Shooting

The Style is in the Details

HIGH Finally glimpsing the lost city of Shambhala.

LOW Quickly dying ten times during a chase sequence before getting a hint as to what I should be doing.

WTF "Don't you love how the water makes your jeans all squidgy?"

The Brainy Gamer blog featured a terrific post today directed at Infinity Ward's questionable "FAGS" advertising campaign, in which Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels decries grenade spam.  It's covert advertising for Modern Warfare 2, of course, although the acronym with which said message is provided is obviously the source of the most worry.

Stranded (and bored) in the wasteland

 

HIGH Millions of guns to choose from, theoretically...

LOW The "adventure" is pure contrivance, utterly lacking a soul.

WTF Where's the onscreen mini-map? Why do weak guns auto-equip?

Spoiler Alert for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 fans!!

This morning on Twitter, I saw a link come in mentioning Modern Warfare 2. I don't really give a rip about it and I've been skipping over most of the masturbatory OMG-look-at-this-new-feature news on it, but this particular tweet was from one of my recent follows who I perceive as being a pretty sharp dude, and his basic reaction to this piece of news was essentially "holy s**t." That in itself isn't usually enough to get me to click a link, but like I said, this guy has had some interesting things to say, so I checked it out.

(Note: I could've used Mad Props as the title but that's already been done like a thousand times)

I stumbled upon a really sweet TF2 mod a few days ago. The red team spawns as various pieces of scenery (barrels, rocks, trees, etc.) with the scout's health, and the blue team spawns as pyros. Blue has to kill all the scenery scouts before time is up or else red wins. Needless to say, the sight of a tree running away from a pyro is pure awesomeness. If you've not played it, you don't get to sit with the cool kids at lunch. You also don't get to sniff dry erase markers with us during recess.

Mad Props (couldn't resist) to the mod author. The Steam group page has a list of servers to play on.

No, I haven't heard of substance. Why?

HIGH Sliding into a wallrun into a dive and scoring five headshots in the process is as cool to watch and perform as it sounds.

LOW "Learning" how to use a shotgun for the third time.

WTF Seriously? You put the plot twist in the manual?

So I finally got around to playing half an hour of Halo 3: ODST last night, and while I'm not planning to write a review of it any time soon, I wanted to comment on the weird experience I had with the game.

I was playing a friend's game, so I just sort of dropped in medias res, and had no idea what was going on plot-wise, so I'm not going to bother commenting on that aspect. What I will say is that for the first fifteen minutes of my playtime I had a blast. So much fun that I couldn't remember why I'd hated Halo 3 as much as I did (by which I mean "not really that much at all").

Been out of action for a while, so I'm catching up on some old news. I did the pre-order deal for Left 4 Dead 2 with three friends, which nets us a discount and the Scout's bat from Team Fortress 2 as a melee weapon. I'm genuinely impressed with what I've seen so far, so hopefully my purchase is justified. In effort to quell some the unrest over the release of the sequel so soon after the original, Valve recently flew two of the most prominent boycotters out to their headquarters for some hands-on time with the game. Now if I'm understanding this correctly, if I complain loudly enough about one of their games Valve will fly me out to their secret bunker and let me play it before anyone else. And so, I'd like to announce my boycott of Half Life 2: Episode 3....