Far Cry 2 Ain’t All That Bad

No, I don't have this sniper rifle... YET.

I wish I had the forethought to get a screencap or a vidcap of my Far Cry 2 game yesterday afternoon, but here’s how the shizzle when down;

I had picked up a mission at a cell tower to go and whack some dudes who were patrolling around an airfield in an SUV. Why? I don’t know. I’m not paid to ask these sorts of questions, I just do it.

So, I barreled in there in a jeep and got capped by a sniper in a watch tower next to the airstrip. F9 is my best friend in Far Cry 2, so I tried again. This time I crept along a line of hills to the south, took control of a safe house and had a snooze. The safe house was right on the leading edge of a creek leading into the airfield, so I used the low-lying creek bed to approach the watch tower. Once within sprinting distance, I ran across an open field, juking to avoid sniper fire. I ran up the watch tower and slashed the sniper with my
machete, then picked up his rifle and his Mac-10. It’s also key to note that in my possession was a rocket launcher.

While my target circled the airfield in his SUV and bracketed by two jeeps, I noticed a third jeep patrolling the airstrip. With the sniper rifle I took out the gunner, and then waited for the driver to get out before taking him down as well. As I waited, the target drove past the airstrip, a pile of large rocks between myself and him.

Racing down to the ground, I took up a position in the rocks with my rocket launcher and waited for their next trip around. I left my own jeep nearby for a quick getaway. The first jeep passed my hiding place, and I fired the rocket into the front of the SUV. It exploded, and the front of the SUV lifted up, flipped over, and the SUV dropped on it’s roof on top of the trailing jeep, which then also exploded. One rocket took out two vehicles and five enemies. I had no time to rejoice, however, as the leading jeep had my position and I had to defend myself.

I was losing interest in this game until this mission, when I realized what I had been doing wrong. This is not a run and gun game. If you try that, you’re going to die. You need to be careful, quiet and tactical, scouting the area well before attempting any action. Most of my mistakes (and subsequent deaths) have come from not paying enough attention to what’s going on. Changing how I approach the game has increased my enjoyment of it tenfold.

R.

Gen Con Wrap Up Part 1: Pretty F**kin’ Chang

Accidental Gameologists from left to right; Colin, Meg, Rob, Fraser and Zeke.

This past Sunday, after twelve hours on the road, I returned home to Kitchener from Gen Con. Let me tell you, it was quite the trip – and I don’t mean the drive back from Indianapolis.

For several years now I’ve been trying to organize getting to Gen Con Indy. Last year, for the first time, I actually began organizing it and actually had a plan to go with two friends and the nephew of one of those friends. Unfortunately do to family priorities, I had to cancel those plans. Anybody who was listening to the Accidental Survivors Podcast around that time would have heard all about it, in all of it’s expletive-filled glory. So, early in 2008 I attempted to make plans to go to Gen Con again. Not wanting to make the drive by myself or pay for the hotel room myself, I contacted two friends about it, but those plans fell through as well. Then, around the middle of June, Fraser Ronald (star of stage and screen) contacted me with an email that said – and I paraphrase – “Do you want to go to Gen Con?”

The rest, as they say, is history. At 4:00am on Thursday, August 14th, Fraser, Colin and myself pulled into Indianapolis in Colin’s van which I refer to lovingly as the Geekmobile. Three hours of restless sleep later, we were walking the short distance to the Indianapolis Convention Center and Gen Con Indy 2008.

My first impressions of Gen Con were pretty much what I expected. I had been to FanExpo, and this was simply a much larger version than that. After we had collected our Press passes we were able to enter the Exhibitor’s Hall an hour before the general public, and that’s how I felt – it was a massive retail space. There were some cool publishers there, like Pinnacle, Fantasy Flight Games, Bioware, Green Ronin and such, but that’s essentially what it was – a big RPG store. We had no plans to do any interviews until Friday or Saturday, so on Thursday we just chilled, met up with some other podcasters, ate at the Ram and caught a nap in the afternoon.

P.F. Chang's China Bistro became a descriptive for us at Gen Con.

That evening we caught up with the folks from The Brilliant Gameologists and got invited to their palatial hotel penthouse where we partied, ate awesome Chinese food from P.F. “Pretty Fuckin’” Chang and drank until the wee hours. Friday, we vowed, would start Gen Con in earnest for us.

More to follow…

Where the Hell is Matt?

I came across this link this morning and after watching it, I immediately had to share it. I find it very inspirational.

Where the Hell is Matt? ( 2008 )

I think what really hit me is that across the 42 countries that this guy visited, of all the people he encountered, we are all the same. The crowds dancing with him really spoke to me beyond the dance, and instead showed me that we share more than just this planet we live on. We are, essentially, all the same.

Watch the video in it’s entirety (don’t fast forward, it’s only 4:28 long, for God’s sake!), and tell me you don’t feel at least a little bit at what I’m hinting at.

Astar, Hero of The People

Do you remember Astar the Robot?

I sure as heck do. I can remember this as one of the coolest PSA’s ever made. I used to love the commercial breaks on Saturday morning between Thundercats and Transformers, because there was a chance I might be able to see the Astar commercial. I wanted to be Astar. I wanted to be able to put my arm back on if I didn’t play safe. When I was growing up I didn’t know anyone who had their arm sawed off in an industrial accident, and I like to think that Astar was directly responsible for that.

However, looking at the video now, my adult brain starts whirring and clicking and thinking about the things that my child brain didn’t consider. Is Astar a boy or a girl? The voice makes it kind of hard to tell. Is Astar some kind of superhero robot? I mean – it leaps up the side of a building and stands on the side of it like Spider-Man. Astar then leaps, spins, rips open walls and stands on narrow pipes.

Is Astar some kind of espionage robot sent into this massive factory in order to shut it down? I mean, obviously something nefarious is going on as Astar gets inside and then opens up it’s radar-dish ears to track down some kind of signal. I think we can all agree that Astar is searching down the reactor core for this monstrous manufacturing facility in order to plant some kind of thermal detonator in order to blow the whole place sky high. Why else would the factory’s autonomous security features attack the robot? Clearly the machines were trying to shear off Astar’s head, but Astar dodged and they got the robot in the shoulder instead. Can Astar put his head back on? I would doubt it. Loss of brain function would probably shut the robot down on the spot. The factory’s security computers would know this, as this isn’t the first time that the rebel forces who built Astar have tried to shut the machines down. But do you blame the rebels? Wouldn’t you want to shut down a factory that builds Fryodyne Cosmatomic Death Rays™?

Astar is obviously a hero of this far-away planet, a hero built by rebel forces trying to shut down the war machine that has plunged their society into thousands of years of fighting and death.

Go, Astar. Go. Put your arm back on and kick some ass.

It’s Official – I’m an Idiot

After my rant about Arkham Horror the other day, I’m both embarassed and ashamed to post here that I totally screwed up the game rules, and that’s why the game seemed so impossible.

You don’t pick up a Mythos card after every player’s turn – you only pick one up at the end of a round. This makes a tonne more sense to me. My only defense (and Melodie can attest to this) is that the rules don’t make this very clear.

So, with egg on my face and all that, this is Rob, signing off.