So I made this game my gaming life for the moment.  I am still far from doing what I did 10, 5 and even 2 years ago in terms of play time but this has become my defacto game of the moment.  It beat out L4D2 mostly b/c of the repetition of L4D but I no doubt think it’s still a good game, I’ve just decided to put it behind MW2 on the hierarchy of games.  I’ve already equaled my time from MW in MW2 and will probably supplant it as the CoD series goes.  My biggest problem is the air crap.  I default back to games like Domination (from my UT99 and BFxxx days) as my favorite.  What I get tired of is the airstrikes, AKA air crap.  Typically you can run a match and easily win while getting the shit kicked out of you by airstrikes.  Why? Because of dipshit morons that like to just camp, snipe and then call them in while doing nothing to progress their team.  I get especially irritated when these morons are on my team and we have a good team with the exception of 1-2 players that are out for personal scores.

What to do? Well I wish that they’d offer ground games without this crap.  Oh wait, you probably could specify this if they had dedicated servers but alas they decided to be cheap assholes and not put any time into the development of the PC version while charging $10 more.  Sorry, I forgot for a second that Activision and Bobby Kotick (who cares nothing about gaming) cared about quality over money.   Bobby Kotick should be the person at the end of single player that gets the knife to the head, hell he probably doesn’t even know that’s how it ends.  I personally would love to see the game move to someone else but unfortunately with the sales of MW2 he’ll remain in control until a fan does toss a fatal knife into his skull.  I look forward to (and God I never thought I’d say this) EA taking back the reins of a game with the Battlefield series.  Unfortunately I’m not sure how BF1943 is going to play out since we’re still 6 months on the PC without it, so I can only hope that Bad Company 2 compares to BF2 or even BF2142.

Edit:  My continued rant on 1/3/2010….

A few more things that pisses me off about the game I love at the moment.

1. The lack of control of hacking and kicking.  WTH were they thinking? People rape people in this game and you can’t kick them. I had a game tonight with a guy who went 85-5 and I left 1/2 through the game.  Sure they did something a while back by kicking 2500 people they said were hacking but we’re at 2 months now and it runs rampant.  Granted some are just campers that rack up scores but not 85 kills to 5 in less than 10 minutes?
2. When you can’t connect there’s no way to exit.  So it attempts to connect and can’t, it sits there forever.
3. It throws you into a map that you can’t change during the load screen, so it forces you to accept the map. Exit after it loads and you lose the match.  A lot could care less but I’m a stats freak which is what does keep me playing, I love the unlocks by WORKING for them.  The Quarry map in particular, who the hell likes that map???
4. I already said this but … People who play Domination like it’s TD. Played a map tonight where the guy just sat around knifing people outside our base.  Didn’t attempt to take the point, just knifed.
5. I already said this too but … Again, air combat in domination from people out for personal score who could care less about points.
6. Inability to play maps you want to play.
7. The party system… It’s a double edged sword.  Unfortunately it stacks players and more than that clans.  Even in most dedicated servers this isn’t a problem or at least you can find another server. Not in glorious MW2.
8. Join delays.  L4D offers that when you’re kicked or exit a map it won’t put you back into that game.  Not in MW2, you pop right back into the server with the assholes hacking or the clan stacked server you just left and get another loss.

Most of these are, gasp, easily avoided in dedicated servers… You kick hacks and you chose the map/server you want to play, admins could turn off air attacks and most of this crap is gone.

Game play is great, the hierarchy, bonuses and unlocks are great but the administration of the game sucks worse than any game I’ve played.  Even BF2 had some restraint by having a single “commander” that did the air support piece. Granted there were hacks in BF2/2142 but they were a lot less frequent, and you could kick people.  I get that things in WaW and MW were out of control in terms of just point hacking but trading that for a gaming experience ISN’T the answer.  It’s backwards thinking…rather than specifying rules like EA did with BF2/2142 “official servers” you just say screw everyone and STILL have no control over hacking.  It reminds me of the RIAA mentality.

Let’s throw in the extremely engaging and riveting but extremely short single player mode (7-8 hours) and the $10 more for a PC game.

