to cover anything it might have missed.

The gameplay is repetitive.

On the plus side I will say that Borderlands sports better and more realistic gun play than supposed “realistic” shooters like Call of Duty. And if you’re a person who loves discovering loot in games, Borderlands has plenty.

However, if you’re expecting things to ever change over time you’re out of luck. The entire game is “start quest, go here, shoot things, optionally grab something, end quest.” I suppose most games can be watered down to their most basic elements like this but there is literally nothing else to do in this game. No puzzles, no engaging storylines, no exploration that will lead to anything other than more of the same enemies and loot, etc.

A lot of the quests leave something to be desired as well. There are far too many simple “find/fetch quests” and the boss battles are generally quite lacking. Oddly enough, the area you start in — the Arid Badlands — is the most extensive of any in the game and has the most quests. It’s like the developers really tried to cram that first area full of stuff to do and then got lazy as the story progressed. For instance, the Arid Badlands sports something like 40 total quests while the next area, The Dahl Headlands, has all of ten. That first area takes a long time to get through but after that it seems the rest of the game falls away quickly.

The loots. We need more loots.

Don’t get me wrong — there is a lot of loot in this game. The problem, however, is that it’s not well varied, and as you progress through the game, said loot matters less and less. As you locate good guns, stock up on class mods, and get buried in cash, you can practically ignore all the loot save for weapon lockers. Ammo and health regeneration void most looting adventures, and I’ve never found a weapon worth buying, so the only time I ever spent money was on the ammo capacity upgrades and to respawn. Not only is there cash everywhere but there’s so much stuff lying about that you end up selling $10 million worth of it by the time you’re halfway through your second playthrough… and then you have nothing worthwhile to spend it on.

Additionally, the random weapon generation is dubious. Perhaps it’s better in co-op mode, but I wound up using the same sniper rifle, machine gun, and shotgun for the entire second half of the game. Given that Borderlands’ developers boasted about the game’s 17.5+ million procedurally-generated guns, I was a bit disappointed to be carrying around the same three for so fucking long. They even lasted a bit into my second playthrough. Ridiculous.

It’s too easy.

Now, I can’t speak for co-op mode because I still haven’t bothered with it, but I can safely say the single-player portion of Borderlands is lacking in difficulty.

Specifically, it’s simply not balanced for lean doing every single side quest available to you. Doing side quests gives you tons of experience, so you level much quicker than if you were to simply plow through the main quests. Unlike Oblivion the enemies don’t level with you; they are more or less set to be within some level range based on when the average player would traipse through the area.

Thus, by taking on most or all of the side quests you fairly quickly out-level your enemies. Being even a couple levels higher than an enemy can make them quite easy to take out, and the end result is an easy game. Each quest is rated in difficulty based on the level of your future opponents, so after some time they all end up being labeled as “trivial.” This severely impedes the fun factor as the game ceases to be a challenge. Even on the second playthrough where the enemies become stronger, it wasn’t long before every quest was trivial for my character.

“So, don’t do all the side quests,” you offer. Sure, that does work to ramp up the game’s difficulty, but you have to be fully prepared to take on this decision. Whenever there are new side quests available, the Claptraps will constantly remind you. You will be inundated with messages such as, “Greetings, traveller! There are more missions available for you at the New Haven bounty board!” every few minutes. It gets annoying. Really annoying. Jar Jar Binks annoying. If you’re going to go the route of quest skipping, I’d recommend skipping the ones where your only reward is experience points. It’s probably worth it to go after the ones that give you weapons and whatnot.

The bottom line…

Borderlands is a game worthy of your time. It’s not perfect, and I’m hopeful that some patches and extra content will smooth out some of its problems (many of which stem from its console-centric development), but it’s good. If you like searching for loot and/or shooting the hell out of some stuff, this game will serve you well. If you like doing those things with other people, even better. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for some kind of deep, thoughtful gameplay and story, look elsewhere. Borderlands’ story is, in fact, about the most unsatisfying I’ve ever encountered. It’s all about the gameplay here.

