I’m still not eating, but I have drunk a lot of tea over the past two days, and that’s helping restore my sanity, and ease the scathing bronchial pain when I cough.

Things are looking up, though: a friend lent me a game that didn’t run on his computer, and amazingly it runs beautifully on mine. Sometimes the weirdest things will help you on the path to health.

My awesome bros in back home hooked me up with a copy of Team Fortress 2 for the anniversary of my birth, and so I was socially obligated to play it with them. And to bug them to play it with me more because I kind of sort of may be addicted to it. The gameplay is wildly fun, class-based team FPS, so much so that I can forgive it for having a ludicrous artistic style.  No screenshots at the moment because I haven’t installed any screenshot applications on my recently reformatted Windows partition yet.

Between Will, the Philly crew, Cihan in Berlin, and Carl downstairs, I’ve had a delightfully difficult time not gaming. This afternoon Carl and I were pressured by the Germans to organize a LAN tonight, but we both exhibited remarkable fortitude and declined.

Given that I’m at my computer, and not gaming, I’ll try to make one of my “takin’ a break” activities posting to the blog.

Rather recently, I finally picked up C&C3, which I play often and thoroughly enjoy, perhaps because I am utterly undefeated within my social circle. But who really knows? Now I find myself salivating over Call Of Duty 4, which looks like the absolute perfect replacement for my inexplicably persisting yet utterly characteristic fixation on Battlefield 2.

That’s like freaking Black Hawk Down right there. Of course, since I’ll never, ever run Vista, I’ll be stuck with DirectX 9 to run the game, and on my aging-with-cobwebs hardware it just won’t look this good. But I’ll know that it can. And that’s really what gaming’s all about, isn’t it?

The environments are breathtakingly beautiful, if you’re into post-apocalyptic war-torn socialist-utopia-turned-ghetto locales for your honeymoons. And boy am I. But in case all this isn’t selling you on the game, just listen to what Putin has to say about it.

As long as I’m embedding tons of crap, let’s see what Cheney thinks of the game.

I think that pretty much settles it. The problem is, I can’t find the damn thing for an affordable price around here. Steam wants $63 (10% off from $70, yay!) and electronics stores are still up at €55. I only paid €17 for C&C3, so it’s tricky justifying such a huge expense when I should be buying, you know, beer. I think I’ll just wait until I see it on sale somewhere.

In the meantime, I’ll continue salivating.

Screenshots in this post from Flickr user katakonik.

On YouTube there’s a still-frame video posting of a song called “The Device Has Been Modified” by Victims Of Science. It’s a collection of samples from the game Portal, pitch-shifted for musical appropriateness, placed over a slick synth beat. The video description laments the practical nonexistence of the artist.

*Please note, this song ISN’T made by me (or anyone that claims to on YT), it’s by Victims of Science, who don’t seem to have a website.. if you find one, please let me know*

A song inspired by Portal using various sounds from GLaDOS.

The song is so absolutely hardcore, it’s difficult for me to contain myself.

[audio:thedevicehasbeenmodified.mp3]

I’ve wrought my Google Fu, and the oldest source I can come up with is a blog post by Jonathan Coulton dated October 23, 2007. The YouTube video linked to above was posted October 24, 2007, which says to me that the song couldn’t have hit the internet much earlier than the Coulton post.

I’ve looked up the track on Last.fm and the oldest wall shout is also dated October 24, 2007. I checked for diggs, and the oldest I found was posted 54 days ago, which, according to my calculations, means November 7, 2007.

I must find this artist so that I can PayPal him my life savings. And then give him something in addition to that 16MB 3dfx Voodoo3 card I never threw away. I’ve already listened to this song way more than is healthy.

OK, yeah, and I listened to a German version of “Silent Night” by Manowar. That’s definitely not healthy and I’m already seeking a therapist for help.

[audio:manowar-stille_nacht]

Download the MP3s directly here:

• Victims Of Science – The Device Has Been Modified
• Manowar – Stille Nacht

Über props to J for telling me about this. (I’m talking about the Portal song, not the Manowar one. Don’t want to shame him or anything.)

This is something J posted a while back, and I didn’t know what to say to it. It just is what it is.

Story the First

This video reminds me of so much. (No, my mother is not dead!) But I can remember one time being very young and calling my mother at work after school. I had read in a videogame magazine that a new videogame, a sequel to one of my favorites ever, was being released on that day. I called and begged my mom to take my to the mall when she got home so she could get it for me.

She huffed a bit and made me repeat the surely-frightening-to-a-parent title several times. She said she had a lot of work to clear up, and she might end up having to stay late at the office—again. But she said she’d try.

