EPT
Along with the end of vacation came less time to play my all time favorite game, StarCraft: Brood War. I actually don't play Brood War that much ever since I got a new computer. It's small but packs a punch. The first thing I wanted to try was PlanetSide 2. I first heard about the game a long, long time ago from someone who now lives far away from me. I heard about how some people who liked Brood War also liked PlanetSide 2. I was reminded of it again a few months ago when someone mentioned it out of the blue. It's a MMORPG first person shooter and it has some strategic depth and a large amount of interaction between teammates. It gets pretty chaotic and fun and the mere overall scope of how large the world is in the game is overwhelming.
There are five classes, all who have specific abilities and fulfill certain roles in an army and can work well together. I decided to commit myself to playing the engineer who specializes in repairing machines and other things but I mostly chose him because he can mount a minigun looking thing which has some rapid fire action going on. It's like some of the static defenses you see in Planetside 2 that come in the form of huge guns mounted on the perimeters of bases. When you get the opportunity to control them when someone else isn't occupying them, you feel so powerful. Now I'm more leaning towards the sniper because I always liked to zoom in on things super close and be super covert-like.
The minigun turret thing the engineer can set up reminds me of an overpowered static defense by just how powerful it looks when it fires. It's really watered down though compared to other weapons in a lot of aspects. I had one particular occasion that sold me on the whole deal. I was on a 15 kill streak with this thing and I was convinced this was the ultimate weapon. The only problem was I was in a sort of practice zone or server meant for newcomers only to play on so really I only got an opportunity to mow down countless people because it was always the same people charging in an open field after respawning. When I tried the same tactic in the big leagues, I got thrashed. The feeling was good while it lasted.
The most funnest part though is when you have a whole crew piloting different parts of a single machine like a tank or a plane. There's a pretty well known warplane called the Galaxy that can fit in 8+ people. Each person gets to control a single part of the plane. One guy would control the movement of the plane and each person might be responsible for a single gun mounted on the plane. It just feels so powerful and what's most amazing is you need to have a good amount of coordination so everyone boards the plane, it's a journey together and you're all watching each other's backs. There's a lot of that aspect of several people controlling different limbs of a single machine. It's awesome.
The experience of piloting a single machine with a crew of people reminds me of another game. It was one of the first online multiplayer games came out, so around the late1980's or something, maybe even earlier. It was always an ongoing war just like how it was in planetside 2, the way you could join servers and what not. There were several strategies to use and there was this one well known plane like the Galaxy that could be controlled by several people at once. Commuting between bases to go to an enemy base would probably take a long time, maybe thirty minutes, an hour, so the crew members would have some bonding time just chatting to each other. Of course, it was all really primitive I bet.
Besides Planetside I sometimes think about my days of playing Brood War pretty comittedly. Whenever I saw a first person view of a progamer playing Brood War, I always felt like in a game I played right after I had the strength to play with the same confidence and punctuated movements the progamers have, putting such great meaning into every key press, every subtlety. Nowadays though I feel like my hands are really stiff and I move like a turtle.
It's been a long ride, lots to think about. I just wanted to crank out a blog post because I don't know, because blogs. Lots to play, lots of memories. Life moves fast, lots of things to do, lots of things. PlanetSide 2 is fun and it's free so I suggest anyone with an okay computer go check it out if you like the pure nonsensical fun of FPS and a bit of teammate strategy interaction. There's also planetside 1 and that's also free and has much lower graphical requirements. Brood War is fun too, probably still my favorite game but only in the right doses. Yummy yummy yummy.
Thanks for reading.
