Weekend Recap - Part 2 (PAX East 2010 - Day 2)

I was determined to have a better second day at PAX. My friends and I all got up relatively early considering how late we stayed up the night before. We took our respective turns in the shower. I went 2nd so I could sleep in an additional 15 minutes. After I got out of the shower, I *purposely*left the shower lever on. A.D. went in after me and a few minutes later, we heard a scream through the bathroom walls as the cold water hit his skin. Haha, owned.

We went to “wagamama”, a Japanese restaurant inside the Prudential Center known for their fresh ramen noodles just as they opened their doors at 11 AM. Okay, maybe we didn’t get up that early. We ordered some duck dumplings, wagama glazed ribs, and chili squid for starters. The ribs were fall-off-the-bone delicious. For the meal, I got the “miso beef ramen”. It was pretty good (though it pales in comparison to Pho).

After lunch, we went back to PAX and walked around some of the exhibition booths where various hardware and software companies were showcasing their various products. We didn’t really spend too much time at each booth because the guys had already seen everything the day before and even though it was all really cool stuff, I get bored easily.

One notable booth was the NVIDIA booth where you could see their new 3D cards. I put on the 3D glasses and stepped up to a keyboard and mouse. The other guys put on their glasses as well and watched as I played part of the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 single player campaign. The technology is really cool but the only thing that really looked “3D” was the gun that your character is holding. Everything else looked pretty much the same so I was a little disappointed in that. My friends also complained that the 3D was causing motion sickness.

It was almost 1 PM so we went to the main theater for the “Penny Arcade Make-a-Strip Panel”. It was my first panel at PAX so I was excited though I had no idea what was going to happen. The panel featured Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the two guys responsible for PAX, as they showed what goes into making a Penny Arcade comic. We sat way back of the balcony section. Several large screens displayed closer views of Jerry and Mike on stage.

The panel started with Jerry typing some dialogue between the characters of the comic. The audience cracked up but I had no clue what was going on since I don’t follow the comic. Mike then pulled up Photoshop and started sketching out the comic while Jerry answered questions from the audience. I was incredibly impressed with Mike’s drawing ability. I’ve always loved art and drawing. Maybe I should start my own webcomic one day. ;)

There were multiple microphones spread throughout the theatre and people got in line to say whatever was on their minds. One guy came up and thanked the two guys for hosting PAX where nerds can get together and be comfortable. Several people later, another person offered similar sentiments. At that moment, it finally hit me. PAX was so much more than just another “nerd” conference. People who may be a little socially awkward, a little obsessed with geeky things, are somewhat allergic to sunlight razor blades bath water, and are often ridiculed in other circles of life actually felt welcome and “normal” here. To quote the keynote speaker, Wil Wheaton, they were at “home”. At that moment, I felt proud to be alongside 60,000 of my fellow nerd brethren. I don’t really remember anything else that either Jerry or Mike said. It didn’t matter. I was just happy to be there.

After the panel, it was about 3 PM so we headed to the PC free play area where the tournament was being held. The organizers told us that our bracket wouldn’t start until 5:30 PM so we had some time to kill. Since we were already there, we stayed there to play some random games on their computers. We stopped playing a little early to check-in but they still weren’t ready for us.

We walked around and checked out a few other areas but nothing really interested us. We eventually settled down in a room with some random people playing music. It’s kind of cool that people who have never met before could still make music together.

We went back to the PC free play area and continued waiting for our bracket to start. The previous brackets were still going on and we noticed that no one had 3D glasses on. It turned out that the 3D cards were having problems so the tournament organizers decided to just hold it in regular 2D. That was such welcome news to our ears…and our stomachs.

It finally was time for our turn in the tourney. The format was “Squad Deathmatch” with single elimination. That just means that each match was between four squads with four players in each squad fighting to reach 50 kills. Our squad was comprised of S.Y., his brother G.Y., L.D. who had never played the game before for the PC, and me. We were the last team to be seated and they sat us down together on a row of computers. We had to quickly configure our buttons and join the designated server. I tried out my settings and I hurried to fix a few buttons that were still messed up.

