Morning Vent, 27 July 2010

Gungirl^TM favors the retro M16A1...

    A brief and slightly early update since it's a full day at the HQ today, including picking up meds, my serviced Jeep, and another marathon hospital session with Mom. I took a vacation day Wednesday in anticipation of her move to a rehab facility. We had the doctor from the rehab place in yesterday, and his take was that Mom's best option was to do the initial rehab at a local hospital associated with the rehab place. That'll mean she'll be at Saint Francis, just down the road from Vassar Brothers, where she is now.

Where the frack is everyone?

    I finally got to play some more Blacklight: Tango Down the other night. There was an update launched by the game when I first started it up. Once the update did it's thing, I launched me some deathmatch. The search seemed to fail and restart multiple times, so I backed out to the dashboard and restarted the game. The second time I managed to get into a match, tho. It's a nice little game. I'm finding that I'm not that good at it, tho. Still, I managed to land on the winning side in one TDM game, get mercilessly thrashed in deathmatch a bunch of times, once eking out a positive score by one measly kill.
    Based on my two hours or so of gameplay, I can say this: In Team Deathmatch, you're dead if you get bottled up in your spawn. The enemy dicks will hop in and out lobbing grenades and spraying you with gunfire. Most unsporting. In Free-for-All, when I use the HRV (the narc visor that highlights everyone on the map), I find that I get shot pretty fast (or, in one particularly egregious bit of unsportsmanlike conduct, bitchslapped and then ungraciously teabagged). I'm pretty sure that I'd like the game a whole lot better if all there was no visor mode in it at all. Sure, the Hyper Reality Visor adds an entire layer of skill to the game - a skill I don't have.
    Bottom line: The game is a lot of fun, but it's not a magic bullet. The update, whatever it was since I never saw any news items about it, didn't significantly impact the quirks of match-making I had encountered. Still a change of pace from Modern Warfare 2's BS is welcome, and I'll play the Free-for-all more. Like any other game, it's likely to be a heckuva lot more fun with friends, rather than alone, and it's cheap enough that everyone can own it and not be too POed if it doesn't pan out for them.
    Slightly disturbing, tho, was how my abbreviated Blacklight: Tango Down session ended: My Xbox 360 froze up, a pixilated screenshot from Tango Down stuck onscreen. Hopefully, it's a glitch with my 'box and not a problem with the game itself...
    I still hope to get in some Medal of Honor beta play. Once I do, I'll try to get together some thoughts on it to blog here.
    Today's featured Modern Warfare 2 vid is Ken Burton sharing the RP Dizzle love with everyone in range. Also linked is a short series of knifing killcams by Bobby Lee Swagger. Moving on...