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No regrets in canceling my MW2 pre-order

By spamfest | Published: November 9, 2009

Since I did wind up enjoying CoD4 more than I ever expected to, there is a part of me that remains disappointed in how MW2 turned out. The other day there was a live chat sponsored by Best Buy on IRC where people could ask Infinity Ward some questions, and in addition to what we already know, here’s some things we found out:

  • No dedicated servers even after that petition.
  • Maximum player count per game is 9v9 (due to lack of dedicated servers).
  • You cannot adjust your field of view.
  • Leaning has been removed because the game isn’t balanced for lean.
  • No client-side demo recording (i.e. no frag videos).
  • IWNET decides who will host; the players have no say (just like Xbox Live).
  • In tests under what were likely rather ideal circumstances the developer guys were seeing pings around 100 ms.
  • Text chat, graphics settings, and mouse control are the PC version’s sole features.

The last one is real, you guys!

Ignoring IW.net, is the PC version a direct port of the console version?

Mackey-IW: No, PC has custom stuff like mouse control, text chat in game, and graphics settings.

At this point it’s laughable. MW2 is looking like one of the worst console-to-PC ports (if not the worst) in the history of gaming. They’re really phoning it in by now — who’d have thought a PC game would have text-based chat and mouse control?!

MW2 is quite literally a console experience via PC. Why anyone would pay $60 for that is beyond me. The multiplayer portion will probably be fucked, and the single-player is guaranteed to be all of six hours, I’m sure. But let’s move on to the real point of this post…

Infinity Ward has learned nothing.

At least as far as multiplayer balance goes. We should all be pretty aware of how messed up CoD4’s air support is. You do nothing at all and you get rewarded for it. You crouch in a corner while your air strike kills two people and you get a chopper given to you for free. That chopper can, in turn, get your next UAV and air strike. Positive feedback loops, no balance, etc. I’ve been over it time and time again.

But check out this new gameplay video. In it you will see the following ridiculous things:

  • A burst-fire gun that looks to be more powerful than the CoD4 M16 (which is the gun all console babies cried about).
  • A spamtacular automatic shotgun.
  • A guy “earning” an Apache chopper with an air strike.
  • That same guy going from 11 to 25 kills in 30 fucking seconds using the Apache’s wall hacks.
  • Our buddy using the stupidest perk ever conceived — a tactical nuke that automatically ends the game as a win for your team.
  • The game going from start to finish in less than four minutes. Seriously, what a waste.

Ho. Ly. Shit. This is the worst example of gameplay balance I have ever seen in my gaming days. There isn’t any balance at all! He got all of nine legit kills before air strikes, choppers, and the nuke took care of the rest of the match. That Apache chopper is far more deadly than CoD4’s… and people whined about that thing incessantly! And then, once you’re finished raping with it, you just end the match whenever you feel like it with your nuke. Bewm. The end. So long and thanks for all the fish.

It’s just… I… I don’t even know what to say anymore. This game has turned into some kind of macabre joke. Whoever is pushing these design decisions has got to be the biggest Real Life™ troll I’ve ever seen.

In the end, maybe Infinity Ward has learned a lot — they seem to have randomly filled MW2 with anything and everything an unskilled, casual gamer would like. Screw balance — it’s all about pulling in players. They have painted the broadest target possible by pandering to every subset of deluded fan, and as a result the game will likely break all kinds console sales records.

It won’t work on me, though. I’ll stick to Borderlands for now and look forward to Bad Company 2. At least that one will have dedicated servers.

Posted in Fail, Gaming, Lulz | 8 Comments

Infinity Ward screws PC gamers royally.

By spamfest | Published: October 18, 2009

Note: This may be a bit of hyperbole given that no one truly knows what’s going on just yet. Time will tell. And soon — the game’s scheduled to come out in less than a month.

Update. Things are continuing to unwind it seems. FourZeroSheep posted an explanation of what the dedicated server-less system would be like. At this point it’s rocking nearly 3,100 comments. That petition I linked to below is now at nearly 130,000 signatures (whether or not online petitions mean squat is another story). The forum continues to fill up with ill will toward IWNET. Humorously, both CoD4 and WaW server admins have been changing their server names to reflect their thoughts on the matter.

