Celebrations!

There was a huge Left 4 Dead update just now and I can't stop feeling happy about it! So many changes to versus, Valve addressed basically all the problems I had with it, namely:

- Tank spawns at the same % through the map for both teams in versus mode

Hunter
- Easier to pounce a Survivor who is meleeing

Smoker
- Smoker now has to be killed or the tongue destroyed for the tongue to break
- Tongue attacks that fail to paralyze or hang a Survivor will use the shorter ability delay timer
- Fixed case where you could point at a Survivor but not register a tongue hit
- Smoker tongue does damage every second while dragging paralyzed Survivors

Tank
- Reduced autoshotgun damage against Tanks

So much for unfair Tanks! So much for getting frustrated at continuous meleeing as Hunter! So much for hating to play as the Smoker! I always hated being the Smoker, because I couldn't seem to be able to do SHIT as one. The tongue targeting was horrible, even if the aim indicator was red and the survivor in plain view, I couldn't score a hit. And if the drag failed, it was a bitch having to wait the minute or so for the attack to recharge and trying to change vantage points in plain sight. Dragging survivors long distances felt pointless at times since there was no damage until the drag was complete. Not even mentioning how frustrating the goddamn melee got. All that, fixed!
And autoshotgun was goddamn imbalanced GOD TIER against Tanks: they were dead in a course of seconds if you just ran behind them and unloaded a few clips into their oblivious backs from point-blank range. Yeah. I know it because I used to do it a lot in finales. The assault rifle is my weapon of choice, but whenever there was a Tank coming (and no one had a molotov) I changed to autoshotty and ran after Tanks while they were chasing some other team member. Yeah.

Too bad that I'm leaving for a family vacation today, and won't be able to play and enjoy the changes until some time next week.
Yeah, I would much rather stay at home playing videogames than go to Rome.

Kidding. I'll be off then.

P.S.: We finally completed two campaigns on expert. No achievements, though. Stupid cheat-proof achievements, we even restarted the campaigns once so that everyone saw the intro, but nooo, no one got Zombicidal Maniac or any progress to What Are You Trying to Prove. Sucks. But at least we did it once, we can surely do it again. We even completed Death Toll without restarting even once. That was pretty impressive.

Insert a witty title here

Well, there's always the first time for everything, I guess. I was just playing a match of L4D with a bunch of my Esa friends, when some random guy playing with us asked if we were up for a friendly clan match after the game.
Well, I, for one, couldn't stop laughing at that, although it's understandable to mistake us for a clan. We do wear a tag after all.
So we told him that we're not actually a clan, but if they really want to, we might be up for a game. Too bad only Cedox, Slaverstrike and I were actually online and willing to play, so in he end we had mixed teams with the guys from the other clan.
And I have to say it was one of best, if not THE best game of L4D I've ever played with complete strangers. No one did anything stupid (and no one whined about anything!), the teamwork was excellent on both teams, and the teams were evenly matched (my team won with a hundred points or so in the end). I had lots of fun! Now I'm hoping they would like to play another game some other time, so that we may even get a full Esa team going. Which shouldn't be difficult since there are at least nine or ten Esas at the moment (dammit we could even START a clan, we definitely have enough players, and I don't think we're even that bad. Well, we still can't seem to finish campaigns on expert, so we do fail a bit, haha).
So much for my slight prejudice for clan players, haha.

So, Esas played an unofficial friendly clan match. That's pretty ... far out.

Left 4 Dead is still awesome, although I'm starting to have a serious beef with the melee defense in versus. It needs to be nerfed in one way or the other, I think it would be enough to make it so that it doesn't do damage. Because I'm really fucking sick of trying to jump people as a Hunter, and just getting shoved around a few times and dying FROM IT. And I think it's a perfectly good defensive measure, I mean, it doesn't piss me off to get shoved off, since it's my own damn fault for being obvious enough trying to jump someone when they see me coming, but dying from it? That's too much.
Not even mentioning the infamous corner defenses. Making the melee NOT do damage would reduce the shoving to a mere temporary solution, for clearing way or fending off attacks, which I think it's supposed to be. Now it's the perfect attack against hordes and special infected since they take damage and eventually die if they're being pushed around long enough. I know, we just did it in No Mercy's fourth chapter, during the elevator faceoff. It's lame, I felt bad for doing it, but at least now I know how fucking impossible such defense it is to break, and I know not to do it anymore. It takes the fun out of the game (since I don't really care about winning as much as I care about playing a fair game and having fun). Slaver was cursing at me from his room after we did it, telling me we're complete fucking assholes for doing that shit. Yeah, I know.
Another problem I think should be addressed at some point, is the spawning of Tanks in versus. Because it's fucking unfair when one team gets the tank right at the beginning of the map, and the other team by the end of it. And since Tank IS such a huge tideturner (though it naturally depends on player skills and teamwork too), and if the teams are evenly matched, or the other team is clearly steamrolling, it's very, very unfair if the other team gets the Tank right away. So maybe synchronize the spawning in some way? I don't know. And no, they shouldn't come in the very same place for both teams, because that's unfair too since the other team can then expect it, but ... I don't know. I just think something must be done. I'm tired of hearing the whining it causes, and I'm tired of feeling cheated on by it.

