Its not a matter of you versus me
11:48 am Friday, 24 August, 2007
Alrighty then.
I’m sat at my desk and somewhat struggling with the screen. I’m sure I’m going to have a headache by lunchtime. I’ve just taken a little break and instead of diving back into work I’m going to dive into some major major nerdiness.
I bought my first desktop computer (my second computer of my own) in October of 2004. I bought a desktop, and will always have a desktop so I can game. Now gaming can usually come and go for me, if I get into something I’ll spend a lot of time playing it and then I’ll give up and maybe come back later. There have been two games of note.
The first, Eve Online. It’s a space based MMPORG. It’s gloriously pretty, at the time of release there was nothing that looked better. It’s now showing it’s age a bit. I did re-up for a month while I was in the US but played for less than a day I think. It’s not a single player game, in order to truly enjoy the game you need to work with a group of people. And it’s not a casual game, it requires effort and time to get everything setup. So both of those put me off a bit.
However I have one glorious moment from Eve. There was a major war going on for some new space stations. They could finally be controlled by players and well the corp I was playing with was part of a pretty strong alliance. We had some stations, 3 as I recall and we had to defend them. And so came fleet battles. It remain the most fun I’ve had on a computer. I woke my flatmate sometime around 3am shouting at the screen as the battle raged. (I warned you this would be nerdy). There were at least 100 ships on each side and the lag was so intense but it didn’t matter. Teamspeak was up and running, targets were shouted, we’d turn, aim, fire, reload and repeat. The graphics were good enough to actually look like a proper space battle.
This is a screenshot of my final moments in battle from the person who got the kill (bastard). You can see the streams of missiles heading into me. Everything else on the screen is a target. Drones, ships the entire lot. It’s just manic.
It was glorious. Loosing the ship didn’t matter, it just took a while to replace and we won the battle and held the stations. If I could play a game where I could just login and take a ship into a fight like that with 200 other people, well sign me up for life. It was glorious.
I did warn you this was going to be nerdy.
The second game of note is City of Heroes. There are two moments from this one. The first was just despair. I was there from the beginning. I was playing inside of Issue One. All the good stuff in the game that there is now wasn’t there. It was a simple case of logging in, finding a team and fighting crime. And man it was a tough game. It’s much easier now than it was way back then.
The night Issue Two came out, I was a level 20 something scrapper. I, like most games, had stuck to my first character. I hadn’t realised a lot of things and had wasted slots on Brawl and Rest (oops). So when character respecification came along, I went straight for the Task Force. I’ve still never seen a zone as I have that evening.
We ran Terra Volta 12 times that evening and failed every single one. I hit the debt cap pretty quickly (and back then debt meant debt) but still we went on and on and on. Finally around 3, maybe 4am I called it a night. I had to sleep. By this stage we could get clear to the last room in about 30 minutes but then the waves and waves would overwhelm us. We made it to wave 8 once and that was it. We’d just faceplant. It was a slaughter.
The next day they took down the Task Force for balancing. That night we beat it first time, barely blinking and I had my Respec. And damn if we had not gone out and earned it. I was one of the first with Transcendant, back when badges and respecs meant something.
It took a long time to work off that debt, 249K at level 24 was nothing to be laughed at. So it was a slaughter, and it was glorious. It remains my defining COH moment.
Yesterday though I broke. I was fed up and I decided I’d just login for a little while. And so I did and I got a team pretty quickly. Not just a team, but a good team. A good leader, a bit of healing and some damage dealers. And we just did some missions and then all of sudden, two things happen. I get my 15 month Veteran badge (that’s spread over 3 years) and in my 459st partrol in hour 427 on that character; *ding*.
It was nice.
So a few more mishes and then I spent some time figuring out enhancements and stuff. Took my nice cool 44 million and was left with 22k after starting to buy everything I need to get my IO set bonuses.
And then I rolled a Peacebringer and it began again. Man, I’m so glad they realised the key hurdle to new characters is lack of a travel power. I have so many alts that I got bored with by level 10 because I’d just get fed up of waiting. So having a decent fly power from level 1 was pretty damn nice.
I have tried World of Warcraft, I played for a while in the US mainly because I could play it on my Mac which was nice and remains something I’d like to see more of. (I know I can play COH on there but I really don’t want to run dual boot). It was okay I guess. I should like it more than I do…but I just don’t. I got to somewhere in the mid 20s I guess, maybe even 30ish. Never did find a good Guild.
So yeah nerdy. But hey, just be glad I didn’t talk about my WarHammer army, my multiple CCG collections, the Heroquest/Space Crusade collections. And ya know, I’ve never LARPed…I know there are some of you that cannot say the same.
Though I did note with considerable interested that D&D fourth edition was announced within the past couple of weeks…
(The post title is of course a lyric, this time after searching my iPod for “Game”, it had to be The Cardigans and My Favourite Game although Queen’s Play the Game was a very close second.)