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).