Games

Been playing more of Quake 4, and enjoying the storm of heavy strogg; a company of tactical transfers backed up with a platoon of Iron Maiden, Light Tank, and Gladiator units for all intents and purposes.

I’ve noticed that Quake 4, kind of like DooM of old has a “Flinch” like pain chance for different kinds of enemies. You hit them, they feel “Pain”, and are momentarily stunned; typically causing a pause in their movement and potentionally curbing their attack rate.

It has made fighting the Light Tank much easier actually, keep just outside punching distance but to close for its other weapons to be practical, and hose the thing with the Hyperblaster until it goes down. Especially since light tanks in Q4 love to try close in and use their brute force, it is a very effective technique when terrain permits; IMHO someone must’ve been thinking/watching Judge Dredd when they designed that Strogg. Also during the network node segment, I was pinned to the wall by a light tank…. but it went down before I did, due to pouring massive amounts of plasma into it lol.

Those Iron Maidens however seem to have a much lower pain chance, the lighting gun and hyperblaster are useful simply for their fire rate, although I wouldn’t suggest bringing the lighting gun to bear versus more then one Iron Maiden lol. The hyperblasters use is purely due to damage rate, it won’t cause enough pain to prevent them from shoving a rocket down your throat. The best weapon to deal with those things seems to be the trusty old rocket launcher, fire a salvo rapid fire and bingo—its lights out. Up close and personal, the shotgun also seems to be very effective when combined with double taps hehe.

Generally I’m not a fan of the Mega-hero with at least ten guns, more ammo then a dump truck can carry, and hordes of enemies that can each suck up as much fire as an Abrams school of game design, but Quake 4 has a nice balance. Most threats can be easily neutralized with suitable kit, Iron Maiden, Light Tank, and Gunners are not hard to bring down; a Gladiator on the other hand will warrant a big freaking gun! The real danger comes with numbers and terrain, plus like most games in the “Classic” style of level design: you will get loaded up with supplies before the real big nasty fights happen. Of course, this is almost always so close to the build-up to a pulse pounding, kick a hole in the wall, and pass the shotgun shells kind of brawl , that it ruins the suspense. Some games however can keep that suspense factor going, by shaking things up, so you really won’t know what is coming up, unless you play the game a lot or have a good memory (I do) for such things. I actually liked how in F.E.A.R. the replica troops that make up most of the games enemies are very easy to neutralize, almost realistically so; and there are only a few threats that are “Heavy” enough to make you nervous.

That being said though, a boss fight should always be expected to be worth a speed run and challenge you to complete it successfully, hehehe.

Been playing through Quake 4 again, very fun single player campaign; just started marching into Iron Maiden country on the last nexus tower tour.

Some how, being crammed into a tin can and shot down the throat of a strogg facility brings back memories of Quake II, lol. Personally I can’t fathom the one-man pods having any practical military value in such an environment. When comparing a group drop ship to a one man pod, I reckon with how unlikely you are to get a squadron of ships through without losing a lot of them, the one man pods would be more economical—less grunts lost per ship downed. On the other hand, unless the one-man pods land in closely grouped clusters, it effectively does nothing more then injecting a lone marine into their own personal ant hill! Which is arguably, what folk who grew up or thrive on the production of games like DooM and Quake, relish as a staple of game+level design ^_^. Although IMHO it would have been better to get a group landing (ala Halo) and either cut the player (+ a few cannon fodder) off from the team.

The suicidal crash landings used in Q4, combined with military history of paratroopers being employed en masse, shows that you can expect to get shafted often enough lol.

The levels are about to get more interesting, since now the Iron Maidens become more of a threat. So far, the only big bruisers have been the Gladiator and “Tank” types. Most of the enemies are pretty easy to deal with; bit o’scattergun action or some hyperblaster deals with most strogg, and I love to plug out grenades whenever there is suitable cover to constrict their movement, whilst protecting me from hostile fires hehe.

