Kinderhass

Tried the Ice Arena's Open Skate today. Had never gone on a Saturday before. It wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the birthday party and the little kiddie youth group party that they decided to have today. The only people there (aside from the regulars and ourselves) were either under the age of 12 or over 40. None of them knew how to skate, however, so there were some entertaining wipeouts.

Time for ultimate flisbee.

And I'm eating Pez like it's crack.

- = Out smurfing = -

With much Copiousness

Went to go see the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra and some Choral Group perform Brahms' Tragic Overture and Ein Deutsches Requiem. Copious amounts of kick-assedness. Didn't see my German prof there, but I know she went.

Got a Ping Pong tournament tomorrow morning at 11am. I know two of the guys that'll be in it, and I know I can beat them. The rest are probably some crazy-ass Korean or Chinese guys who know nothing but engineering and ganop ganip. I'm hoping, since it will be a Saturday morning, that they'll still be either drunk or hung-over. We'll see.

- = Das Gras ist verdorret und die Blumen abgefallen = -

TacOps vs. CS

::In response to Justin::

Well, I don't think you can call TO CS's sole counterpart. I mean you have (to varying degrees) Rainbow Six and all it's sequels, the Flashpoint series, Sum of All Fears, and about a million other games that have more or less the exact same concept.

I think the main reasons for CS's popularity is that HL is easy to mod, almost everyone owns a copy of Half-Life, and any idiot can play CS (the aforementioned "Spray and Pray" technique). Seriously, any braindead asshole that can click his mouse and type streams of obscenities into the console can play CS.

Before TacOps was bastardized for retail (read: turned into CS), it was an awesome game. It's fanbase was smaller than CS's, but really only due to the fact that CS had been around for much longer (and was therefore sporting an older engine, I might add). A lot of people also didn't like the fact that in TacOps, you couldn't just aim in the general direction of an enemy and get a series of headshots; one would actually have to place their little targeting reticle on an enemy before pulling the trigger. It was too much for many people; therefore, they played CS instead.

Yes, CS can be fun and yes, CS is very popular. But keep in mind that most of the world's population (especially when it comes the online gaming community) is fucking retarded. I'm sure Eric would agree with me that the popularity of a game (or music, movie, whatever) is not always a sign of quality.

- = The term is Special Forces, not "CTs" = -

Natural Selection vs. Counter-Strike

CS is pretty cool, but the originality factor is floating somewhere around absolute zero.

NS is quite cool, not terribly original with regards to the theme (marines vs. aliens), but the implementation if friggin genius. It's also one of the very few multiplayer games that can truly be considered team-based. In CS, yes, there are teams and yes, you can work together, but it isn't even remotely close to the level of teamwork that is required in NS.

I personally find NS infinitely more fun than CS. Fighting back and forth on huge maps, taking, losing and retaking key control points, battling for resources, assaulting fortified positions, following the orders of your commander or flowing with the hive mind from one conflict to the next, running under the floor, across the walls or on the ceiling as a Skulk... CS (and virtually all similar games) can pretty much be boiled down to buy a gun, shoot things that move, hopefully not die, round restart, buy bigger gun, repeat.

You also really can't say much about the graphics, since they both very obviously have be spawned from the HL engine. However, the environments in NS are much nicer; it's all indoors and futuristic, but you can always tell when you're approaching a hive, because the walls slowly become more infected as you move closer. The sound is great too; marine commands, taunts, requests, the hive mind speaking to you, little (or sometimes large) alien clawsteps, that great Onos primal scream...

Yes, CS is an entertaining diversion, but Natural Selection is a game.

I'm such a damn nerd.

- = Game over, man. Game over. = -

Alright, Yeah, Whatever

I think that there happens to be a very large difference between the two examples cited in Justin's post (Nov. 9, 5:42 PM) concerning our friend JB and his friend Elliot.

When myself and some others indirectly teased JB about his name, in was in a small group of friends in a rather closed environment. Yes, this is the internet, but not a whole lot of people we don't know are going to be checking our blogs and reading about it, and if they did, they're hardly going to care about people they don't know.

Now, what Justin's friends did to this Elliot... That was fucking public humiliation. I don't even know the guy, and it pisses me off. I swear, if one (or several) of my friends did that to me, there would have been a body once everything was finally resolved. And I don't belive for one damned second that you can chalk this up to a misinterpretation of what one given person finds amusing/upseting. Yeah, some friendly prodding to get up on stage or whatever and sing, fine. Bringing in a cafe full of strangers and continuing to needle the guy to get up on stage? And keep in mind, this was in person, so one of those guys should have been able to see how pissed they were making this Elliot. It was much more difficult to tell with JB, since there was no real person to person interaction. Granted, we (or perhaps I should say, at least I) should have been able to figure how upset we (probably "I" again in this case) were making him.

Well, I wasn't there for the kareoke incident, so I suppose I can't/shouldn't say anything else about it. And sorry Justin, I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything, or say that you did something horribly wrong or anything like that, I just thought that the two scenarios you compared were really very different.

I seem to be on a roll for ticking people off lately.

- = We've got hostiles = -

FUFKIGN