This was my first gaming tournament so I wasn’t sure how the competition would be. I consider myself to be one of the best players in my circle of friends so I was hoping that we would at least advance past one round. Our strategy was relatively simple; since L.D. had never played this game on the PC before, we had him play a support role and try to stick together with our squad. Since it was a race to 50 kills, we decided to ignore any tanks that the other teams would use and just focus on killing enemy infantry. It ended up being a very sound strategy.

The first round finally got started. I accidentally picked the Recon class to begin the round so I was pretty worried that it might cost us the match. I had trouble getting used to the mouse sensitivity and I missed the first few enemies I saw. Fortunately, the rest of my teammates finished them off. It was a jungle map and there was a tank somewhere on the map. One of the other squads hopped inside of it and started causing havoc. Knowing that tanks are slow and that we could use the foliage for cover, I sprinted up to the tank and dropped a pair of C4 on its side. I pulled the trigger and BOOM! I blew up the tank and everyone inside. I didn’t care that I blew myself up in the process because I knew that my teammates would be safer with that thing gone.

At that moment, I finally settled down and realized that, “Hey, we can win this!” I changed back to my normal Medic class with the M60 (aka “The Gun of Rambo”) and I was back in my comfort zone. G.Y. helped direct the squad from one area to the next and we mowed down everyone along the way. Before I knew it, the round was over. We were amazed at the final score. We had 50 and the 2nd place team had only about 18! Ownage! I finished with about 18 kills and 6 deaths. That felt so good! The adrenaline was freely flowing now. I am so glad we entered this tourney!

The organizers had us stay at our computers and the second round started shortly after. This time, we were playing on a desert map. The competition was much harder this time around. We got off to a bit of a slow start. The score was really close between all four squads. One squad hopped into a tank and started to kill everyone. They started to pull away from us score-wise! They had about 38 points and we were just over 30.

Then all of a sudden, someone blew me up with a Carlos Gustav, an anti-infantry rocket launcher. I have to point out that that the Gustav is the cheapest weapon in the entire game. You don’t need any skill to use it; it has incredible damage, a large blast radius, and results in instant death. I knew it was only a matter of time before some no-skill n00b jerk face would try to use that cheapness on us. Well, getting blown up by the Gustav set off some kind of switch with me. I went into a blinding uber berserker nerd rage and promptly killed the first guy I saw. I then took out his teammate who spawned on him. I ran toward a building and killed everyone along the way and knifed the last guy for good measure. I saw my teammates had died so I killed the guys nearby and res’d my squadmates with the defibrillator. I lost count of how many guys I killed but the game awards you a virtual pin when you get a kill streak of at least 8. I finally died after completely running out of bullets on my primary gun. I glanced at the scoreboard and we took over the lead and were pulling away. We got to 49 kills and it felt like forever to get that last kill. When we finally took out that last guy, we all let out a collective yell. I ended up finishing with another score similar to the first round.

We had to get up from our computers while the other brackets played out their rounds. We all stood around reflecting how awesome this whole experience has been. Whew, the second round was so intense. All of that adrenaline had me flying sky high. I can’t believe we won another round. Boo yeah! We pwned so much face! I can’t believe we made it to the finals of a 64-team tourney that we only joined on a whim with a bunch of weeknight warriors featuring someone who has never played it before. I started to feel like we could actually win it all.

For the finals, there were two other pro teams who won their respective brackets. The last squad was another amateur team like our own. The round started off as badly as it could possibly go. Boom, I died. Boom, my squadmates died. One of the pro teams got on the roof of some building (which I didn’t know you could even do) and everyone was using Gustavs! Every time we died, the game kept causing us to respawn near the other teams where they could keep raining death upon us. We tried to run for the hills (literally) to get away from the cheapness but to no avail. They had no honor. Even if we played as cheaply as they did, I knew we weren’t going to come back and win.

At this point, it felt like we were now only fighting for 3rd place. Someone n00b tubed me and the round was over. We took a moment to congratulate the other teams. We finished last of the four teams. To add insult to injury, we found out that they only handed out prizes for the top three teams. Fail.

