Plasmahawk

I’ve been addicted to games lately and it’s both a good thing and a bad thing. It all started this past summer with TF2. This addicting class-based multiplayer frag-fest is fast paced, eccentric, and very rewarding. It’s all team-based which itself is a good/bad mix. You get to have teammates working along side and sometimes there’ll be a medic following you around, healing you as you get hurt, and uber you up for a coup de’grace (if you manage to not waste it). Then there’re the folks that are all gung-ho about team work and moan and yell at people who just want to have fun (but not necessarily want to win) or at newbs. Valve does a good job of keeping it alive with updates that add new toys to play after you earn them through achievements and new, addicting maps. The weapons are simple, everyone gets 3 (some like engineers/spies has extra abilities like build and disguise) weapons: main, secondary, and melee. Some weapons might have secondary functions, though most will not. The mechanics of operating the weapons are straight forward and intuitive. This puts some people off, but the real learning curve occurs with the maps. There are tons of nooks and niches that are good hiding and shooting places. Often times the enemy seems to come out of nowhere when they have found a side passage I haven’t explored. The sheer amount of details to explore and exploit makes this game very re-playable and it isn’t until recently, some 3-4 months after I first started playing it, did I begin to feel the boredom creep in. Even now, however, I’m finding the fun in playing character classes that I’ve been neglecting such as scouts and spies. Not to mention the low price ($20) makes for an easier time to convert your friends to play with you. The game comes in Steam which includes its own messenger so even if you don’t have a mic you can chat with your friends and coordinate uber assaults or what-have-yous.

Then Spore came out and despite its misgivings in the DRM department (the fact that it has one at all is bad enough) it was surprisingly addictive (but not in a good way). It had all the elements of an mmorpg without any real players. Not to mention the hyped evolution element in the game is everything but. If anything it’s about intelligent design, without much intelligence. You start in the microbial world and swim in a 2 dimensional field eating others (if you’re a carnival) or plants (otherwise). This, beside the last stage, is probably the funnest of them all. It’s like a slightly sexed-up flash game. The others are over simplified, half-hearted games whose only real purpose is to propel you into the final space stage. These filler stages takes you through the organism stage when you get big enough to come out onto land (because you have to walk, you can’t stay in the sea forever) and basically repeat the first stage in 3d but this time you get to make allies too if you’re not a carnival. Next stage is tribal but you just kill or make friends like the last one. Then you get civilization which is essentially the same thing and make vehicles/ships/planes that all fire the same damn colorful projectile no matter what weapon you equip it with. Then comes the space age where you can earn about sfifty-five hundred badges and get tons of upgrades on your little space craft, which can destroy other civilizations, place colonies, go through black holes and into other parts of the galaxy, and haul cargo to and fro. There are hundreds of star systems to explore and maybe more if you keep playing (I didn’t). Eventually you’ll get so powerful you can start slaughtering empires that gives you the bad look and others will start paying tribute to you so you won’t slaughter them. The crisis that comes at you every 30 seconds is annoying and if you don’t ignore them you won’t be able to expand your empire. Ultimately, it ends the way all mmorpg ends for me: when I realize it’s freaking pointless to work in a game to see my wallet grow and my empire expand (without end). It’s not rewarding. It’s merely addicting.

Lastly comes Crysis: Warhead. I built my computer December last year for the sole purpose of the original Crysis. It’s a ultra low end for approximately $700: E2180, 2GB DDR800, 500gig Sata HDD, the DS3L mobo, and a PNY 8800GT 512MB, plus the other misc. Combined with my 7 year old THX certified Kplisch 4.1 (which has been crippled to 2.1 since I don’t have room for rear speakers anymore) and a Soyo 24″ I got last summer during Office Max’s occasional sale on this lackluster, prone to failure of a huge slab of a screen, the original Crysis was pretty awesome to play. Everything on HIGH (but not VERYHIGH) and set to about 1440×900, it was a very memorable experience. Warhead, with its supposedly optimized engine, forces me to play at 1280×800 and everything to MAINSTREAM, which is equivalent to the bracket below HIGH in the original. Nevertheless, so the texture is lower and blurry, it was still a good experience to play through and now has gotten me to play Crysis again for the… 2.5 time. 

Sadly, none of this gaming has inspired me to draw or paint anything to show.