10 years later. . .

So I have been in Vancouver the past few days. Thus, this has been a bit of a ghost town. But I'm back now. And I'm ready to tell you about Aliens Vs Predator.

Who hasn't heard of at least one of these franchises? For whatever reason, they got put together in an ongoing hunt. Oh and you can also play as the Marines, cause more sides is more fun.

The game is a FPS but only the Marine gameplay could be called classic FPS. I really can't stand being one. You have to be a good team player to survive as a marine, and since I don't like using my microphone to converse with rude foreigners, (not to mention its a ghetto ass walmart clearance headset/microphone combo, so it's pretty bad and since I have my speakes aimed at my face, generates terrible, terrible feedback.) I'm not the best person for that.

Every predator is almost an MK walker. They have the best weapons once they find them. Permastealth. Long range tracking ability. The best melee. And the most health. Oh and they can heal themselves too. With ammo.
They aren't invincible by any means, but they are damn cheap, and because of all their power ups, often get played with cheese tactics.


Aliens (mah faves!) are sexy sleek embodiments of phallic symbolism and death. Basically they are rape with shape. (Poet and I didn't even kn-....err yeah...) SO THEY ARE TOTALLY AWESOME.
Yeah. They can climb any surface. are very hard to see in shadows, can telepathically sense all other players through walls with in range, can impale you with their super long tail, can jump pretty far (and land on ceilings!!) and are very, very fast. If you are bad at moving in all 3 dimensions, trying to play an alien will make your head spin. Down on the screen will be where your feet are, and at first I got myself lost a lot when dropping to the floor would disorient me, over time I got used to it and can ninja around like they do in the movies.

I love playing as alien, it's very much the rogue of the game. They generally can't take much of a beating. They get stunned easily, and their regen isn't worth much since they have so little hp anyways. But I love playing sneaky, and you have to if you play alien. A big black thing with a huge tail is actually pretty easy to see in almost any setting. So the first thing I usually do in deathmatch is to kill the lights. Being seen means being shot at or snuck up on. The best way to avoid being snuck up on, is to simply never stop moving and when you do move dont move in predictable ways. Best way to kill is to charge from shadows, if you have enough height advantage it will knock them down and you can finish with a tail stab, or a grab move. if they block, (ie, suspect you're there) charge will fail and you will get knocked down, so be very observant of their actions. Other way is if they are near a wall you can sneak up to them from is the wall tail stab, 2 or 3 hits and they dead.

Against a group of marines, which are nigh impossible to approach, due to teamwork/motion trackers, I usually run bait for them. Aliens can roar when you press a certain key which can be useful for mind games, and they can hold alt to move super slow to be invisible to motion tracker. If you are sprinting perpendicular to marines or zigzag sprinting away from them, their chance to hit you is very low. So you (or two) can play distraction while your team mates move in behind either slowly, or just jump in while the guns are aimed away. The tactic works well on preds too, but in most open levels you can't get close enough to the preds to sense them, as they are usually invis to normal sight. So you have to meta game and just know the spots they like to camp. :p


Lag is not your friend in this game, theres been 10000s of times I jump off a ledge and land on the next floor when the game rubber bands me back up top into the instadeathmove of the guy who was chasing me. And my ping is at max 100 else I don't join. (Aliens and Preds can insta kill anyone close enough with their back to them. just by spamming E until the server gives it to them)

I 99% of the time play as an alien. If I wanted to play like a marine I'd play doom, or L4D. I think predators are cheese so I refuse to play them without a handicaps.

As a final word, the insta kills in this  game are ultra violent.  Close up despineings, decapitations, alien brain digging, shoving a tail up a guys ass and out his mouth. I think it's a bit overboard, but I'm too desensitized to care really, but I'm sure children would get nightmares from watching this game.

So I had a huge post ready and accidentally hit the back button on my mouse.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu


Now I'm pissed. an hour wasted. I'll post again in the morning.

