Gearheads of War

Um yeah, so I had a fantastic time last night, first playing Firefight with tyrus, Kenai and tyrus' brother.  I think tyrus might literally be a robot.  He's insane with how methodical he takes out the enemy.  It's remarkable.  The biggest highlight for me was playing the map with the Warthog (sorry, don't remember the name) and Kenai driving the thing around while I pwned the Covenant.  It made the experience so freaking fun.  As many of you guys who play Halo know, my favorite part of Halo is using the vehicles because I've never been a huge fan of the mechanics of the FPS aspects.  It simply moves too slow for my taste.  But the vehicles are second to none.  Everything from a simple ghost to a banshee to the hornet of death to the warthog, Bungie just does vehicles right.

Any way, after a while we switched to Gears and it was pretty fun.  We got Polandstyle's son Christopher in the game and he and I went against Robbins and Kenai for a while.  Then Grymm joined and everything was pretty fairly balanced, despite Grymm and Robbins being a man down (they're pretty robotic when it comes to Gears 1).  

Everything was working well and I should've left after a match on Mansion.  But I didn't and wound up playing two matches with Blankman joining.  We should've separated the teams but instead Blank joined the Robbins and Grymm juggernaut team (they didn't need an extra person, trust me).  And then I lost my cool on Old Bones when a nade that was past me over a barrier blew me up.  I let out a profane-laced tirade that apparently included the word "c%ntbag". Yeah, well, what I didn't realize that my wife's door was open and she could hear everything.  Here's a lesson to the married among us out there.  Don't lose your cool in that fashion if you can avoid it.  I'm not quite I've ever seen my wife so, uh, disgusted with me.  So yeah, I think my image in her head went down a few notches last night as the young 20-something in my personality came roaring to life.

Other than the last two matches and the aftermath, I had a fantastic time.  If only that stupid nade hadn't killed me...ah well, such is life.  I'll just deal with not having a pristine image any longer with my beautifully pregnant wife.

Gearheads, my apologies for not making it last night.  Yesterday was a pretty long day for me.  It started with me getting my first ever performance review for the company I founded.  That was kind of surreal, but good.  

But later I went on a 10-mile bike ride with my new bike.  I towed my 50-pound daughter behind me in a trailer, so that was kind of tiring.  But then we went to Disneyland so my daughter could see the fireworks for the first time in her life.  She loved them, but it was crazy busy as most of the other So Cal residents were there.  It took us forever just to leave the park once the fireworks were over.  Now my daughter can't stop talking about the fireworks, so it was worth it, but I'm kind of glad I'm blacked out from going to the park over the next few months.  I need a little break from that place to recharge my batteries.  

Any way, that's a long way of saying that I didn't get home last night until about 11 and then I volunteered to put my daughter to bed since my wife was also wiped from the day.  By the time all was said and done it was 11:30 p.m. and if I'd jumped on to play some multiplayer, I might have kept my daughter awake as I'm wont to do when I have my turtle beach X4 on.  So I watched the NHL Draft on DVR and passed out half way through.  

That's my exciting Friday story.  I imagine you guys had fun last night though and I want to read about it.  So let me know what happened.  What game was the hotness?  Did SweetTea actually make a rare appearance?

It was another great evening of gaming, though "up to 8 players" doesn't cut it when you have a solid turnout of awesome people.  Sincerely, the most exciting feature about MW2 for me, will be the 9v9 gaming (which, admittedly, we already have in CoD4).  Missed you Kenai, and Blankman (who later in the evening, left for a quick shower, and found that nobody was ready to leave when he got back).  

The patch, the new gametype, and the unlocking of the remaining campaigns, are all solid additions to the game.  The melee is fixed.  No more melee spam, at all.

The night belonged to Infidel and Jambi, who, regardless of their teammates, cleaned the rest of us up like just so much spilt milk on a shiny linoleum floor.  I lost every game last night.

