Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Multiplayer Madness #1


So I have attempted to pick up my online (and overall) gaming over the past few days and I've had relatively good results. If you consider getting sniped over and over again Halo: Reach, hustled in NHL 13, and not being able to play Modern Warfare 3 online good results. I'll explain all of that as I give you all a rundown on my quest to become a better online game player.

The Custodians Use This?

The first game I decided to try out was Halo: Reach and I got the mixed bag that I was expecting. The first few matches proved just how out of touch I was with the game. Reloading, meleeing, and using armor abilities all seemed foreign to me and I didn't really get a handle on  the controls until I was a couple of matches in.

To make matters worse I continually got caught with the Team Snipers game mode, which I am horrible at. During one particularly gruesome match, where I got 3 kills and 20 deaths, I knew I wouldn't be competing so I figured I would take a look around to get a better feel for the scenery. I forgot the name of the map that I was on but it was the one with several large buildings and a half complete bridge in the center of the map. Anyway, I was in one of the buildings and I saw that the name of one of the lifts was called the "Custodian Lift."


The lift is a large fan that blows you up into the air (remember, you are an incredibly heavy Spartan not a normal human) so the question becomes "do they really make custodians use this?" I mean, imagine working for a place that basically made you use an indoor skydiving fan to go up to the next floor. It seemed a bit weird but I guess humanity works a little differently in Halo's future.

I eventually began to do better in matches and even began to get positive K/D spreads so the practice is helping out. Every now and again I got a bad matchup but skill does play into that and the skill of the opponents seems to change drastically every single match. 

Getting Hustled

So remember how I said that playing sports games online was a longshot for me? Well, I decided to take the plunge and play some NHL 13 online to see how I would do. The matchmaking process is pretty easy and I was in a game in no time. 

One thing that you need to learn if you want to play online is how to effectively pass and deke, something you don't really need to know how to do on easy mode. Defenders would fly at me more aggressively than usual and pokechecks are the norm, so you need to protect the puck. I lost my first few matches but stayed competitive. I wasn't doing great, but I wasn't getting blown out either.


Then came one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. It started with the team selection as I chose my New York Rangers but this guy decides to go for Team Canada. It's a bit of a jerk move to use an international all star team against a NHL team but whatever. We began to play and he played like a complete and utter fool; skating around in circles, airmailing the puck over my goaltender, and allowing me to get to the net. I took a 2-0 lead going into the third period and that is where it got weird. He suddenly turned on the skills and began to do crazy dekes, take accurate shots, and just began to destroy me. I got lucky and scored a goal after he had scored 3 so we went into OT tied at 3.

He messed around a bit in OT but I couldn't capitalize and he finally won the game with a wrist shot at the 4:53 mark of the OT (that's seven seconds to go, btw). It was demoralizing, this guy had been toying with me the whole time and I never had a chance. I eventually got some wins and even won my first shootout last night but the lingering feeling of being toyed with remained with me. At least I have a fun story to tell.

Modern Warfare 3?

The final game that I decided I would try online was Modern Warfare 3 but I never made it to multiplayer matchmaking. I couldn't access any of the playlists without some free DLC that I hadn't downloaded. I tried to download the pieces I needed but they just refused to start downloading. I gave up and played some Survival where I did pretty well and am approaching level 42 now. 

That's it for my first installment in the Multplayer Madness blog series. I had a decent amount of success in online gaming and was able to kill some valuable time that would have otherwise been occupied by things like working out, job searching, or other useless things like that. 


Thursday, September 20, 2012

Back in the Saddle

It has been quite some time but I am back with a little more life experience and a new direction for this blog. When I started this blog back in 2008 I was looking to get some experience writing about video games and see where it took me throughout my college career. After I graduated from college I began to volunteer write at GamerGaia.com and this blog became an advertisement for that site.

I have since moved on from GamerGaia and am now the Editor in Chief for VGutopia.com. I have seen some great stuff in the past few weeks from a re surging site and am excited to see where VGutopia goes. However, I don't want this blog to turn into a big advertisement for my site, I want it to be its own thing. A place where I can vent out what I want to say in a less than formal setting.

Will I never link you guys to VGutopia stuff? Of course not, if I have a good opinion piece up or something I'll let you guys know but I would like to leave this as a general place to discuss my thoughts on trying to enter the video game journalism field, playing games as I get older, and anything else that enters my mind (exactly what a blog should be).


So I will begin by talking about how "out of shape" I felt while playing Halo tonight. I was bored around 11 o'clock or so (shortly after the Giants finished kicking the crap out of the Panthers) and decided to pop in a disc and play some Xbox. I mulled over a choice in game and landed on NHL 13 after a bit of deliberation but after destroying the Minnesota Wild 8-0 and then beating the Canadiens 4-3 in OT, I was looking for something different.

So I took another glance at my games and decided I'd give Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary a go. I decided against another roll through the campaign and instead decided to try something I hadn't done in a while; play online multiplayer. I'd been a big Halo online guy years ago but I had basically stopped playing online games (even though I still shell out the cash for Live every month). I quickly realized this was a mistake.

The first match was incredibly brutal, with the other team beating my four man crew 50-9 (I contributed one of those nine kills by the way). I began to wonder if maybe I had lost my touch. The second match turned out to be better with my team winning and me actually pulling out a +3 K/D ratio (usually I'm in the negatives) so that wasn't too bad but it didn't shake off the rusty feeling I had.

Atrophy is a term I only used to describe what happened to my biceps when I stopped working out but now I see its uses in my gaming life. My skills at Halo (and most likely any game online) have severely atrophied over the past few years of almost non-use. I see  this as a problem, especially if I am going to be a video game journalist for a living. How could I possibly have any credibility among my audience if I thoroughly sucked at the games I played?

So I've decided to change my fate and get my online gaming skills back up to snuff. It won't be easy; real life obligations, single-player RPGs, and laziness might get in the way but dammit I am going to try! I'll start with a healthy dose of Halo before moving on to titles like Call of Duty and then maybe I'll venture into the uncharted waters of sports games online but I wouldn't hold my breath on that. I'll keep you all posted and we'll see if I can get my "online legs" back under me.