I haven't been writing here for a while, I don't exactly know why. I've been playing lots of Fallout (clocked over 100 hours with Gabrielle, and still there's so much to do! Also started another game with another character, who strives to be good instead of ending up as the Scourge of Humanity). Then I had this irresistible urge to play Kingdom Hearts 2 (I know!) and spent 30 hours with a PS2 controller glued to my hands. And say what you want, but I like that game! It's fun to play.
I also bought Bioshock from the Steam Christmas sale (only five euros for a game like that was almost ridiculous! I had to get it), and I should play that one too.

And I'm finally getting back to playing Team Fortress 2 after a few months of hardly playing it at all. And I've been playing as a Sniper. Which is pretty ... yeah. I'm pretty bad at it, but at least I've gotten a lot better! I came very close to breaking the damage record my little brother did back in the day, and I was even an MVP the other day! That was pretty unbelievable, but you'll understand once I tell you that the enemy team had about four Snipers, and all of them were amusingly bad. I had three of them aiming at me in a nice line, and I headshot all of them one by one, so yeah. They were horrible. And thanks to them, I got enough points in one round to be an MVP. I often get owned by enemy Snipers, but every now and then there's a Sniper who's even worse than I am, and I can usually get a domination on them.

I've also gone from Chrome to being Kromi, which is basically the same thing. Since kromi means chrome in Finnish. And at least there are not that many Kromis running around (not that anyone can mistake me for someone else anymore since I wear a tag these days. Dammit, and it wasn't even a long ago I ranted about not wanting to wear a tag. Oh how fickle I am).
Also it's pretty funny when people pronounce it in English.
Where does the nick Chrome come from anyhow? You see, back in last January when I was considering starting to play TF2, I was actually horrified of playing with strangers, and embarrassed because I had never played an online FPS before. So instead of using the nick I usually go by (Katastrophe), I wanted a new nick so that no one would know it's actually me. Yeah, lol. Zeromancer's Chrome Bitch was one of my favourite songs back then, so I figured that it was a good as name as any (and for the first few days I went by the whole title, dropping the Bitch at some point). And I was planning to go back to Katastrophe once I got comfortable enough with the game. Well, I never did, since Chrome kinda grew on me.

Oh yeah, I'm an obsessive-compulsive screenshot-taker in Fallout 3, so in case you're interested about the first part of Gabrielle's great journey in the Capitol Wasteland, you can read it here. I have another part coming up, since that just basically covers the main quest, and I've had many silly adventures after that.

About L4D, for a change

It sure is a good thing Valve fixed dedicated server searching in L4D. Tried playing a few nights ago, and since I had four friends along, we of course made a lobby to make things a bit easier. I (or Slaver) usually host locally, because our connection's upload rate is pretty okay, and at least my friends hardly ever get any lag, but since the dedicated business was supposed to be fixed (and sometimes Steam decides to kick me while hosting locally, naturally making the server shut down), we tried that.
Did we find a server?
Yes. Once, out of five tries. And we had 170 ping. So matchmaking indeed! Server searching was fucking better before this so-called fix.

And why do people try to invite me to play L4D when I'm in-game? I never really understood what's the point in that. If you see me already playing on a server, what in the world makes you think I'll just jump servers and join your game? I get a lot of invites suddenly, from several different people on my friends list, and for some reason those always get under my skin.
So take note, people: when I play L4D, I usually play with a rather large group of friends (who are people I know irl). So if you want to play with me, drop me a line instead of just throwing a random invite, and I'll see what I can do.

And if there are a bunch of people with "Esa" after their name playing with me, yeah, those are my friends. We decided to start wearing a tag to confuse people (and scare them away in lobby when they join: there are four people in already, all going Infected, and all wearing the same tag after their name. Hehehe) and make it obvious that we know each other and any insults we may fling at each other are not to be taken seriously.
And if you ask, Esa stands for European Space Agency, and yes, we all work there.
(In reality it's just a silly in-joke which really doesn't make any sense in any other language but Finnish. Or, well, imagine replacing a part of any compound word - or in severe cases, any noun - with a very common male name, eg. John. There you go).
And don't mistake us for a clan of any kind.

