Archive for February, 2009

Games Night #5, which was last night, was a great success!

Some of us met up in Home first. There was xBerserker (Tosh), Trieloth, HEAD_SHOTT, Sinlock, and me (Blackstaffer). We chatted it up first and it was nice that we all had headsets. We didn’t need to type. We even remembered to use R2 to talk!

At 10pm sharp I exited Home and went into CoD:WaW. At first I went into the online co-op area, but discovered that I couldn’t invite people to my party if they were in the online multiplayer area. So I went over there (why is menu navigation SO SLOW?). Eventually I got a party of four together – Trieloth, HEAD_SHOTT, cpfuzz2, and me. We waited around for HEALLACHEAP to join us, but he was taking too long, so we played a game of Headquarters while we waited (sorry dude). (Of course as soon as we were in the game for a minute or two he came online.) We did a pretty good job winning that game – I think the final score was something like 250 to 20.

After that, HELLACHEAP and warpdrive joined us, so we were six people playing. That was more than we’ve ever gotten together on games night, so I was quite pleased.

We played some Domination, some Search and Destroy, and some Capture the Flag. Some games went well, and some games went really really bad. We stopped the evening on a sour note – losing 6-0 at capture the flag. We spent all our time trying to avoid the stupid enemy tanks, it wasn’t much fun. But I had a good time playing the other matches, even the ones we lost.

Another great thing about the evening was that all of us (except for cpfuzz2) had headsets. So we could talk to one another and complain when “I shot that guy 5 times and he didn’t die!” (who was that, anyway?). Maybe we should have used our headsets to coordinate a bit more. cpfuzz2 – you have to get a headset! Even though it was nice to have headsets, it’ll take some getting used to. I don’t recognize anybody’s voice except for Ray’s low gravelly one. Somebody mentioned that they played S&D in Hardcore a lot, but I couldn’t tell you right now who it was.

So yeah we played Search and Destroy on hardcore mode, which was quite confusing when I tried to plant a bomb. It never said “Hold Square to plant explosive” so I couldn’t plant. I didn’t realize until someone helped me later to diffuse it (which one of you was that?) that it doesn’t prompt you – you just have to be in the right spot and hold down Square. (Can you tell I don’t play Hardcore mode at all?)

One thing I noticed that I thought was cool was that CoD5 shows your party members in blue. This is both in the lobby and in the game, where your chevrons are blue. Nice touch.

Also, it was obvious that there was a large variance in gamers’ abilities, to say the least. warpdrive and I both finished at the bottom of the pack in most games with very few kills, while all the others did much better. Hey, I never said I was good at this stuff. I just like it! I hope you better players didn’t mind that us poor players brought you down!

So I’m happy. If game nights continue like this one, I’ll stay happy. Once Killzone 2 comes out, it’ll be nice to know that everyone with a PS3 will have the game and we won’t need to wonder which game to play. (Make sure you have a headset!) But in the lead-up to that awesome (I hope) event, we can keep playing other fun games. Next week I think we’ll go with Warhawk or CoD4. I’ll post about that in the next couple days. In the meantime, think about which you’d rather play.