Current mood:	happy
Current music:	Nickelback - If Everyone Cared

University is Awesome - LAN Party Edition
The SSU Computer Science club (it is awesome enough that we have one) had a LAN party last night with pizza and drinks in two of the school's computer labs so we didn't need to bring our own equipment and software. The game was UT2004 and I got my ass handed to me. It was great. I should have been doing homework, but you have to have some fun sometime.

Since the last FPS I played was Half-Life and the last one I deathmatched in was Quake [edit: scratch that; I once had about a half hour in Quake 3 at one of the Linux Expos], it was nice to see the advancement. The graphics, of course, were an improvement over the last century's. One of the levels eschewed the square platform model and had a not-too-unrealistic curved landscape of rolling hills and valleys. Another had low gravity and bounce pads that would throw you between distant towers. One feature new to me is the ability to dodge by double tapping a direction, but since there was a short delay before you could move again, I had better luck dodging by old-fashioned strafing and jumping.

UT2004 is a dedicated multiplayer game, with the single player mode being a series of multiplayer deathmatches against computer-controlled opponents. The weapons were fairly well developed and most had a secondary mode (like in Half-Life) which is in effect an immediately accessible backup weapon. Here is overview of the weapons:

* The Shield Gun is the hand to hand weapon of last resort. It does a decent amount of damage, but if you are able to hit someone point blank you might as well use the flak cannon. Its secondary mode is a shield which is useful to protect yourself with when you run out of ammo.
* The beginning gun has the advantages of rapid fire and instant hit, but does minimal damage. Its secondary mode launches grenades that don't appear to explode unless you hit someone with them, and they are slow enough that I only got hits at point blank range. That can be somewhat counterproductive.
* The Assault Rifle is basically a beginning gun in each hand for twice the firepower, making it one of the better weapons in the game in my opinion.
* The Bio gun does high damage at close range and its misses leaves glop on the ground that do minimal damage to whoever walks over it, but its range is too short for most maps and I never killed anyone but myself with the glop.
* The purple gun is one of the sniper weapons, dealing instant damage and able to kill someone in one or two shots. Its secondary mode is a slow moving ball of energy that might do more damage, but the only guy I hit with it didn't die. You are supposed to be able to shoot the ball for an area affect attack, but I never tried. I would be too busy dodging to hit it anyway.
* The Link Gun is analogous to Doom's plasma gun, firing medium-damage projectiles. My enemies were able to dodge away, but it felt nice shooting it. Its secondary mode fires a continuous instant-hit bolt of lightning that always killed me instantly, but I had to hold it on a target for a few seconds to bring them down.
* The Minigun (chain gun) has the rapid fire and instant hit advantages of the beginning gun and deals more damage. Its only disadvantage is that it takes a second to warm up before firing, but that was never a problem for me. This was my favourite weapon.
* The obligatory rocket launcher did what you would expect. I tried aiming at floors and walls to get people with splash damage, but only had moderate success.
* The Flak Cannon (the obligatory shotgun) fires too few too-slow shots over too wide an area to be anything but a point blank weapon. At point blank, though, it's one of the most powerful weapons in the game.
* The Lightning Gun is a sniper weapon that seems to do less damage than the purple gun, taking two to three shots to down an enemy. You may be able to hurt players in water by zapping the water, but I'm not sure about that. Its secondary mode is a scope, allowing for long-range targeting.
* The Sniper Rifle sounds like the ultimate sniper weapon, but it has a very slow refire rate and it seems to do less damage than either the purple gun or the lightning gun. Its only advantage is that you can score an instant kill if you hit somebody in the head while using the scope. A nifty gameplay effect is that the gun creates a puff of smoke at your position when you fire it.

I had the best luck with the instant-hit weapons: the minigun, the purple gun, and the beginning assault rifle (especially after picking up a second gun). The better players (those who could aim) prefered the flak cannon, and of course everybody loves the rocket launcher.

I mentioned that I got my ass handed to me, but I didn't mention how badly. I generally ended up in the bottom middle of the scorelist with about a 1:2 kills/deaths ratio, often more deaths than anyone else in the game but a middling number of kills. This was largely due to my aggressive playing style. I would start right off searching for enemies instead of weapons or powerups and would attack them with whatever I had handy, which was often those grenades at point blank range. I also took a few lava baths and failed to learn that jumping down into the middle of an active firefight to try to find a target does not work.