Disgaea 3

I don't know what to say about this game really. It doesn't even really start until after you beat the story, which took me around 50 hours, I had one or two guys at lvl 100. After that, the challenge modes open up. So far I have one character up to lvl 1000ish, but you can keep making the old stages have higher level monsters, and you can reincarnate your chars so they start at lvl 1 but get better stat growth.

I made a cleric/monk/thief with a number of reincarnations, she can do a half million damage with one use of Big Bang. it's pretty berserk. The plan is to set up the clubs in the classroom so that I can piggy back lvl 1s to get 10% of any xp she can get, and she can get millions in one hit. enough to plug someone straight up 60 levels in  one turn.  then once they are high enough to be boosted by uber gear to one shot a particular group of mobs that sit on XP boosting tiles, they can really start leveling.

The only problem is that the grind area is terribly short. I takes literally about 8 seconds to finish the level I chose to grind in, and gets repetitive ultra quick. and to do it anywhere else, would be less efficient. So... yeah.

Anyways I am reinstalling a number of games I havnt played in a bit.
Aliens Vs Predator is first up.
I like the multiplayer in this game. Love it even.  90% of the time, I play alien.
But yeah, more on that next time.

First post ever.

First.


Now that that is out of the way. Now I can concentrate on what's been absorbing my time lately.
A mix of playing Champions Online free player, and Disgaea 3.

I started playing CO about a week ago, with no real reason other than the ever gnawing hunger for more games.
At first I made a mind based sentinel, which is the closest thing to a healer the game has. I didn't fall in love with that character so I deleted it.
So I started another, a grimoire, which is basicly the mario class of this game. I've been on a kick of playing Dissidia Final Fantasy whenever I can't sleep, go to the john, take the bus, etc, and Exdeath is one of my favorites to play as.  So...  I based my CO char on him.

 Now, there's no playable villains side in CO, but since the first time I logged in, about 1/4 of the other players I've looked at are demons, batwings, horns and all. Not to mention the first character I made was one too.  >_>
So yeah, no body seems to care about what side they're on, as long as they get to grind XP on classic comic book thugs and goons.
But that's the thing, XP grinding gets boring by yourself and I'm horrible at making friends in games nowadays, I never ask for help,(mostly since I'm smart enough to do it all solo,) and if I can't do something, it's cause it's way too high a level for my character in the first place.

I'm too busy trying to power level to socialize. Let me talk about Star Trek Online, a sister MMO to CO,(both are developed by Cryptic,) and expound on what this means. The last time I played, My captain was maximum rank. I got there by myself, since no teamwork is required to get up to the level cap. I had 1 person in my friends list, and only because he wanted me to add him. I typically make female avatars 99% and I am pretty good at not making them ugly. Tangent: Somehow I always forget that there are tons of people out there willing to cyber with anything that looks hot to them, even if they claim no homo, yet know the person behind the cute avatar is male. Anyways, cyber has never been my thing, but the point I'm trying to make is that MMO's are about playing with friends, or at least making friends in the process. While I did that in WoW, I only did that when I was a noob. Once I went hardcore with the friends I made there, I never made very many new ones. And that is what stuck with me, I'm not an elitist jerk, I share my info with noobs who are learning, but I just never maintain contact with them, since they can't possibly help me get more epic gear.
Now when I play ANY other MMO, It takes me a day or two of fooling around to 'get it' and then know how the game works, what and how to use stats, and an idea of how much grinding it will take to hit cap. All the while, I may never speak to a single other person, (other than typical barrens chat chuck norris drivel,) Which leaves me in the same boat I'm in in STO, Max Level, Awesome Ship. No Buddies. Then I'm bored since there's nothing else to level up, no new powers or skills to play with, and no drive to epic my avatar out since that takes the one thing I lack. In game friends.

And that's why I play games like Disgaea 3. The level cap is 9999. Just look at this vid:






The numbers just keep going up. Maybe I'll save that for another day.