Monthly Archives: July 2009

Where’s My Jill Sandwich?

6
Posted by Dasutin on July 30, 2009 – 12:00 PM
Filed under Other
Tagged as , , ,

Am I alone in the world when I say that the Resident Evil series was a thousand times better before RE:4 and 5 were created? Sometimes I feel like it. I watched a rerun of an old X-Play episode where they reviewed Resident Evil 4. They said that it was hard to even think about going back and playing the old games. I find that to be completely ridiculous.

Resident Evil: Directors Cut box art.

Resident Evil: Director's Cut box art.

Resident Evil 1 was the first survival horror game I ever played, and I didn’t even start by playing it myself. I watched my older brother beat the entire game, and I loved every second. A few years later, I worked up the courage to play it myself. It’s been about 10 years now and I still love playing it. So the prospect of it being hard to come back and play RE:1 after playing 4 is unfathomable to me.

The first ever zombie encounter in Resident Evil 1.

The first ever zombie encounter in Resident Evil 1.

Frankly, I find it difficult to play RE:4 and even consider it a true sequel. (I’m not mentioning RE:5 because I haven’t played much more than the demo because it angers me so much.) Resident Evil -for me- was always about the puzzles and the atmosphere. RE:4 has almost none of either of these. It’s a shooter, not a survival horror. Where are all the puzzle locks and complicated do-hickies that you have take to the other thing and combine it to make the whatchamacallit? They aren’t there. Where’s the scary, cramped, dark and stale atmosphere? Any crowded city blocks with destroyed cars and debris everywhere? I don’t see that anywhere either.

Then there’s the widely argued, “But those static cameras and controls are too hard!” complaint. Get over it. Those camera angles gave the entire game life. It was like you were watching a beautifully filmed horror movie, except you’re the main character. You’re being stalked and watched from every angle, you hear something, but it’s off frame, the best you can do is aim into the darkness and pull the trigger and hope whatever it is dies before you run out of ammunition. (Just writing that makes me want to go play it.) That, right there, is survival horror, not getting a camera full of shoulder-blade and mowing down groups of people.

RE:4 gameplay.

RE:4 gameplay.

Just my thoughts.

Oh, and Capcom, Outbreak Files 1 and 2 were almost there, why not bring it home with File 3?

Mr. Pink doesn’t tip

1
Posted by Guitarfreak on July 29, 2009 – 2:48 AM
Filed under General

I decided to wake up early the other day and go out for some breakfast by myself because I was feeling lonely and hungry and I wanted to eat some breakfast, alone. I drove down to a local diner and went inside. While I was waiting for the hostess to seat me I noticed there was some crappy, ambient music playing. The songs that were playing were loud enough to just barely be heard if you aren’t paying attention, and loud enough to listen to, audibly, if you are paying attention. Either way, most of the songs suck. The radio station is probably called K Billy’s Shitty Sounds of the 70’s because most of the music they play comes from washed up 70’s pop groups.

This is my real time response to the music playing

Anyway, I was seated shortly after my silent analysis of the music and I ordered the a normal breakfast combo of bacon, scrambled eggs, hashbrowns and pancakes. As my waitress brought the food I was listening to the crappy drum beat and bass line of the current generic song, meh. I got my coffee, my food (the bacon was probably the best bacon I’ve ever had, tender, borderline crunchy, juicy and bursting with meaty flavor) and the waitress politely asked me if I wanted anything else, to which I declined.

The second she took a step away from the table I sunk my teeth into the juicy bacon, by the time I finished the first piece of bacon (and I finished it pretty fast), I realized something was missing. Ketchup. No ketchup for my hashbrowns. Fuck.

This is how I felt about not having ketchup

This is my real time reaction to the ordeal

In the time it took for the above course of events to occur, the waitress was half way across the restaurant. I was too late. Fuck.

