Longer Delay (Much) and News

This blog let me down, not by any fault of yours, but of my own ambitions. I'd read all the things saying, "You need to stick to it, through the hard and the easy. When it gets good, you'll understand why you worked so hard for so little." Like a typical human, not just an arrogant bastard, I believed them and promptly forgot. I started getting a few who thought what I had to say was interesting, and that rekindled my fires, but then I started posting less and less. It got to a point where I'd reached what was, for me, a cap in viewership, and something inside just wouldn't let me justify continuing. So I let this thing sit idle for full on four months. It was not until tonight, sitting in my editing class and talking about the future (what a thing to do, right?) that something inside me wanted to return, start up the engines again, and get somewhere. And so I write this. What's to talk about, now that I've explained (uselessly) my absence? Well, Halo Reach came out, Medal of Honor all but fell flat, and Call of Duty: Black Ops ensnared the highest preorder stats in GameStop history and got millions (several of them, myself included) playing for inordinate hours. In retrospect, getting that XBOX 360 Slim for Reach was a great idea. I'd never have found out I'm a rusher who enjoys getting in the face of his enemies. In sum, I'm a CoD guy. Halo's too slow, and Battlefield is too sluggish (there's a subtle difference there, but I won't go into that).

So, Black Ops. I'm not going too deep right now, nor will I in the future, just to say that 1) it's my first CoD game, 2) the weapons, for the most part, don't have an overall dominate member (save the G11, perhaps) and 3) Domination is the best game type in the whole game.

I'll put this into perspective using the only other game I've put a lot of effort and time in: TF2 (yes, I'm returning to that too). I've played every game type in TF2, save Arena, because I don't like not getting back in the action, and I can say Payload is the best. The map design, both from Valve and the community, is not at the par of Capture point, but the concept of payload as a game mode is the best one. To qualify, with Payload, more than most CP maps, and similarly in Domination, you know, immediately, exactly where your enemies are. On Payload, your HUD says X players on the cart, and vocal queues tell you to get to it. With Domination, you have a flashing flag and a vocal queue. Those are guaranteed kills if you can get the drop on your hapless foe. While it can certainly become a deathmatch and constant rush for flags, by and large there's one team who takes it to the other team and just keeps hammering. Objective game modes are, I think, my excuse to not play deathmatch modes because I'm not confident enough. There's something to that, and I understand that about myself. My gun skills aren't to par for sheer gun on gun combat, and my mind doesn't work fast enough, most of the time, that I don't need some indicator of where exactly I should be going to get my killstreaks. If I played more, I'm sure that'd change some. The larger reason, or at least so I tell myself, is that I can never find one single bloody person to kill in TDM. I run to where the action is, and I'm a second too late. Ten kills later on the board and I'm still freaking looking for my second kill. If anything, I like some kind of assurance that someone will be somewhere at some point and that I have some chance of killing them. In TDM, for me at least, I'm always exactly where that is not, and if by some chance I happen to be, some situation with contrive to get me out of that groove. IT's usually an RC car.

Let me be clear, however. My most played game mode in Reach was Team Slayer, so my gun skills aren't bad enough that I must stick to objective game modes. I play games to enjoy myself, and I do not enjoy my time in TDM like I do in Domination. And let me be clear that I've gotten several Chopper Gunners and enough kills for Gunship and Dogs (though I don't really ever equip them. That'll change) Hell, I've rushed spawns at gotten upwards of fifteen kills, topped the leaderboard in captures and defenses and had K/D over 5. I can turn on Beast Mode when something inside me really wants to. But I remain the average, above at times, gamer.

That's all for now. I've got other writing to do, and a begging session with That VideoGame Blog