I am so proud of our squad for getting as far as we did. We finished 4th out of 64 teams! What an experience. I am so happy that we did so well but I am incredibly disappointed in the way the other teams won in the finals. I know that cheap tactics are part of the game and you can’t fault another team for using what’s available. But in the final round, I don’t think any of us died from even a single bullet. All they used were those cheap Gustavs. @#$%!!! Had the round taken place on a different map with different terrain, I can’t help but think that we would have placed higher. I can’t wait for next year! Team Rambo will rise again!

You Are Not a Sniper

I've been playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 now for about a week and I have one huge pet peeve about the game that I had to blog about it. Everyone and their little brother loves using the Recon class to be a sniper. In almost every game, most of my squad will be working together to complete objectives like capturing a flag, blowing up a M-COM station, leveling a building, or taking out enemy vehicles. Each of these tasks helps the team win. However, there is always at least one guy in the squad who's off hiding in the woods trying to be that sniper in Enemy At The Gate. Hey, guy! You are not a sniper!

There are four classes in the game, each with their individual strengths and weaknesses. The Assault class is useful for taking out enemy infantry and basically owning other people. He can support his teammates with ammo packs. A skilled Assault soldier can kill enemy infantry from both close and long distances. He can keep providing extra ammo for the other classes to continue blowing things up.

The Engineer class is great for repairing vehicles and for blowing up enemy ones. Engineers have problems in long range combat but are great at close range. Engineers can keep ally vehicles around longer by repairing them with his drill thingy.

The Medic class is great for providing suppressing fire, resurrecting fallen teammates, and for dropping health packs. The light machine gun is also great a taking out infantry when fired in short bursts. He can use his defibrillator paddles and bring back teammates that have died. Each "res" also restores tickets that are normally lost with each death.

Last and certainly least, we have the Recon class. The class is meant to sneak around in the front lines to spot enemy troops and to blow up objectives. They have a motion detector ball that they can toss nearby which reveals enemy locations. The Recon class can also blow up objectives and vehicles with their remote detonated C4. Lastly, the Recon class can use a variety of weapons ranging from sub-machine guns to shotguns to sniper rifles. However, everyone seems to forget that last fact and always try to snipe. Why? Sniping is so cool. It looks cool in movies. It looks cool in video games. It feels awesome when you are a one-man army who can strike fear in your enemies and make them paranoid to venture out in the open. Unfortunately, most people stink at it and can't shoot fish in a barrel.

Bad Company 2 is a team-based game. It's hard to win without working as a team. You can be the best person on the server and you will still lose consistently if the rest of your teammates aren't working together. All of the other classes fill some sort of rule that helps the entire team. But on every team, there are at least a half-dozen people trying to snipe. They only care about having a good K/D (kill/death) ratio. They think that as long as they kill more people than the number of times they die, they are helping their team win. They just run off on their own, hide somewhere, and wait for unsuspecting victims to run in front of their cross-hairs. A 2:1 K/D looks good on paper. But if you only kill 4 people in a round and your team still loses by 50 tickets, it doesn't mean anything! If you hid in the woods and let the enemy tank roll by and mow down 10 of your teammates, what good does that do?

Argh, snipers are so useless in this game! The main problem is that you just can't kill enemies fast enough. The sniper rifle usually takes two shots to kill someone. By the time you fire the first round, the enemies will have an idea where you're hiding. If there are multiple enemies together (which usually happens because the other team will be working together), you will get run over. Sure, you can hide and pick your spots and get the stragglers. But you can't cover your teammates' backs if you're always trying to preserve your own life.

The team is better off if you switched to a real class and did something useful. Anything! If you are an assault class, you can at least kill more enemies and at a much faster rate. If you are an engineer, you can blow up their tanks which keeps them from killing more of your teammates. Medics can bring your teammates back to life.

It is called the RECON class for a reason! It is not the Sniper class! Just because you have a slick ghillie suit, a pair of binoculars, and a buff rifle, that does not mean that you are a sniper! Stop wasting tickets and help your team. For the last time, you n00b; You are a not a sniper!