Several long hours later, my mom comes home, comes in the kitchen door with armfuls of groceries. I ran up to her expectantly, and she said she was too tired that night to go back out. “There are more groceries on the carport.” I wilted in disappointment and moped outside to bring in the groceries.

I made a few trips, then sat in the kitchen while she put things away in the cabinets. She asked whether I was sure I had brought everything in. Annoyed, petulant: “Yes, mom.” She bade me check again. Still nothing. Check again, she said. “Maybe inside the cat tower?”

There was a cat play tower we’d gotten from somewhere out on the porch. We kept it there because sometimes a cat would sneak out late at night, and we didn’t feel like waiting for them to realize what a mistake it was to forsake a cozy home with blankets and beds for a freezing winter night out in the lawn. They could curl up inside the tower and spend the night out of the cold, waiting by the door until we got up the next day.

I reached inside the cat tower—after peeking, to make sure I wouldn’t punch a cat—and there was a plastic bag from Electronics Boutique. (Yes, this was before they changed their name to EB Games.) The game I’d asked for was inside it. I did a collision hug with my mom’s legs while she patted my head and presumably smiled at how easy it can be to make a child’s universe explode in rainbows of joy.

Story the Second

One day, also when I was quite young, I’m at the mall at a toy store, browsing through all the nonsensical things I was absolutely convinced I needed. Actually, I still haven’t shaken the conviction that my life would be better if I had an elaborate chest-harness system which housed several holsters for various Nerf guns, but that’s a different tale.

Near the front of the store, there’s a bargain bin, filled with VHSes like “Cocoon” and old videogames like “Barbie Saves Pets: PETA Edition!” Bear with me here. I’m waving aside the fog of memory and pretty much guessing at what I descry through the swirling mists. But that sounds like a bargain bin game, doesn’t it? So I’m rifling through used SNES games, and I find a jewel not in my collection: Starfox. Oh man I wanted that game so much! But I know how pestering I can be, always clamoring for new games, so I set it back in its slot between some junk titles, and move along.

Before I’m out of range of the bin, though, I espy an attractively colored game box, and pluck it out from the ranks. It looks pretty neat. The color palette matched what my sick, violent mind thought was cool, so I just marvelled the box for a bit.

I flip it over and read the game description, see that it’s a totally lame sidescroller based on some ancient one that ran on an ENIAC or abacus or something. Sucks. I take one last look at the cover, which today I have a lot of trouble believing looked cool to me, then return it to its spot in the white metal wire bin.

About two months later, at Christmas, I get Pitfall for SNES as a gift from my mother. I was stunned, seeing as it was a game I never wanted to play, but it dawned on me that she had seen me poring raptly over the box in the store, only to tamely replace it in the bin without saying a word. She thought this was my favorite game. And no doubt, I did pay more attention to its box than the one of Starfox, which I already knew I wanted.

She was so completely wrong, but she never could have shown me so well how much she loved me if she had been right. I played the game every day for months, and just thought about my mom, and how awesome she is. I don’t think I ever got past level 5.

I love you, Mom. Thank you for everything.

Saturday was spent on a good deal of gaming, both lannage and transatlantic (love you, Will). I’m sure I’ll throw up a post about the games we played, because that’s awesome and I love looking at screenshots of destruction on the black-on-blood theme I have going on on this site.

Ahhh, war.

At the moment I’m performing computer maintenance, which is the closest thing I have to petting a cat these days. I just need to make sure it doesn’t feel neglected or exploited, and that is doesn’t get fat or sick.

Which is funny, because my cat is horribly fat, and I love him all the more for it.

But I’m not running games on my cat, I guess.

But today I found another person, Shelley the Republican, who finally understands what SF is about.

If you are not familiar with the genre, do not worry: Very little has changed since it was invented 50 years ago by Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard. These two men created the first “Scifi” (pronounced see-fee) books as a crazy of bet: They dared each other to concoct the most preposterous nonsense in order to see if American kids would buy it

[...]

These outlandish tales are often full of vivid, perverse sexual imagery, violence or excessive cussing. The stories are frequently amoral, with protagonists rewarded for their sinful behavior. Furthermore when God is mentioned, it is usually to take his Holy name in vain. The end-result is a shameful and grotesque fantasy nightmare. It’s more horrific than anything that could come form Hollywood’s sick imagination.

If only this were the full extent of the sci-fi problem: There are now hundreds of web-sites offering readers a quick fix of fantasy. As with drug pushers the first hit is always free, which is why you can find authors offering hundreds of short-stories and even entire novels available as a free download. This is clearly an incentive to coerce your kids into buying-into their degrading fantasies.

Man, talk about hitting the nail on the head. And I love the burn about how SF authors can never get published, so they just Creative Commons their work. Ouch.

