Grunge Gamer

Yo!  So I was playin ball with my olda brothas when this freakin demo comes chargin into the field.  The guy was all ova' the place!  Wicked drunk!  You'd think the staggerin cyclops would be easy to drag off the field, but he starts 'targin' all around and I have trouble gettin a hold of him!  Eventually he charged himself right into the swing of my Sandman, but that's besides the point. 

It got me thinkin.  What's up with all the speed buffs from Mann Co. lately?  Equalizer, Eyelander, Pain Train, Targe...  What the heck is all this crap?!  When I enlisted, my employer told me it was my duty to provide one unique skill to the team...  The same ability I honed right here on the streets of the roughest town in the world.  Speed. 

Most of us have a routine.  In the late afternoon I work out.  Then I get a shower.  And I shave.... using Steam's razor sharp user interface to do the job.  Its precise steel colored edges are better than BIC and get closer than Gillette.  I mean, the Steam UI is SHARP!  The recent changes aren't all bad, but they've definately softened a bit.  Don't get me wrong, I still love it, but why does everything in the online world become softer, rounder, and more bubbly? 

I don’t know if it’s the servers I play on or what, but it looks to me that 90% of the people playing tf2 are playing for their individual scores.  Maybe it’s because I play mostly on pubs because I don’t really feel like joining a clan.  Some of us actually want to win the game and it makes me want to jam rusty Phillips head screw drivers into my eyeballs when someone is only playing for themselves.

Just last weekend I was dead and in spec mode watching a demo-man standing next to the payload on Gold rush shooting out his little bombs at some sniper sitting up in the sniper nest, not killing him of course.  Mean while 2 scouts and a medic pushed the cart right past this retard to win the game.  All he had to do was turn around and bomb the cart so I could respawn and actually help out the team to WIN THE GAME.  That’s what it’s about isn’t it? Winning the game? You’d think it was, but apparently not.

If you've been gaming as long as I have, you have to remember the turbo controller mainstays from the days of the NES. If you needed that extra bit of something in Mega Man, you flipped on the turbo and blasted little yellow pellets to your heart's delight. Gaming has obviously come a very long way since the 8 bit days and so have controllers. Gone are the 2 button, D-Pad control schemes, replaced by complex button presses and analog control sticks. Controllers vibrate, mimic movement and conform to the shape of your hand. One thing they don't do normally these days, is fire rapidly with one press (depending on the game and gun type). 

(Continued from Part 1: Where's my next MMO: The Begining) 
Oh and what a sweet teet it was. I remember running around in the Elwynn Forest as a noob just being amazed at how it blew away all those free Korean mmorpg’s. My char was a human paladin, which at the time wasn’t a terrible character to roll. As I progressed through the game, I began to realize that WoW is an extremely easy game to play. Pretty much anyone could just pick it up and start playing with little knowledge of mmo’s. When I got to lvl 60, I raided, I worked on my mining and blacksmithing skills so I could craft some sweet weapons and armor. WoW had so much to offer an mmo noob like me, and I suckled the crap out it. I worked hard for that purple epic gear and like a no wiper crap, I loved every minute of it.

I was browsing some sites (as I usually do on the interwebs along with the rest of the world) and I noticed a banner ad.  This ad was for an mmorpg, and they were marketing themselves as "The most addictive game ever." 

For the last 2 years I’ve been asking myself this question.  While I hang on to the threads that are vaporware, watching videos of Star Wars: TOR and various other mmos that seemingly will never be released.  I wonder if maybe I’ve gotten too old for this gaming genre, too busy, as I listen to a 12 year old curse at me while calling for a medic and running in the other direction.  One thing is for sure though, I miss my mmorpgs, I miss the guilds, the late night raids, the friendships, the camaraderie , the excitement, and even the boringness of them at times.

I just don't get it, I feel like it's been done 1000 times before.  The playstation eye for one.  Everytime I mention that, someone jumps down my throat "Oh no, it's not the same thing."  I beg to differ, it's a camera that captures your movements and interprets that into functions that allow you to do operations.   I think I saw this same thing 15 years ago in a mall as a kid with a digital projector. 

Ground breaking my ass. Please someone prove me wrong before I have an aneurysm.