As I watched her walk away I pretty much gave up on ketchup, but then I realized that the bass line I had heard earlier was no ordinary bass line. The song was telling me that forgetting the ketchup was a waste of time. The song was in fact **** **** ****! The chorus of the song rang louder than any restaurant music I had ever heard before, as she walked away. It was a magical moment, and I forgot all about the ketchup (ironic eh?). Fuuuu-

Baby come back.

At The Bottom of Everything: =(eGo)=

6
Posted by Guitarfreak on July 27, 2009 – 9:12 PM
Filed under General, Team Fortress 2

Bill Maher once said that in the event that you find yourself on an airplane going down, you should look at the person next to you, go into the bathroom with them and make sweet love. In the event that the plane somehow fixes itself and doesn’t crash, Bill Maher said, you and your partner should both straighten your ties and never speak of the event to anyone, ever.

I’m not sure what the above statement has to do with anything in the post, but I know what the above picture does. You’ll have to excuse my distraught state right now, I just had to explain to my mom what “that’s what she said” means.

The above picture is a policy every community should have. But at the bottom of every (overall) gaming community, there is a community or clan that does the exact opposite of this policy. The groups at the bottom of everything in any game, just say fuck it and embrace the bullshit as much as their twelve year old, Canadian arms will allow them to. I don’t know what’s at the top of everything, but today I’ll provide a little story about what’s at the bottom.

Before I get too far into things, I’ll let one thing be known: The EdgeGamers Organization (eGo) is, by far, the worst, relatively large sized, clan/gaming community currently standing. EdgeGamers Organization is the sheer definition of quantity over quality, because the amount of servers they own and players the amount of players that play on those servers, is the exact amount of quality they don’t possess. (Yeah, I too thought TnB was originally started out as a Garry’s Mod charter of this clan, lets be glad GMod is still safe from them).

The first time I played on an EdgeGamers server was some time ago in Day of Defeat: Source. DoD:S happens to be my favorite game, I like playing it non chalantly, while still being able to express myself freely. During this time on the EdgeGamers server, I was doing quite poorly for whatever reason. I wasn’t in a DoD:S mood. One of my (non-clan member) teammates killed me, and I was aware of their censorship rules so the only thing I could think to yell out at him was, “YOU CHINAMAN!” Now, this was in no direct violation of their rules, as it’s not racist, it’s not a swear word, not disrespectful of the admins, none of that. It was just some silly phrase I thought to yell into my mic at the time. As one could imagine, this made the guy quite mad. He sounded to be about 30ish and he started talking about his time in the army and how he could “kick a Chinaman’s ass all day long.” He began a harsh use of invective while I just remained quiet. After a few minutes a ranking admin with his authoritative “=(eGo)=” tag came in and told the guy to stop. Save for a short, stupid exchange between the teamkiller and the admin, the guy wasted no time permanently banning me from the server. The interesting part is the reason he banned me: indirectly causing other players to break clan rules.

There exists no synonym, no better word, no other adjective to describe this action than just plain stupid. Do I even need to talk about the stupidity here? Their rules are so arduous and bureaucratic to begin with as they include censorship, requiring players to show more respect for admins than they would normally show to other players and preemptive banning. I should’ve gotten a medal just for putting up with their stupid rule system, let alone being banned for causing someone else to break them.

Aside from this instance of stupidity, EdgeGamers servers just suck. Most of the admins and moderators are complete, self righteous assholes who are either way too old or way too young to be playing whatever game they’re playing, and most of the members are self righteous assholes who act even more self righeous in the hopes of becoming an admin.

With this in mind, everyone playing Day of Defeat, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, Call of Duty 4 or Insurgency should boycott eGo servers. If you don’t want to do that then go troll them or say “hell” or “shit” and get yourself banned, because if you can somehow stand to be on their servers for more than five minutes at least make it hard on them.

And remember kids, bullshit is bad, stay away from it. If you know someone who’s in an EdgeGamers division or thinking joining, do anything in your power to stop them. Show them this, show them chat logs from TnB members, do SOMETHING. If anyone has stories of this or other eGO related shennanigans, post them below and maybe you’ll get a medal.

