Shooter

9 entries. 8,819 words.

2015-01

  • Planetside 2 – First, Second, and Third Impressions. 2015-01-30. This is unrelated to MMOs (sort of ), but I’ve been on a Quake CTF nostalgia trip for a while, so I went looking for a modern AAA shooter that would provide the same sort of team-based competitive spirit. I don’t know if such a game still exists, but my first candidate for testing was Planetside 2, a game which I haven’t played before. (Well, that’s not entirely true-I installed it sometime around when it first came out, played it for about 30 seconds-enough to see myself airdropped into a chaotic mess-and then decided it wasn’t for me.
    • Reviews
    • Shooter
    2,053 words

2015-08

  • Quake CTF Nostalgia – CC vs. DPS. 2015-08-19. This is off topic for this blog, but my old Crayola Clan mate ]CC[-Orange converted some of our Quake CTF match demos into videos. It’s not an exact copy of what we would have seen on our monitors back then (we probably ran at 800×600, and the fov looks higher than I remember) but it’s close. Most of the time I was average, but this one Quake 2 match I was “on” so this is how I will choose to remember my performance from the good old days.
    • Musings
    • Shooter
    315 words

2016-02

  • Snap Judgment – The Division Open Beta. 2016-02-21. The Division isn’t for me. It’s a very beautiful-looking game. The graphics are fantastic, and the urban environments are very realistic and detailed. Unfortunately I didn’t see anything new or innovative in the gameplay. The whole time I was playing, I kept thinking, “This plays just like Defiance, and Defiance is free.” The only thing The Division has is the cover mechanic. And the fantastic graphics, of course. I also couldn’t help but notice that there were very few other people around in this alleged MMO game.
    • Pre-Release
    • Shooter
    • Snap Judgment
    • Videos
    115 words

2016-05

  • Overwatch Snap Judgments. 2016-05-17. I finally have a chance to talk a bit about Overwatch, which I played for roughly an hour or two during the open beta. My first impression was horrible, because I played it on a Sunday night, which is usually my least favorite time of the week, considering that it’s the time when I’m forced to face the reality of going back to work the next day. Last week was a particularly onerous week because it was my last one on the dying project, so I was anticipating a horrendous week of panic and anxiety from me and everyone else who would be left behind after I’m gone.
    • Pre-Release
    • Shooter
    • Snap Judgment
    1,207 words

2016-10

  • Doom’s Problems. 2016-10-13. I haven’t played very much lately. Over the last few weeks I’ve been putting time into reading up on World War I (research for what I hope will be a historical fiction story for NaNoWriMo), reading Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, listening to Stephen King’s 11.22.63 audiobook, and even playing with composing some music in Renoise. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say the frenzy over the 2016 election has turned into a really entertaining Jerry Springer episode.
    • Shooter
    • Status
    438 words

2017-05

  • Battlefield 1 Authenticity. 2017-05-10. Here’s a timely post written about six months ago, which sat in my Drafts folder lacking not only a picture, but also some links. I started playing the Battlefield 1 single-player campaign on a Friday evening, and finished it the next day, on Saturday night. There were six missions. I recorded 12 videos, averaging about 35 minutes each, for a grand total of about 7 hours of gameplay. Let’s be extremely generous and say I cut out an hour of video, so let’s round it up to 8 hours.
    • Shooter
    2,016 words
  • Snap Judgment – Quake Champions (Open Beta). 2017-05-15. I don’t know how many people know this, but I used to play a lot of Quake CTF with Crayola Clan in the 1990s. Back then, “eSports” were community-run tournaments with no stakes and no prizes and barely any organization. We played mostly NetQuake, QuakeWorld, and Quake 2. We played a little bit of Quake 3 Arena but I personally never liked it and by then gaming started to get commercial with sponsors and cash prizes and it was more work than fun and it was all too stressful to deal with.
    • Reviews
    • Shooter
    • Snap Judgment
    707 words

2017-08

  • Destiny 2 Anti-Hype. 2017-08-31. I tried out the Destiny 2 PC Open Beta Tuesday night. I’ve never played Destiny before or even seen it or read much about it. It was incredibly easy to install and play through the Battle.net launcher. I just clicked on the “Install” button and less than an hour later it was ready to go. It was not quite as easy to configure though. It gave me exactly one opportunity to adjust my video settings and then I got a class selection screen.
    • Shooter
    1,228 words

2020-09

  • The Division 2, Again. 2020-09-20. So I’m playing an MMO again, kind of. I just happened to notice the other day that the base version of The Division 2 was on sale in the Ubisoft store for $10. Adding in a handful of “Uplay Points”-or whatever they’re called-that I’d gathered from years of playing Assassin’s Creed games, I knocked it down to $8. The Division 2 is my favorite of the “looter shooters” I’ve seen, mainly because the cover shooting mechanics looks and feels more natural than any of the others.
    • MMO
    • Shooter
    740 words