It came to light yesterday that Infinity Ward is doing something crazy with multiplayer for the PC version of Modern Warfare 2. Rather than going with the usual dedicated server setup of most games (including CoD4), they’re apparently pushing out this system called IWNet or IW.NET or something equally lame. Basically, it will be a closed system that Infinity Ward themselves control in order to wrangle the multiplayer community. It’s kind of like Epic using GameSpy as the server browser for UT3… only a lot more central and (very possibly) a lot worse.

Bash and Slash conducted an interview with Infinity Ward sheep Rob Bowling. Here’s some of the things they found out:

General

  • IW partnering through Steam is what you will see in the future. Match-making is not through Steam, but IW.NET is run in conjunction with Steam.
  • GSP’s will no longer be renting out servers.
  • No PunkBuster. VAC will be used as an anti-cheat.
  • Retail distribution: Pre-orders will get a disk. Or you could order from Steam.
  • DLC may now need to be paid for – not confirmed [but, of course, will definitely be true].
  • Piracy was only a small reason for going to IW.NET – not the whole reason [obviously not a small reason].

Clans

  • No more clan [i.e. dedicated] servers. Private matches via IW.NET replace clan servers.
  • Listen servers [i.e. people's computers] will connect to each other.
  • IW.NET/Steam will replace the community server admin [interface].

Modding

  • Modding the game is now very much in question. fourzerotwo had no info on modding. However, it appears that there will be no mods or maps for MW2.
  • Modding in SpecOps? Unknown.

Competitive Gaming

  • Competitive gaming has changed forever [with respect to MW2].
  • It might be possible in the future for IW engineers to load a “competitive” setting on IW.NET, but it is far from a guarantee. It might also never happen.

Why have Infinity Ward decided to do this?

Piracy is a factor. Piracy is always a factor because the higher-ups in any company (in this case Activision) are out of touch with reality. In other words, the same people that push DRM as an effect method of piracy control are the same who decided this central IW.NET system was a good idea.

A very plausible explanation lies in the fact that this theoretically forces more sales. One of the reasons CoD4 is still going strong is because of mods, custom maps, custom rules, etc. By removing all of that the game’s replayability is diminished, and it would thereby be easier to convince gamers to purchase the next game in the CoD series six months down the road.

Quite naturally, many enthusiasts are now pissed the fuck off. And this is just scraping the surface. Any forum or site that discusses MW2 is now focused solely on this issue. There’s even a petition.

Edit: It seems most of those posts on IW’s board have been deleted under the guise of “spam.” Still, people aren’t giving up. There is an “official” online petition now (it was previously a forum post that got deleted after 1500 replies) and I found this MW2 boycott Steam group.

And why wouldn’t they be pissed off? No dedicated servers? No mods? What the fuck?! If people wanted the console experience they would — get this — buy the game on a console. It appears that once again PC gamers are getting fucked, and it probably won’t end well. This comment from the Kotaku post sums it up rather nicely.

The worst part is that MW2 is sure to sell poorly on PC in light of this news, and piracy rates are sure to go through the roof. Companies will just be able to use it’s poor sales as an example of piracy, a decline in PC gaming, and whatever other bullshit excuses they use to try to force out the PC market and push the consoles even further on top.

Maybe it won’t be so bad in the end but until we know what’s going on, I implore everyone to cancel any pre-orders that you have.

lol

It's sad that it's come to this.

I’ve attempted to cancel my pre-order from Walmart. I was unable to cancel it automatically so I had to send a message to them saying that because it was, in fact, a pre-order that I should be able to cancel it. We’ll see what happens.

Perhaps the saddest bit of all is that any boycotts and cancellations probably won’t have much of an effect. Selection bias says that there are probably far, far more people who don’t and won’t care how the multiplayer portion is handled compared to the ones who do and are currently being very vocal about these latest happenings. Statistically this could very easily turn out to be a hugely successful game regardless, and that’ll only pave the way for other developers to follow Infinity Ward’s lead in giving PC gamers the finger.

Posted in Fail, Gaming, Multiplayer, News | 6 Comments

See you at the crossroads.