This Past Week

This past week has been brutal. I feel like I've been so busy that it's hard to balance everything that I enjoy in my spare time. It definitely affects how often I get to write on this blog. It's 3:36 AM right now and I can't fall asleep. I know I should be sleeping because I have to wake up early for church later this morning but I have too many things I want to write about and there aren't enough hours in the day to write them all. I know I’m going to pay for this later but here goes…

I normally won't write about work but I guess the events of this week are sort of blog-worthy. We're in “crank” mode and we're trying to get everything done in time for our upcoming release. I probably signed up for more things than I normally should and I should delegate more. I am a bit of a control freak so I would rather work hard on something just to get it to work the way I want it to than to leave it to someone else to do it. All of those extra hours were pretty stressful on both my physical and mental health. I had several milestones that I set for myself I put a lot of pressure on myself to meet them.

On top of all of the busyness at work, the video game (Battlefield: Bad Company 2) that I built my new computer for was released this week. After those long days at work, I just wanted to unwind and blow up some baddies. But unfortunately, the release has been far from smooth. On Tuesday night (March 2, 2010), after I got home from work, I quickly installed the game and set up my controls. I logged on for the first time and was eager to get into the action. What on earth were they thinking when they designed the GUI for this game? The whole interface is garbage. It is so confusing trying to manage my friends list, or browse through the list of servers. There are arrows in places where regular buttons would have made much more sense.

Everything just feels slow. The server list takes forever to refresh. When I finally got into a server, my screen immediately started spinning. Argh! They still haven’t fixed the stupid joystick binding? I went back into the settings to unbind the joystick keys and found that the developers removed the ability to unbind keys. What?! This used to work in the Beta. Okay, now I’m getting angry. How did this game get even buggier in the released version?

I got tired of trying to work around my problems so I just unplugged my joystick from the USB port. I went back into the game and played for what felt like only 15 minutes. The game just felt off. I’m really sensitive to lag so any kind of unresponsiveness feels apparent to me. It just seemed like every server had a 100+ ms ping. I guess that could be expected with the sheer number of people playing at the same time but I’m still not happy.

Some of the weapons in the game just don’t feel “right”. Grenades from the grenade launchers (i.e., n00b tubes) sometimes blow up. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they blow up but don’t do any damage. I don’t care what kind of damage they set for it but all I ask is that the gun’s behavior is consistent. Is that too much to ask?

The game wasn’t all bad. It was really awesome with the new “Destruction 2.0” feature where you blow up just about any obstacle or terrain in the game. A few times I got into firefights with someone and they would run through a doorway and hide behind a wall. I would then just blow up the wall and get a kill. That never gets old. It’s also awesome when you blow up the last support on a building and watch the entire structure collapse on itself and take out everyone still inside of it.

Anyways, I wanted to keep going but then all of the servers went down. Oh great. Now I can’t even play anything. Whenever you tried to join a game, it either made it look like you were logging in but then kick you out or it would just not work at all. That was about 10 PM at night. What am I supposed to do for the rest of the night? Play single player mode? That’s so boring…

What drives me crazy is that I work in Software QA. I know what’s it like to test a product and to make sure it’s as polished as it can be. I understand that there will always be unexpected things that will come up at customer sites and how it feels to issue a patch to fix the issues. But how does a company as large as DICE/EA not have found these obvious issues in their testing and addressed them? How can they still get things wrong when they can learn from what worked and didn’t work in their previous Battlefield games? I tried to find answers online to see if other users have posted workarounds but all of their online websites were also hammered and were either down or very sluggish. I’m sick of paying all of this money to companies just to get a sub-quality product and then wait months for the game to actually mature.

So I’ve been killing myself at work to get things done and thoroughly tested and all I want to do is to just relieve some stress with a nice video game. But I’ve been so disappointed thus far with Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I was so excited early on but the game causes me more stress than I need right now. I’ve only played it a few days this past week and only for an hour or two at most each time. There are a bunch of things to like about the game but the there are so many fundamental flaws that It’s just too frustrating to play right now. I haven’t even played it this weekend yet. I guess I really don’t care that much about that game until they get their act together.