Back in Quake II, the Enforcers could really rip you a new one with their machiengun arms; on the upside though you could usually dance about outside punchin’ range and cook them super shotgun style before it got to dangerous ;). I haven’t really encountered anything comparable to them in Quake 4, or equally annoying found lurking around a corner! The seem to have been replaced by the Grunts, which are little more then Berserker Junior Grades in my book 8=). Because like the Berserkers, get close, shoot the monster with some shells, back off before it impales you, then pelt it some more. A shame though that you usually encounter Grunts as lone wolfs (unlike Berserkers). With how bulky the things are, it would be an awesome thing to cause some monster infighting DooM style with; not to mention an interesting exercise in level design, to use them to heard the player into the line of fire of worse monsters or even into traps!

Whenever I’ve bumped into a shield packing Gladiator, I’ve always plugged it using rockets, grenades, and slugs; I think I’ve only encountered one light tank so far, so there hasn’t been anything really durable yet. If memory serves, light tanks in Quake 4 are a heck of a lot more rare then the Tanks of Quake II were… and no where near as nasty. The Quake II tanks, oi; first time I met one, the sucker soaked up nearly every bit of ammunition I had—before leaving me bare in country riddled with Gladiators, Enforcers, and Gunners!

The Gunners in Q4 are actually not as mean as I remember them being in Q2, feels like they spend less time spamming grenades your way; but they are still awfully fun to nuke on the run :-). Going CQ with them using the shotgun or a rapid fire weapon like the hypberblaster & nailgun is especially more interesting then shoving a few rockets or slugs up their keesters from a far. I think in one spot, it was a ring around the rosey like game: using grenades on the former grenade masters lol.

The only enemies in Quake 4 that worry me are those bloody Iron Maidens; you can’t get much worse then a ticked off cyber.itch wielding a rocket launcher and shrieking your ears off—unless it starts to teleport around, and takes a lickin’ and keeps on shootin’ at you xD.

I reckon the tower hopping war and nexus hub could probably be compared to MDK and the end of DooM. I can’t help but wonder though, what are the odds that the ‘new’ Makron was built using the nameless marine from Quake II? After all, the guy did survive as virtually the last survivor of a failed drop, kick the strogg in the teeth, and deep six their leader…. wouldn’t that be a twisted end? But assuming the hero of Quake II lived to tell the tale, one could argue that he was more effective then Quake 4s Matthew Kane – who ended up part Strogg in the process of one upping a John Doe!!!

It hasn’t been a very comfortable day… to say the least of it. I woke up a bit after 0600Q with a toothache and no luck gettin’ back to sleep. I remembered something a friend once said about using a moistened tablet of paracetamol (acetaminophen) to rub along the site (and iirc, push in the “hole” if such was the case). Finding a bottle of tylenol here being slightly harder >_>.

Since yesterday the phone rang, and I stupidly left my headset on the chair instead of the desk – I sat down with a crunch! So today I had to get a new headset. I can care less about the Live! related features, as long as it is decent quality and durable (even if not 160lb of ass worth, lol). In installing it, I had quiet a bit of a monkey fight to get everything working; seems that the driver disk really likes Live Call / Messenger—and lacks a required USB Audio driver for Windows XP SP3. Ok, I was saved by that annoying hardware detection dialog but at least XP no longer thinks the headset is a mass storage device! Sound quality is totally different, gunfire in RvS and SWAT 4 reminds me of listening to Call of Duty on my brothers (costly) speaker system once upon a time.

Spent a bit of time playing OpenArena, set up a skirmish on my favorite map with 3 bots for help against 4 bots. I scored nearly 70 frags, at least a dozen of which involved the “Buzzsaw”. I couldn’t get ahold of any decent weapons but the starting kit, so I decided to start chasing the pricks with a Buzzsaw, racked up a screen full of kill-icon things with it before finally getting a proper kit. I’ve also started to get better with rocket-placement – even scoring several direct hits as well as the usual splash-damage SOP.

Tried to take some time to write code but no one in this rat-fucking place would let me get work done. Combine with a nasty headache, and I said fuck it all—and just took a nap.

I feel much better now but absolutely nothing has gotten done. I have all of about 2 useful lines of documentation for the library I wanted to get done, LAST WEEK.