And while we're on the topic of L4D, I wanna write about another thing. If you, for any reason at all, go AFK during game, even for a moment, TAKE A FUCKING BREAK FROM THE MENU. The goddamn idle mode is there for a reason. Because what happens if, during a versus match, you go to a toilet, or where the fuck ever, and just leave your character standing there? Yeah, we get slaughtered, that's what. Because we have to
a) Wait and protect you in one place, making all of us easy prey for the enemy team, and Director of course thinks that we're bored, and marches out a few hordes to make us feel alive again,
or
b) Run for it and leave you, which gets all of us killed. Because a smart enemy team knows that you, being AFK, are not a threat, and thus goes after US instead of YOU. Because we're one man short, you can't help us, and after we've been overwhelmed and incapped, you're the easy target.
Next time you go AFK without going idle, we're going to votekick your sorry ass that fucking instant.

And why don't people stay together in versus? I hate it when our game falls apart just because one man stays behind for some reason, and then gets assaulted by a Smoker or a Hunter, and we have to go back for them, and then we lose. I'd love to leave them to die because it was their own mistake to stay behind, especially when we make it very clear at the start of the match that we're going to stay together and keep moving, but you know how it goes, it's a team game.
If you're going to heal, SAY SO, so we know to hang back. Don't go after Smokers or Hunters you saw behind us in the distance, just inform the team of the threat and KEEP MOVING. The infected have to keep moving too in order to catch us, so a Smoker hanging back won't be doing much if we ignore him. If YOU go after him, by yourself, you're a fucking idiot, because the Smoker sees you, you probably won't see him or his tongue, and then you're in trouble, and fucking things up for the rest of us. And if you need to do anything that requires you to be away from the keyboard for more than five fucking seconds, go idle. For the love of god, it's not that hard.

And here, have a GTA-style Francis (who's incidentally my favourite Survivor):



I've also been getting back to TF2 and I would appear to be a kickass Pyro (my brand new most kills record is 20) while I've nearly completely lost my touch with both Soldier and Demo (although it is debatable if I ever really HAD any touch with either, oh well).

I am seriously embarrassed about playing versus in Left 4 Dead. Not because I'm a bad player, no, while I may not kill as much zombies as others, I still have the common sense to avoid most of the mistakes "noobs" make.
Except for one.
Friendly fire.
Don't get me wrong, I don't shoot at others because I am griefing or because I'm an asshole, or because I don't realise to use melee (I use melee a lot, I always try to shove special Infected off my friends unless I'm miles away, when I will resort to shooting), all those times are accidents. You know, I'm firing at something, and then one of my team-mates runs in front of me. Or there's something behind me, and I turn around guns blazing and accidentally hit a friend. Or I'm trying to shoot at something that's close to a friend, and they make a sudden move and suddenly their head's in my sights.
And I feel terrible when it happens. And I just can't seem to stop doing it. And because community's seriously frowning upon friendly fire, I dread playing versus. Because it's okay if I hit someone I know, they probably won't be too mad at me because they know it's an accident (and believe me, they already know my team-killing fucktard ways), but if I hit a complete stranger I'm playing with in versus, who knows what they might think of me. And I don't want anyone to go ballistic because of it.

I already stopped using shotguns because of my tendency to fire at friendlies. Now I rely on the assault rifle because it doesn't make as crazy damage as shotgun does.

And we still haven't finished any campaigns on expert. It's a bitch. We got to No Mercy finale, and then kept getting our collective butt handed to us, usually by the first Tank, and if we somehow managed to escape that, the next horde overwhelmed us completely. Never even saw the second Tank.
Not that we were doing so hot in the earlier scenes either. I think the second part ended in Slaver running for the safe room after Tank had killed me and another friend, and left the last one incapped. There was a Witch outside, as well as a Hunter and a Boomer, and Slaver just kept yelling "DIE ALREADY!" at the incapped friend so that the scene would end. (I love the end of the second part, everyone's always in horrible shape after all the subway slaughter and once we have the saferoom in our sights, we just decide to make a run for it. And then we're limping furiously towards the saferoom, and because Director's a fucking sadist, it always spawns a Tank right that moment. And there's probably a Witch waiting for us right in front of the door too. And I remember the one time we were sure to make it, we were just outside the pawn shop, and because I was dying and seeing in black-and-white and had never played that part before, I didn't know the car had an alarm. So of course I accidentally shot it. And then the horde killed all of us, and everyone was like "CHROOOOME!" Hee hee, good times).
And I think the third scene ended in ME being the one making a beeline for the saferoom, killing the Tank through the tiny hole in the saferoom door and then just waiting it out until the rest of my still-living friends hauled their asses over. But hey, at least I took care of the Tank!