On a brighter note, work actually ended on a high note. I was able to finish everything that I wanted to do this week. Nothing feels better than to work hard and feel that you put in a solid week’s worth of work. I feel accomplished. At least I have Bejeweled Blitz to help unwind.

Current Computer = FAIL

Well, it's been a while since my last post and a few interesting things have come up that I would consider blogworthy. First up, my computer stinks...let me explain.

My friends and I have been eagerly waiting for the past several years for the next great first-person shooter (FPS) to come out for the PC. Nothing was as fun as Battlefield 2 (BF2) back in 2005. That was the first multiplayer game where it combined traditional ground combat with air combat in the form of various helicopters and fighter jets. The maps were huge, the explosions were bigger, and the dominance by our crew, "Team Rambo" was bigger still. Unfortunately, too many people complained about the balance in the game so the developers nerfed (i.e., changed the game to reduce the desirability/effectiveness of a particular game element) a bunch of things in the game. Certain attack vehicles that used to be buff were reduced to mere transport vehicles. Instead of allowing great players to play great, the developers were more concerned with making everyone feel "okay". Lame.

Anyways, the people at Infinity Ward (IW) tried to create the next great FPS with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (or as my friends affectionately call it, Call of Dookie: Modern Failure 2). This game has been a commercial success and it might even be a great game, but I will never ever buy it. The makers have made numerous decisions which detract from its appeal to PC gamers. I don't care how niche of a market they think the PC game market is.  Buying their product only reaffirms their business practices and encourages future game developers to follow suit. The only way I can voice my displeasure is through my wallet so I refuse to buy this game and anything else from IW. I refuse to be a lemming.

Then came Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The developers of this game have appeared to take the opposite approach of IW and try to listen to the PC gaming community. It's a promising start. The game play trailers look amazing and brings me back to a happy place of blowing up baddies with the helicopters. My friends and I were anxiously awaiting its release. Trinhbo is back! Team Rambo lives again! And on top of that, there was a public multi-player beta this past Thursday. Yes!

Tary pre-ordered the game online for me earlier in the week so that I could get access to a beta key required to participate in the public beta. Thursday morning, I got the email with the key. I got home from work that night and started downloading the public beta client. I had to wait in a queue of about 258 people before I could start downloading the installer. It was about a half hour wait.

After I installed the game and put in my beta key, I fired up the game. I quickly set up my keys and changed a few display settings. Trinhbo was ready to start owning people again. I hopped on a random server and then I waited anxiously for the map to load. Then I waited. Then I waited some more. *yawn*

Finally, I appeared in the game and saw what looked to be a dumpster and a fence. My screen kept rotating so I figured that there was something wrong with how the game implemented my joystick controls. I unplugged my joystick from the USB port and the screen stopped rotating. Whew.

I tried to run to the fence but the game felt so "choppy". Ideally you'd like to have over 60 frames per second (FPS) for smooth game play. I was lucky if I even got 1 FPS. I quickly pulled up the setup menu and reduced the display settings to their lowest settings. I went back into the game. Still choppy. I somehow "chopped" my way over to a building (I think) and somehow killed 3 guys (or trees, I couldn't tell!). I saw a tank chop its way through the air and an enemy was following behind it to repair it. I shanked him (or at least where I thought he was) and then there was an explosion and I died. Worst gaming experience...ever.

It truly was a sad night. I finally realized that my computer just wasn't good enough to run this game. I should have looked at the minimum requirements. It's not even close. But, I've been hesitant to upgrade it for several reasons:

1. Gaming takes up a lot of time and I didn't want to rob my family of that time. And having a baby on the way won't make it any easier to find the time to play a lot.
2. Keeping a computer up-to-date with the latest hardware is an expensive hobby.
3. There weren't any games out that made me want to keep upgrading my PC.

Tary's been telling me for months to go ahead and buy a new computer and to reassure me that it would be okay. After this past Thursday night, I'm ready to take the plunge!