Jambi also wins the coveted "Marlborough Man" Award for the most awesome smoke on Death Toll.  He smoked time and again on the one life, ending the run by pulling our remaining healthy teammate OVER the fence and basically back to the safe house door - the one we just left to start our mission.  

Johann gets runner-up as he did something similar, later in the movie, to the fourth in our group when we were making a dash for the power weapons in the tower (following my bad advice).  Zoso (aka Zoey), upon seeing his team stretched thin, and mostly dead or incapacitated,  became so distraught that he jumped to his death.  

Zoso gets the Kermit the Frog award for best pounce - 21 points off a flying leap from almost the same spot as Johann would later smoke us from.

I give myself the Big Stinky Pooper's award for having caused my team's death at the Boathouse - in my search for those darned health packs.  

Act 5  
The Boathouse

Suns:  Running around frantically, fully healthed, but wanting to know for future reference, in case need arises,
"Where are the frickin' health packs on this level?"  

Zoso:  Fully aware of where the health packs are (on the lower floor, by the water front, outside the porch door), but not wanting to risk superfluous speech, very sparsely replies:  
"They're outside the house!"

Cue various running and screaming, followed by silence.

The End

Bwahahahaahahahahahaahahahaha

I googled "A Good Start" and this was the image I got.  Works for me.

This was going to be short and sweet but ...it isn't.  LOL  

First, I just want to mention that as Infidel reminded us many, many times, there is very little in the Title Update that actually affects the way Gearheads play when we are using house rules.  However, the few changes are significant, positive, and actually almost eliminated the need for house rules altogether. With the exception of no smokes, no roadie-rolling, and no grenade planting it was "No holds barred" all evening.  The house rules stress was almost completely eliminated, because those three rules are easy to implement and enforce.

I think the biggest change with TU3 for me, is the fact that the shottie brings down the saw now. It may not be completely foolproof because of lag shenanigans, but if someone gets a full on shot with the shottie, that saw comes way down, the lancer bearer is vulnerable, and will most likely lose the skirmish. I think this is as it should be.  Two thumbs WAY up!

Wow.

Yes, I played Gears of War last night with some of the regulars.  We got Grymm, Robbins, Jambi, Poland, ChrisB, MDK and Abe.  I probably hadn't played Gears with MDK in maybe six months, so that was fun.  And it was most definitely a blast to catch up with the rest of the folks too as my presence on FFF lately hasn't been very consistent of late.

I do think that I possibly had my best kill ever last night.  And that's nearly two years of playing Gears.  Grymm was on the other team in Gridlock and he was running straight through the middle by nades towards our spawn side stairs.  I led him perfectly and blew him to smithereens.  It was pretty.  Very pretty.

Robbins had several sick head shots on me.  Once when MDK told me that the sniper was dead so I stuck my head out like a noob.  That's a pretty dangerous game when Robbins is actually still alive and just waiting for someone to stand there like a dolt asking, "Please de-nogginize me.  Please?"  Robbins was more than happy to oblige.  Oh and ChrisB was a monster last night.  I mean I think he led our team two or three times in points.  The saw was cranking last night.  I enjoyed using the torque quite a few times as well.  I'm best with the Boom, no doubt, but my favorite to use is really the torque.  I love the sweet "thunk" sound someone hears right before they die.  I had at least five of those kills last night.  I just don't often get to pick up the TB because someone on my team is usually better than me with it.  That's going to become a goal of mine to get more skilled with the TB in Gears 2.  Hopefully the bots can help with that.

We then moved to Call of Duty: World at War and my initial impression wasn't good.  David Ellis, who joined us for the COD time, makes an outstanding point on Game Videos about the beta.  The fact is that there doesn't really seem to be a good starting weapon like the M-16A4 in COD4.  You immediately feel like a helpless noob.  I do want to play it a little bit more before I give you my real impressions.  But my initial thought is that I might be canceling my preorder on this one.

Also, I got a chance to try the Resistance 2 beta today and my impression of that isn't necessarily the greatest either.  But I plan a separate post about that one too.

What happened in your Gears FFF games?