Good times.

Yeah, you don't wanna play with us. Although I wouldn't have the guts to pull stunts like that playing with strangers. With friends it's a whole different story, they probably won't mind. Like I didn't mind all those times I got killed by a Tank while the rest of my team were running for their lives because "it's on fire, let's just hide and wait for it to die!"
I also have the tendency to fail hard right after managing to do something right. And probably awesome. Like at the end of No Mercy, I'm standing on top of the building with the radio inside, and the Tank is coming, and I have a molotov in my hand. I wait for the perfect moment to throw it at the Tank, and I wait patiently and just as it climbs the wall and stands next to the minigun, I throw it. And it's a perfect throw, and I'm like FUCK YEAH AND NOW WE JUST RUN. So I run. Backwards. And I fall. And then I dangle from the edge of the roof, while there's a fucking Tank on the loose. Good thing I'm behind the building, the Tank probably went after someone else, and then there's a friend helping me up, and just as I start running away to get back to the battle, something hits me and I'm incapped and I turn around and there's the fucking flaming Tank punching at me.
Extraordinary fail.
Another time we're on the hospital construction site, you know the most annoying part of fourth scene, right before the saferoom? It's the most annoying part of the whole No Mercy, in my opinion, because the team's always half-dead from waiting the elevator, and there will always be a Tank and personally I hate fighting Tanks in cramped spaces. Especially if your whole team is limping. It's like we're lying on a silver platter for some zombie rape.
So we're limping through the construction maze, being horribly aware of special Infected because we're about to die. A Boomer calling out a horde would be the last nail on our collective coffin. So naturally there's the Tank soundcue (which has been stuck in my head for a day now. It's a bit distracting, gotta admit), so we opt to running the fuck away. I have a molotov, and somehow I'm behind the Tank while it charges at the rest of my team, and I'm in a hurry because the Tank's getting away, so I just throw it. And it looks like it's going to miss and I'm like fuuuuck now we're certainly going to die. But no! It bounces from a structure and hits the Tank head-on! I naturally die immediately after the Tank comes after me, and so do two of my friends, and Slaver's the only one left, limping away. The Tank naturally dies of the flames, and then Slaver's alone against a bunch of zombies. First there's a Boomer he shoves away and kills without it alerting the horde, then a Hunter attacks but thankfully misses and Slaver kills it, and there's the tell-tale green cloud of smoke in the distance and Slaver goes apeshit because if he gets captured, it's game over. Somehow he kills even the Smoker, frees the rest of us from closets and together we make it to the saferoom. It was awesome.

I also have the most rotten luck. So when we finally finish No Mercy, I naturally miss the helicopter by dying brutally. We kill the second Tank and go straight to the helipad to wait for the evac, and of course a Smoker pulls me down from the helipad. After I get freed from that, I get pounced by a Hunter, and when I try to return to the helipad, a horde greets me around the corner. And then I turn around to see the Tank standing right next to me. The Director doesn't want me to finish campaigns.

And could you wager a guess: what in the world happened in this very room?



Yes. A Witch happened.

Oh, and aside from those pesky friendly fire incidents, I've been doing pretty good in versus. As Survivors you can do almost anything by staying together. Can't stress it enough. Even a bad team of Infected can take out a group of Survivors who are not staying together. And a good team of Infected can't do shit against a group that stays together (the Tank's a tiebreaker, and I think spawning as one shouldn't be as random as it is now. I hate listening to the "why did you get a Tank and we didn't?" whining every time a team doesn't get a Tank. OR Director should be controlling it much more like it controls the campaign: if you're doing great, Director ups the ante, and gives the enemy team a helping hand by spawning a Tank).

