Anyhow. Christmas. We've been to the Christmas market thingie in Nottingham last night. Kinda spontaneous. Just wanted to buy some cat litter, but then we somehow ended up taking the bus to town and there we made friends with the awesome ham lady, who put crispy, delicious, if somewhat overpriced ham on soft rolls. Mmmm! She was into it. Soooo into it. The way she smiled when she cut that stuff. She was one with the ham. She looked like a fucking ham with her glazed, rosy pink face. After six or so weeks of healthy, carb-free food, this is probably gonna do more harm than good, but that's the problem with this whole festive season. Family's gonna bury us under a mountain of chocolate next week and there's gonna be beef, turkey, gammon, prawns and god knows what else. Dafuq am I supposed to do? "I'll have some broccoli and a fat free yoghurt, please?" Fuck that. Gotta start all over again. Sigh.
We're bringing Hugo with us when we go meet the family. Which seems appropriate, given he was last year's present and all.
As for gaming, everyone I know has gone batshit insane. But let me start at the beginning. Maybe you've seen the little youtube video I linked here the other day, when a friend challenged me to a match on King of Fighters XIII. That whole thing is turning into a regular event of sorts. East vs West (he's Asian, I'm not, so that's where that came from), the two of us competing head to head in various games. We played Super Street Fighter IV last weekend and I'll post the results as soon as the video has finally finished uploading, converting and all that shit. We're gonna play SFIV shots around the holidays, which basically means that after every match we'll have a shot and get gradually more drunk as we go. Should be interesting, especially since I never really drink anything. At all.
This week's game is Unreal Tournament 3, which is gonna be genuinely difficult, because I haven't touched the series since the release of UT3, which I simply didn't enjoy very much. I'm practicing against godlike mode bots as we speak, the results of which can be seen here:
We've got a whole ton of games planned for future East vs West videos, ranging from Need for Speed to fucking Star Stable, so there should be plenty of humiliation for everyone. One thing that won't be on the list is CoD: Ghosts. Still no dedicated servers, the top 50 or so players on the leaderboards have several hundred billion kills (some of them at zero deaths) and while nobody at InfinityWard seems to give a shit about cheats and hacks, they've now introduced the first paid DLC, which lets you summon a wolf in multiplayer mode. Because that's what tactical military shooters are all about. I'm still waiting for a shaman class, with totems and a Bill Shatner commercial and everything.
There are much better games out there. Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior, for one. Lewk:
I've played Chivalry: Medieval Warfare for some time and this expansion adds arsetons of cool new classes and fighting styles. The combat system is absolutely fantastic and purely skill-based. My only gripe with this game lies within the absolutely awful game modes. Chivalry had objective-based multiplayer modes, where both teams had to stay together and work cooperatively in order to win. Then there's Deadliest Warrior, which has stuff like free for all deathmatch, team deathmatch, multi-team deathmatch... 90% of the time it's really hust a huge clusterfuck of people beating the shit out of one another, up to a point where you spawn and get instagibbed by a guy who spawns behind you a split second later. Too many people per map, zero coordination, very spammy.
To be fair, it's all still in a very early stage and I really hope they'll implement some of Medieval Warfare's more interesting game modes. Right now, it's difficult to appreciate the great combat system, when you always end up in the middle of a dozen people, all of which just wildly hack away at each other.
But my real problem with all of these games, Street Fighter, NFS, UT, Chivalry and what have you, is something completely different: I have no play mates, because all of my friends are old, tired and boring. You're probably not going to understand this if you haven't been around when Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena and Half-Life were still new. People actually still played back then! We'd meet in school, agree on a game for the weekend and then 5-10 of us would play Counter-Strike, Age of Empires, UT or whatever the fuck we felt like playing at the time. Maybe we'd gather at someone's house to play Street Fighter. Point being - we've played everything together and we all had some great stories to tell. I remember spending entire nights playing AvP2 with a bunch of friends from school and I was so into it, I wanted to fucking write about it! And no, not dirty fan-fiction or some shit. The whole thing ended up becoming my damn job!
Today? I can talk about King of Fighters and UT on Facebook all day and I'll get plenty of responses from people talking about the good old days, about how they used to play these games to death, about how good they were or even about how they still play now and then. And that's about it. Do we ever get together and play? Bah! They're busy, they're tired, they had to work all day, they have family, they just don't have the fucking time.
Sure, many of these games are still being played online, they have their communities, their server browsers and stuff, but honestly, playing against random strangers on the 'net is about as entertaining as fighting the AI. It's just not very satisfying if the person whose brains you're splattering all over the walls and ceiling isn't somebody you know and love. Playing with friends means comparing dicks with your tribe and sporting the biggest schlong makes you their chief. Random matchmaking is like comparing dicks at the public urinal, which is creepy, wrong and should only be done in secret. What a horrible analogy!
Oh well. Looks like those days are all over now. Everyone's old. Everyone's tired. You wanna know what my friends are all playing now? You wanna know what the strange new hype is among "gamers" at my age? Look at this shit:
I'm not making this up. Fuck, I wish I was! Over the last few days more and more screenshots and videos of this game have appeared in my feed and every moron, their mothers and their dogs are playing fucking Euro Truck Simulator 2! People are "too tired" to play King of Fighters after eight hours of Angry Birds at the office, but they're all in the mood to drive virtual fertilizer around Europe and getting stuck in fucking pretend traffic jams.
Claire played it last night. She tunes in to BBC Radio Nottingham (game supports RL radio streaming) and drives tomatoes from one country to another. Always tomatoes. I don't think she cares about the route or the pay for as long as she gets to drive tomatoes. Ironically, she had to stop after a while, because she got carsick. I'm not joking. Driving gives her motion sickness IRL and for some fucked up reason this simulator is realistic enough to make her feel ill up to the point of throwing up.
Now I've seen it all. I guess I'll just go back to fighting the AI on Street Fighter or I'll get myself stuck in another pointless clusterfuck on Deadliest Warrior. Sigh. I need a playmate...
-Cat
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