Picture from the article. I don’t know whether it’s fair to label this dude an SF fan, given that he’s dressed as a videogame character, but I suppose some leniency should be allowed, since the author is a self-professed Republican. They aren’t exactly champions of cultural know-how.

Pictured above is Will’s battlecruiser assault on the enemy base, with the last scattered remnants of my tank battalion on the left hand side. If you look closely at the text in the bottom left corner, you can see Will’s trash talk of “ready for the storm?” just fading out. (Click on image to see it big.)

After much pwnage, Will suggested we switch over to Counter-Strike, as he knows a bunch of the people living with me are all about that game. I said I wasn’t sure, as it was pretty early in the day over here to be gaming, but I would do lap around the dorm to see what was up.

I’m greeted in the hallway by streams of my friends shuffling underneath stuffed backpacks. I ask what’s up, and they say “ISTANBUL!” Riiiiiight, this weekend was the trip to Istanbul. So pretty much everybody I know says “see ya Tuesday” and I head back to game with Will. (I, of course, didn’t tag along because my trip to Italy pretty much broke the bank, and now I’m trying to make rent next month.)

Now Will’s gone for the weekend, visiting Philly for Ace’s birthday party tonight, and the Amon Amarth concert on Sunday. He’ll be back home sometime Monday.

Till then, I’ve got a pretty easy going weekend. I’m staying in tonight, even though Jukka and Ke already asked me to hit up a Christmas market on the Wiesen (where Oktoberfest is). I told them I had some money to save, so I’d b better off spending the evening in chill mode.

This should make it very easy this weekend to get in a lot of studying, perhaps a few posts, and maybe even some more gaming—although, sadly, none of my friends will be able to join me.

Although I must be honest and say that once again my game was off when we played dense urban maps, where sniping was all but impossible.

What a shame. We didn’t play too long, because we weren’t too many, and we all have classes on the morrow. But several people made the rounds through our rooms and watched the match, and signed up for a much larger game on Saturday afternoon, when nobody has to worry about sleeping reasonable amounts.

For the moment, I’m off to finish a bit of reading before retiring. I don’t have anything due tomorrow, but I do have to prepare for a rather neat guest speaker in my e-society class. I’ll post more about that after the fact.

I didn’t post the vid because it was horribly low quality, so much so that the text could barely be read. Now, though, it appears that they’ve replaced it with an HD version, which pleases me.

It might give you goosebumps. Here’s hoping.

Thanks to Will for the hookups on the über version.

Sometime in the late afternoon, my good man Christoph dropped by to bid me partake in another game of Call of Duty with the other dudes in the building. He knew he caught me at a good time, because I was right in the middle of a skirmish in C&C 3, and I was actually getting stomped by a “medium” difficulty computer. (I’d spent too much time and money fortifying my base, playing like it was SimCity, and I ran out of resources early on.) I said of course I was in.

This night we had 8 people! I think at some points it was up to 9 or maybe even 10, but it was solidly 8 for most of the evening. To be sure, 4 on 4 is worlds different than 3 on 3 play, so we had a blast. I, of course, cleaned up, as usual.

It should also be obvious that Philip the German was cleaning house in his own special way. He and I consistently had sniper duels across the map, but the others quickly voted that sniper rifles be disabled, because they wanted to be able to walk outside sometimes. We then had to make due with scopeless bolt-action rifles, and sniping with those was actually pretty exhilarating, as sometimes the person in the distance would be obscured by the iron sights of the gun, and you just had to pull the trigger and hope he didn’t live to see the muzzle flash, or you’d dead before you had a chance to ready another bullet.

I should also state that my affinity for sniping is definitely a weakness in my playing style. With sniper rifles disabled, I had to act much more like a solider, and my performance suffered for it. It should be obvious that the above map had plenty of Enemy At The Gates-style sniping opportunities, but not every map was like that. Take for example this French village, which almost entirely close-quarters house fighting. There were a few sniping corridors down long stretches of road, but there was no cover to be had, so it wasn’t worth it to set up shop and wait for someone to goosestep around the corner.

Check out the end-game shot from that map where I couldn’t snipe people.

I still helped, but my good ol’ American bro, lumbering around the streets with biceps bulging from his 50-pound machine gun, definitely carried the day. You’ll notice Philip was in second place, too, as he was also out of his element.

After the game, a different American asked me whether I had Counter-Strike, because he’s better at that game. I just nodded and said we’d have to give it a shot.

I hope we do this every freaking night.

I wish I could like just not own so hard, and let the n00bz beat me, but the Viking code is that “I CANNOT LET UP.” For proof, there’s an Amon Amarth song about it:

From Across The Rainbow Bridge:

Why cannot death just set me free!

