Zombie Chess!

Finally committing myself to AOE3’s campaign, I finished up Act I over the weekend. This may not seem significant, but I have not completed many single player RTS offerings so I’m gonna pat myself on the back. Command & Conquer 3’s GDI campaign is the lone silhouette painted on the side of my PC…I’ll take my victories where I find em. Previously, I was stuck on a mission for about 2 weeks which led to my dismissal of the game in favor of Dead Space. Coming back to the mission, it turns out I was making things too hard on myself. Way too hard. Trying a different approach I was able to knock it out in short order. Now that I’ve passed the proverbial ‘hump’, I find I am enjoying the game quite a bit more.

It feels weird to admit this, but I owe my small victory in AOE3 to playing lots of Left 4 Dead. Strange, I know, but bear with me while I explain: I’ve played L4D for almost 130 hours now. The majority of that time was spent in versus mode. Since there are only 2 maps available in this mode I have had a lot of time to become intimate with the levels, developing many strategies and counter strategies. Because of this, L4D has become a chess match. A bloody, undead chess match to be sure, but a chess match all the same. For example at the start of No Mercy level 2, it was common for survivors to rush out and down the stairs as fast as possible to avoid the inevitable Boomer waiting under their feet. But, what if the other team puts the boomer at the stairs instead? What if the survivors rush for the vent on the right side? Punch. Counter-punch. L4D has forced me to think more tactically and my overall gaming skills are better for it.

Making the move now from games that require mental skill to games that require reflex skill I finally installed Unreal Tournament 3 this weekend. I had the game installed for maybe 6 hours (after having owned it for 6 months) and Steam announces they will begin accepting retail keys for the title and now support it fully. Rolling my eyes, I removed UT3 from my system and installed it again with Steam instead. No big deal though, I would gladly connect all my games with Steam if I could. Hopefully this is a step towards more developers embracing the content delivery Steam provides. Admittedly, I’ve never been one for the deathmatch multiplayer games like Quake or even Doom but always found something to like in their single player components. Having never tried a game from the Unreal Tournament series I figured I would take the campaign out for a spin, and what a disappointing spin it proved to be. 3-4 missions into it and I am bored with a forgettable storyline propping up what amounts to multiplayer matches with bots replacing real players. Shame on you Epic. I’ll probably finish it up just to get myself used to the weapons and controls before jumping in a multiplayer match, but I seriously hope it gets better than this.

All in all, it was an odd weekend. While being sick was not cool, it supplied a perfect excuse to play lots of games. I played some LotRO and had good times, spent some time with the already mentioned UT3 and AOE3, and I installed Diablo 2 and FEAR. Both of these latter titles gave Vista fits. D2 worked well enough after finally discovering I had to force my video card to run it in 2d instead of 3d, but FEAR wouldn’t run at all until I patched it. Now it runs, but the framerate is terrible. Odd that I can’t play FEAR worth a damn, but the same PC chews up the demo for FEAR 2?

Seriously considering setting up my XP PC in a network with this one and just using both. Oh wait, Vista networks aren’t friendly to XP…

Vander OUT