By spamfest | Published: September 11, 2009

Having been a disgruntled PC “gamer” for awhile now, I’m actually considering being (almost) done with it and buying one of the current-generation consoles. Shock and awe, I know. I’m leaning toward a PS3 at the moment for various reasons including but not limited to the following.

  • The 360’s 54% hardware failure rate is frightening.
  • Most of the games I might want will be on both systems and the 360 exclusives aren’t anything to write home about (Halo, Fable, Gears of War, Forza, et al).
  • Xbox Live is full of racist teenagers.
  • The PS2’s life cycle was at least ten years and some crazy developers may still be making games for it. Apparently the PS3 was designed with such a long-term plan in mind.

While this seems like a fairly solid decision, it does leave me with one rather large issue. Mainly that I do not have a television and thus do not have any kind of HDMI input. In other words, I’d have to hook the PS3 up to my computer monitor.

Therefore, I’d need to get one of those HDMI-to-DVI cables, which is fine and all, but in the process I’d lose audio as DVI has no such connections. I can then switch the PS3 to output audio over RCA cables, but my quandary is going from that to my 5.1 surround sound system that’s currently used on my computer. I think I’d need adapters to change RCA to “mini-jacks” but I’m not sure yet.

Crappy sound is no way to play video games; I refuse to do it. However, at the moment I am clueless as to how I would get this to work. Ideally I’d like to be able to hit some switch to change the audio source from PC to PS3 — just like I can switch input sources on my monitor — but I don’t yet know of such a device. Granted, my research is incredibly preliminary at this point and this post is mostly just a brain dump.

There’s another issue in that I’m not completely abandoning PC gaming. I want to play Modern Warfare 2 on the PC, and I’m waiting patiently for Supreme Commander 2, StarCraft 2, and Diablo 3 (no one has original ideas anymore). There may be a couple others but those are what’s coming to mind at the moment.

I also want to run Windows 7 rather desperately after eight years of XP. I’m left with a choice in how I approach the PC gaming side — do I upgrade at all?

I built my current system (Intel E6850, 2 gigs memory, 8800 GT) in December 2007 mostly in order to play UT3. That game was bound to be so fucking pro — I just knew it! — and I needed a decent rig to run it properly. Sadly, UT3 proved to be a giant turd with almost no community support — within six months there were more mappers than players — so my cunning plan didn’t go too smoothly.

Luckily, CoD4 was there to pick up the slack. Aside from CoD4, though, I really haven’t put too much time into PC games at all, so I’m left wondering if upgrading is really something I need to be doing. I will most definitely pop in another two gigs of memory but beyond that I don’t think upgrading is worthwhile. My system’s not even two years old at this point and is still considered decent. It can run Crysis on high settings without much issue — though playing Crysis is a stupid idea all around.

What I’ll most likely do is get the system running four gigs of memory, overclock the CPU a bit as it runs rather cool, and buy a new hard drive for a clean Windows 7 install. Then, if at some point down the road I feel like upgrading properly, I will. At this point, though, I can’t really justify it.

Posted in Gaming, Tech | Leave a comment

Modern Warfare 2 for $40!

By spamfest | Published: September 7, 2009

Pretty soon after that last post I was pointed to Walmart as a place to buy the next CoD. I was skeptical but found myself surprised.

Walmart has Modern Warfare 2 available for preorder for “only” $50 and you also get an online gift card worth $10.

I know it’s not really $40 but that’s $10 you can put toward something else, so figuratively speaking my math is good. I knew that math minor would come in handy one day.

Regardless on your thoughts of the game’s worthiness of its true $60 cost, surely it’ll be worth $40. The single-player campaign alone will probably be worth somewhere around there, and if you put any time into multiplayer then that will have been a well-spent $40.

In this way it won’t truly matter (for you) if the PC version doesn’t get the full console treatment — balance, timely DLC, etc. — since you won’t be paying the console price. Sure, I will still be peeved if those things are absent, but since I’m expecting their absence maybe I’ll end up surprised yet again.

Posted in Gaming, News, Win | Leave a comment