Countless armies have I attacked
Not once have I backed down
And though I’ve spilled a lot of blood
I never once received a mortal wound

I’ve raided shores in many lands
I cannot count the men I’ve killed
So many friends died with sword in hand
But the warrior’s death was never granted me

I dress myself in battle clothes
Alone I make the final ride
My sight is blurred, by whipping snow
I seek to end my life

I want to walk across the Rainbow Bridge
And see my fathers in the golden hall
They beckon me to join their feast
In my dreams I hear their call

That’s like exactly how I feel about everything I’ve ever done. Anyway.

About a month ago I picked up C&C3, but that was really just to help my German. I haven’t played it too extensively, but honestly the profuse dialog and radio chatter in the game has definitely helped my language ability. Although I admit that hearing “Einheit verloren” still doesn’t cut me as deeply as “unit lost.”

Given my sociological bent, I really should be scooping up an MMO, especially one that isn’t Second Life, as that seems to be the only thing academics are willing to write about. I recently read link-heavy coverage of new MMO Tabula Rasa on an anthropology-and-gaming blog I read, Terra Nova, but it doesn’t seem like it’s for me. In fact, it’s actually geared for n00bz, and my trusted review site gave it a lukewarm 7.5.

Terra Nova has also been posting a ton about Eve-Online, a game which has always appealed to me, but which I never did pick up. At this point I’d feel too much like a tool hopping into Eve, as the game feels to me very dated. I’ve already felt a little dirty for playing BF2 for so long, and never even getting BF2142. Where the hell have I been?

Speaking of BF2, I just noticed there’s a new version of Project Reality out, which adds some cool stuff like an Apache. And version 0.7 is shaping up really nicely, I read.

Last, for a bit of nostalgia, I’ll slap in a video review of UT2K7, which there’s no reason for me to pick up, either, because I would just drive everyone around in my gigantic schoolbus.

Miss you, J.

We played for an hour or two, only six of us, three Germans and three Americans. Needless to say, the Germans consistently played as Germans, the Americans alternately between the U.S. and Russia, depending on the location of the map we were playing on.

Also needless to say, the Americans absolutely rocked house. The Germans had one very excellent sniper, but he could not compete with the likes of me. Playing with him was really interesting, because he was going all Enemy at the Gates on my ass, hunting me down across the map. This worked wonders on humiliating me, but unfortunately it meant that he was passing up shots on my teammates in order to get close to me, whereas I was pithing every German I could find, whether sprinting across a field in Brecourt or crawling amongst piles of rubble somewhere along the road to Moscow.

I didn’t think to take any screenshots of the scoreboard as I was tearing it up, but just trust me when I tell you it was brutal. Instead enjoy this pic I found on the internet of Call of Duty 2, because I love snowy sniper maps.

And this next one’s great, too. I can’t tell you how many times tonight I made that exact shot, through that same window. Silly Germans.

We’re taking a break from the carnage now, so I hope to bang out a post on Thanksgiving and then scoop back up my Springfield M1903 to shatter some more German skulls.

I’m very much looking forward to how (or should I say whether?) the cinematography complements the CGI. From the previews I’ve seen, the target audience is definitely gamers, as every shot selected for the trailer had a distinct feeling of being lifted right from a video game cutscene.

Speaking of video games, in searching for fun images to stick in this post, I found an animated GIF of the warrior from Diablo 1. I’m really happy about this.

Well, here’s hoping Neil Gaiman didn’t totally hose this one.

But I did get to make a lot of deals during the game, and I freaking love making deals. It has nothing to do with economic prowess, either, because I let myself get screwed all the time. I just love trading stuff, and getting stuff. Like I started a wheat empire, and hoarded all the wheat resources on the board, and bade the other players lay themselves prostrate before my throne of scythes. Really all they did was just keep mining metal and tending sheep and went on to kick my ass, but I bet the whole time they were at least moderately hungry. Suckers.

Speaking of hungry, that game lasted so long, I haven’t made dinner yet. It’s not even 8pm here, which is messing with my head, because it’s been dark for a very long time. I know this because buildings in Germany are constructed in such a manner that during the day, one need never use artificial lighting. We had to click on overhead lights rather early in our game, and so I was estimating that now it was about 10pm or maybe a little later.

As it stands, I should be going out. But I probably won’t. A bunch of us are still deliberating over a trip to Istanbul in the beginning of December. Roundtrip plane tickets and three nights in a three star hotel costs 160€. That’s pretty sweet. The price jumped to 200€, due to room availability, and I backed out, but now someone’s telling me there’s a plane ticket for around 100€. I could bring a tent, or find a hostel at 10€ a night or something.

I’d actually like to save the money on that and not go, because I’m going to be up in Berlin next weekend, visiting my dearest bro Cihan. And I should think he could get me to Turkey pretty cheaply, and also show me a better time than these Bavarians.