However, I was dangerous enough to become a notable target, eliciting numerous cries of "Damn you Tang!" when I fragged somebody, "Die, Tang!" when I refused to lay down and, and one "Damn it, Tang, you're making me thirsty!". I even won one of the matches when TruffleKing and one or two of the other good players left to get food from the other room. In sum, I was annoying and could get in a few good shots but was not very effective. That about sums up my record on Daily Kos too.

Summary of my deathmatch skills as compared to other SSUers:

* Reaction Time: Poor. When me and any other player see each other at the same time, he hits me right when I press the fire button. I must still be wired for Atari-speed games. While I could make up for this in normal play by dancing around the next few shots, it was a major disadvantage in instant-kill mode.

* Aiming: Poor. Hence the reason I like rapid fire weaponry. There were times I was getting one hit for every five from my opponent, and the flak cannon was useless in my hands. However, I could snipe if sitting still and given a few seconds to aim.

* Dodging: Mediocre to good. I put more effort into dodging than most players, some of whom hardly tried to dodge at all, but I also had a habit of dodging into a wall, corner, or lava pit. Overall this was probably to my advantage because I made enemies miss me enough to make up for my bad aim, but it was also to my detriment because I have a hard enough time aiming when I'm not moving.

* Tactical: Mediocre. I made my share of mistakes, but I also did some smart thinks like sniping when I could and jumping behind a player to follow them and shoot them in the back later when I had a better shot.

* Scouting: Poor. I didn't intentionally look for weapons and upgrades often enough and I took more unexpected shots to the back than I dished out. I had a hard time finding targets while easily becoming one myself.

To my surprise, the fact that I was new to the game did not matter much. I got up to speed fairly quickly.


I earlier mentioned TruffleKing as a player good enough to be mentioned by name, and he was as clearly the best player in the room. However, he became a marked man when he won two or three matches in a row early in the day, so he had to share the victory circle with some of the other good players because he got ganged up on whenever he showed his face. His battle style was similar to mine, fighting close in with lots of dodging, except he could actually track his targets and hit them and he could dodge a lot better than me.

I didn't do too bad against him, relatively speaking, but only because I didn't run into him often and the times I did, I held my distance and sniped. The situation repeated itself often: He would be clearing out a room of four other players all gunning for him at once, and I would pop him in the back with the purple gun. He won most of our one-on-one entanglements fairly easily, but I got him fair and square a couple of times.

My major nemesis was instead Dan who was to me as TruffleKing was to the rest of the room, a good dodger who can hit his target. We often ended up in each others' sights and he usually bested me. I don't recall him winning many matches, though. My secondary nemesis was Nifty Numa Numa who spent the last half of the gaming session knocking me around the arena, and another nemesis was Adam who had good enough aim to hit me any time I tried to dodge. There were a couple of other good players whose names I don't recall. The victories were mostly split between TruffleKing, Adam, and two players whose names I don't remember, though Numa also won a few.

Best nickname of the night goes to Necrovore, who had an appropriately themed character in a skeleton wearing a top hat. Honorable mentions to TruffleKing and to AIDS ("You have been killed by AIDS!" *sputter*), who might have been same player as Nifty Numa Numa since he disappeared once that joke got old and Numa appeared about the same time.

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Other fun stuff from last night:

Somebody blared loud music over the speakers to start the party. I was annoyed at first because it was louder than the sound effects in my headphones, but the playlist was perfect background music for the game.

The head of the CS club left a note on the whiteboard that the club forbids anyone from having fun. Someone replaced that with a lament about Bash, to which was added "rm -rf /" which was soon joined by various other ways to destroy your unix system, such as making a tar of /proc in /proc and this fork bomb that looks like a smiley from hell.

In the other room, they stopped playing games and started showing cartoons on the projector. The show was Cartoon Network's Metalocalypse, about fictional heavy metal superband Dethklok. The show is ultra violent and relies heavily on bodily function "humor", but it was good enough to make me stop deathmatch to watch a few episodes. I give it a B-. The quality is in the absurdity and crackery of the plots. For instance, in one show the band leader wants the next album to be perfect and has spent months deleting several albums' worth of good material. He decides that to make the recording great, they have to perform in the middle of the ocean -- underwater -- in the Mariana Trench, the darkest place on earth. So the band rents a nuclear submarine, spends several more months recording, and accidentally leaks radiation into the ocean that turns a seahorse into a gigantic sea monster. They also jettison the guitarist into the ocean in a transparent tankful of liquid oxygen where he has a totally un-metal Beatles-style interlude with ugly-teethed deep-sea fish. All the while they are being tracked by a shadowy government organization that is trying to stop them; from what? And why? Who knows? It's funny.