And I still love playing as the Infected. I don't really care about the Survivors, and although the game experience is whole lotta different from Director-directed campaign, playing as Survivors is always bit of a turn-off for me.
But Infected, oh how do I love them. And Tank, oh how do I love you. I finally got to be the Tank for more than ten seconds, and it truly is the most awesome thing in the history of everything. I completely raped the Survivors, incapping all of them and getting the All 4 Dead achievement in the process. Tee hee. Zoey tried to run all the way back to the saferoom, but I followed and punched her dead. Hee, it was completely awesome.
And it annoys me to see Tanks do stupid mistakes, like attacking a Survivor that a Hunter is pinning down. Argh, idiot Tank, go after the ones still on their feet! If you're there on their heels, they don't really have the time to help others, thus the Hunter can freely incap and kill the Survivor. Besides, the Tank kills the Hunter if he attacks the Survivor. And don't start punching a guy who's already incapped! That's what AI Tanks do, and that's where AI Tanks lose, because while they're punching an already helpless guy, his friends have all the time in the world to shoot you in the back. Once you incap someone, move on to another, and leave them to die. Besides, you don't have to kill the Survivors to get a game over for them, as you should know by now. And I'd go after the healthiest Survivors first, because you can ALWAYS catch up to those who are limping. And they're easier to incap by your fellow Infected anyhow.
And how awesome it is to be in the team with 1300 points, while the enemy team reaches measly 4 points.
Well, actually, it's kinda lame. Everyone in the enemy team always ragequits after that, and who in the world enjoys a complete rape right after getting out of saferoom. Except the Infected. And the Boomer who scores 2000-something points by being awesome. Tee hee.

Wb, me!

Guess who's back in the game.



And as you can see, the new PC handles L4D pretty nicely, the resolution alone is pretty insane (yes, I am playing with 1280x1024 and near-highest graphics settings, and it runs as smoothly as it possibly can). For now I'd say getting this PC was worth the while.
L4D seems to be pretty light either way, back when I played the Demo on my old PC, the game actually ran pretty nicely. I mean, I wasn't even playing on the lowest graphics settings - at least texture detail was high - but my resolution was 640 x 480 (this is how it looked, yay PSOne graphics ftw!), and I got all the lighting effects, and actually a pretty decent FPS. And I had been quite sure that the computer would refuse to run it in the first place.

So how about Team Fortress 2?
FPS stays on green almost in every situation (saw it flicker in yellow when there was dozens of stuff on the screen at once), and I get about the same graphics as I did playing on little brother's computer last summer.
So all in all? I'm pretty much extremely satisfied.

I have much to do, organizing files, installing stuff and so forth, so I'll leave a more in-depth entry about Left 4 Dead for later, for now I'll just say that I love versus. I got to play some bits of the co-op campaign on a friend's PC last week after the game came out, so I was somewhat familiar with it, and last night the first thing we did after I got the game, was to find a server and play some versus. I had played it once before, and the game whined to me about needing to play the campaign first, but I didn't really care.
And yes yes the best part about versus is getting to play as the Infected. The best part about playing as the Infected is spawning as the Tank. Okay, yeah, I can't really say since I was a Tank for about ten seconds last night. I spawned at the end of No Mercy just as the Survivors were stumbling to the evac helicopter. I managed to incap one of them, though, so job well done, and only one escaped alive, as rest of my Infected buddies managed to pin the others down. (Yeah, I'm the Tank in the screenshot I posted.)
I like being other Infected as well, Smoker's probably my favourite since you don't have to go get so intimate with the Survivors as the Smoker. I like lurking about rooftops. Hunter's fun as well, although I seem to be just horrible at aiming my jumps, haha. But I've had my best ownage moments as a Hunter pinning down a lone Survivor while others are being harrassed by a Boomer and subsequently a horde. Oh, love. Boomer's surprisingly fun as well.

What sucks about versus is the crazy console-reminiscent lobby system that absolutely sucks because you don't know what kind of ping you'll have until you're actually in game. So it's mostly just jumping from one server to another until one with not-as-crazy latency comes along.
Or since I usually have at least three buddies to play with at any given time, we make a server of our own and then search for a dedicated one, which seems to work pretty well. We get nice ping, and the server usually fills up quickly.
And then we get our fair share of idiots: one of my buddies was playing versus for the first time last night, so of course one of our team-mates started whining at him that he sucks, but. Me and Slaver kindly told him to stfu, and he still had the nerve to start a votekick against my friend. Which backfired royally, because after that there was a vote to kick the whiner, which - needless to say - passed 3 to 1.
I can only imagine how much he must've been raging, hee hee.
But just what the fucking hell, you choose a random public server and then start whining about the noobs? Besides, dear idiot, you weren't doing too hot either (I was kicking your ass in scores and I was playing for the second time), so please do take a look in the mirror before mouthing off a "noob."
Yeah yeah, I know, the whole teamwork thing, of course it sucks if someone on your team seems to be lost, but ffs you can still treat the player nicely and try to understand that the game's been out for a week and not everyone can be fucking brilliant at it already.

But yeah, it's like fighting windmills, fighting these idiots in online multiplayer communities.