Loaded in with Keshim at Pogorevka, and decided we needed to get water and supplies first. We headed to the well in town but ran into zombies along the way. After not finding the well we decided to go to Green Mountain to see what was there. We thought we saw a survivor near a deer stand close to Green Mountain… Once at Green Mountain we did a pariater sweep, then moved in and took out a few zombies. We found nothing there, so we headed southwest….
So I don’t normally blog or write too much about gaming, even though my career is game design and I consider myself a hardcore gamer. I mean, the games that I tend to play I haven’t seen too much in blogs anyways. I play a lot of League of Legends, mostly because all or at least most of my gaming friends play it too; its easy to learn hard to master, the load times are reasonable, the games don’t last too long and just about every round I have played has been different. If you haven’t checked out League of Legends (aka LOLs) I suggest that you do, its free to play and quite addicting. As for blogging about LOLs I don’t see much point in that, there isn’t a lot of story in each game, you just kill each other a ton and maybe there was a cool ambush or some team fight that you won that was totally unexpected but theres not enough material in it at least from a story standpoint for me. Don’t get me wrong I love watching my friends play and the major tournaments but I don’t look up blogs about games on it or read stories about other peoples matches. The other game I play is Battlefield 3, a fantastic game - I have been a fan of the battlefield series for a long long time. I also don’t see much blogging on this game either. I feel this is because BF3 is almost too chaotic for written description. To tell someone about the game there is no better medium than video, sure you can get some cool screenshots of action (jet crashes, whole buildings blowing up, barley getting hit by an AT rocket) but I feel BF3 is all about the motion of things. I feel like words fail to describe that OHSHIT-OHSHIT reaction to coming around a corner and seeing a tank rolling its way towards you, or that badassness of when you are about to storm a building with your squad and a jet comes crashing into the building in front of you. I think these events can only be done justice in video, not only for all the crazy animations and physics that happen but the sound is fantastic too.
So while I play these games all the time I don’t write too much about them, the events don’t stick much in history, like I said before - sure there might be some badass games and battles but they easily fade as you load into the next round. I have no problem with this but I just came across a game (well, its actually a mod) that stirs the writer in me to write some of the stuff that happened down, maybe not for anyone to read, doubt anyone would anyways. But I want to write about it cause I FUCKIN’ wanna. so deal.
The mod is called DayZ its a mod for Americas Army 2 (aka Arma2) and its a zombie survival mod. Here is a link to the mod, you will probably want to get Arma2 Combined Operations (preferably off steam, seems like the mod install works best with that) its like 29$ and I can tell you after about 6 hours of playing I am SO SO SO glad that I bought it. Now I played Arma2 a bit while I was waiting for the DayZ packages to download and I found out really quick that it is and probably will be for a while a very hard game for me to play. I was on easy mode doing the first tutorial where you take out targets in a village and I have yet to finish it after 10 tires, the AI is ruthless and one or two shots can kill you. The helicopter controls are nothing like BF3 and thus I am terrible at flying, ect ect the list of difficulties goes on. But back to the mod… I usually get mods for games that I already own, usually to spice things up for a game that is losing its luster. Mods like Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942, or Natural Selection for Half Life. ot once have I bought a game strictly to play a mod till DayZ.
DayZ is the zombie game I have so longly waited for. I spawned into the game as a survivor with a pistol a few clips of ammo, some food, a full canteen of water, and some medical supplies. I was on the coast of some foggy island with the sun high in the sky, I did not know where the fuck I was. In the global chat some player was talking about trying to team up with other survivors and roll as a group. As the newbie to the game I immediately asked for help and said I would be down to meet somewhere. We exchanged teamspeak info and I heard the voice of another survivor. His tag was Keshim, and he was up the coast from me about 2 towns away, he told me to follow the coast to my right and I would meet up with him along the way, he told me to avoid the towns, and if zombies came after me to try and find a blacktop pier because the zombies didn’t like going on those (a game bug perhaps or something built in). So I followed his directions, along the way he clued me in on the various controls and displays on my screen (food/water meters, blood aka health, and my morality). The immersion in this game is fantastic, the fact that I have to look for supplies, fix my broken limbs, get blood transfusions from another player if I lost a large amount of blood and other various small things really drew me into the experience.
As I was heading down the coast to meet him talking to him over teamspeak I suddenly heard screaming to my left, I turned to see a zombie sprinting at me, I immediately started running up the coast Keshim assured me that so long as I kept running the zombie wouldn’t catch up. I got to one of the piers and delt head-shots to about 6 or so zombies and waited for him at the pier. We linked up and exchanged a good handshake, and made our way towards one of the larger cities (I don’t know which one, all the signs are in Russian, go figure). Along the way we met up with other survivors, and a bandit. Bandits are players that kill a lot of other players, their morality meter goes into the dark side and the players skin (what they look like) changes to a bandit skin. Bandits are not to be trusted but we got lucky with this one, he taught us all kinds of good things to know, and was probably the reason we got out of the city alive (I was shot by a sniper while walking around in an apartment standing up like an idiot, he dragged me downstairs and patched me up with some medical supplies).
So much happened in the first few hours of play, and when I say hours I mean real hours in the game. The servers have a clock which is set to the time of the server location; the server we were on was based in Chicago, and thus when it was 6pm in Chicago it was 6pm in crazy-russia-zombie-land. The sun started to set around 7-8ish and we were running through the woods (about 6 of us now) to some small town in a valley somewhere (someone had a map and had a plan as to where we were going, I don’t really know, I just had a shotgun and I was a happy camper). It got so fucking dark that we had to use a road flare to see, I am not kidding you when I say it was FUCKING DARK, I turned up all kinds of settings on my monitor and it was still hard to see anything without the flare. We got to the town and were mauled by a group of zombies, they got the jump on us cause we couldn’t see much farther than the flare but they could see us a mile away. I logged out after we delt with them, I’m not to sure where they went after that, but I can say that I can’t wait to get back in and meet back up with Keshim and the others and see where our adventure leads to next.
More bad-ass than Halo, more brutal than Gears, more awesome than anything that is in Call of Duty. Battlefield is where teamwork is at, and has been like that since 1942. MY TANK IS FIGHT!
I don’t want to go to work… I want to play deus ex
Legend of the Matrix - by Rhonda Walker
Note from Artist: Legend of Zelda/Matrix Mash up. Morpheus is going around offering game characters a chance to come to the real world.
T-shirt available on Red Bubble
This is awesome!
(Source: insanelygaming, via gamefreaksnz)
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