So I’ve not done anything for the longest time probably since I started BREWTALITY.NET through all of it’s incarnations.  I’m still alive.   I’m playing Left 4 Dead 2 and Modern Warfare 2 at the moment.  Held back on MW2 because of the non-dedicated servers but after playing it I have to say it’s a LOT of fun and may end up superseding L4D2 (gasp!!).  L4D2 is a lot of fun as well so I’m hoping that mixing the two will give a longer time for it but time away from MW2 means you fall behind and get worse than you already are, and in my case that’s bad! lol  I’m not the best at it and tonight I didn’t especially like the guy (cheesy shooter movie?) wielding 2 sub machine guns but it’s still fun.  Spec Ops was especially fun after a few hours tonight, hope to do some more of that soon!

As for the dedicated servers on MW2, I’m not noticing much issue so far, although I’m not a daily player or spend all my free time gaming.  The fact that there are people already with prestige makes me wonder, can someone really do that in a few weeks unless they’re playing constantly?  I guess I know some that do it in WoW so anything is possible.  It is nice that people are “supposedly” earning their achievements unlike the debacle that World at War was.  I admit I played on some of the servers that had an ungodly amount of points for a kill, etc. but it grows old but so does having games like MW that casual gamers got the hell beat out of them because they didn’t play daily.  The nice thing with MW2 is they have perks for casual gamers who aren’t great (AKA me! heh).

Anyway, I need to do something with screenshots since I have 100’s that I’ve not uploaded including stuff from these two great games.  I have a crap load on my xFire profile which I’m finding is more and more useful as a gaming social site even though a lot of gamers don’t use it.  It keeps all my shots in their 1920×1200 glory so that’s a bonus and does the uploads in game rather than having to do anything with them here and spending precious space.  Still using FRAPS tho and have that subscription.   If you’re not into xFire, you should at least check it out.  Cheap product for a lot of usefulness… Videos, Frame Rates  & Screenshots.

Check out the xFire Screenshot page.

As much as I would like to have a full gaming experience with Call of Duty: World at War, I don’t think it’s possible.  I’ve encountered so many errors and issues that I don’t think I can remember all of them.

It initially started on the beta.  I had a few days of fun with the beta and suddenly one day it started crashing after getting partially through the map load screen…the screen would flash and then crash.  There was an error message but the brilliant minds at Treyarch didn’t think to allow the error to show over the game executable dialog so I have no idea what the message was, just showed an error dialog that couldn’t be viewed.  I played with settings and found that if I disabled Crossfire on my dual ATI Radeon 3870’s, and clicked on restore factory defaults (I didn’t change anything but did it anyway) it worked.

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This week I found out that running Virus protection on everything Microsoft seems to be essential.  My main system was rebuilt a few months ago and I decided that I’d not install AV right away or any kind of protection.  I found out this past week that it’s not a wise move.  While I wasn’t infected with a virus or worm (typically choosing to open a document from an unknown source) I did find I had a trojan that was wreaking havoc on gaming.  I typically have issues with Unreal Tournament 3 and crashes since they can’t seem to fix the OpenAL issue that plagues the game on SoundBlaster X-Fi cards or it bounces back and forth between them and Creative.  Regardless I started having frequent crashes in Call of Duty 4 which has never happened.  I did some reading and found that people were reporting issues and the answer was a trojan.

I initially thought that I hadn’t done anything to warrant the concern but downloaded and installed a few spyware apps and Spywarefigher found an executable residing in my Program Files that looked like an MS patch that it reported as a trojan as well as a few tracking cookies.  I did the clean up and viola the crashes went away.  While it wasn’t a hard lesson learned, it was a lesson learned that running Virus protection is vital for the integrety of even gaming.

Thought I’d post that even if you think you’re privy to something like this, you may want to think again.  I’m still not sure what I did that allowed this to happen but I went ahead and installed AV even with the hit it takes on resources.

Why can’t we have a perfect game filter?  So many games create filters and leave so much to be desired.

Most of the first person shooters have filters but it seems a mismash of what we would like to see.

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