Politik

12
Posted by Guitarfreak on July 25, 2009 – 1:59 PM
Filed under General

Dear Sir or Madam,

We’re currently conducting a study on people’s behavior and how it’s affected by their political views. Additionally, we’ll see how this affects their in-game actions.
Signed,

The Board of Directors

Ok I don’t have a picture of William Shatner to go along with it but if you don’t understand..post your political views down below in the comments section. I’m interested to see what you people think about politics (regardless of country). I myself am an independent and I just happen to believe that the U.S. is going to hell in a hand basket faster than you can say any witicism I can come up with. So, tell me what you believe down below. If you don’t have any beliefs, then get some. If you’re incapable of getting some then copy the person next to you.

And as always,

Revelation Mother Reich RP

6
Posted by Guitarfreak on July 23, 2009 – 12:48 AM
Filed under Garry's Mod

The title doesn’t lie, nor does the picture. We’re not done with Reich RP. Not yet, folks. Allow me to give a brief summary of a thread that’s up right now on their forum (which happens to be using the same color scheme that our forum is using >_>).

It started with Matteo announcing his leave from the community with this post.

It was followed by the usual butthurt replies of some forum mods and witty one liners by some of the less mature members. But I started feeling the need to intervene, partly on behalf of Matteo (who I’ve never actually talked to before) and partly on behalf of decency. Josef Nader (an admin there) along with some others, were making increasingly pretentious posts, trying to portray Reich RP as some sort of master Aryan race of GMod communities (these posts were also followed with witty one line responses by blind followers, supporting the claims). As such, I decided to post myself, with this.

Playing my usual role of the (attempting-to-be-helpful) devil’s advocate, I awaited reply. Some opposition from Josef Nader (which I quote in the following post) and other stuff.

This post must’ve been enough to get someone’s attention upstairs because Mr. Papa replied with this:

That’s the gist of the thread. I encourage you to read the whole thread that you can find here. Though you’ll need a forum account there to view it.

The point of this post is not to acknowledge certain Reich RP members’ incompetence, but to acknowledge Mr. Papa’s respectable understanding. It’s a rare thing to see one community leader(Paradox RP) recognize the faults of their community, but to see two do it as a result of my advice is rather interesting. I hope this streak continues within more communities that don’t have decent standards, and lets all hope Mr. Papa stays true to his word. If he speaks true of his intentions, then perhaps I’ve just prevented the creation and growth of another TnB.

The ideal admin system for a GMod RP Server

1
Posted by Guitarfreak on July 20, 2009 – 11:57 PM
Filed under Garry's Mod

Since the dawn of time, man has been blessed with retarded RP admins. Whether it’s admins not doing their jobs, trying too hard at their jobs, abusing their powers, favoring certain players with their powers or any other form of retardation in administration, GMod RP servers have always been prone to such. Now, we all know this is not a secret. Sadly, this has grown to be common sense, common knowledge and commmon expectation of GMod servers in recent years.

I’ve had this idea for a while, and I’ve always wanted to try it. An admin system that would work, would be volunteer, competent admins who moderate the server while not being allowed to roleplay at the same time. In other words, if a player is RPing on the server, that player may not have access to admin powers at the same time. Likewise, if a player is moderating a server, he or she (not sure why I even bother saying “she”) will not have access to in-character actions.

The downside to this is that it would be harder to find more willing admins, as they wouldn’t always be occuppied (because, hopefully, the system would work well enough to improve the server overall).

The pros to this system are valuable and well needed. The new notable ones are:

  • Less of a bias
  • Roleplay wouldn’t be affected (if not at all, hopefully not as much) as it is currently
  • It would be much more difficult to use admin powers for in-character gain

The list could go on, though that’s the general set of ideas. If a community has a playerbase with enough dedication and fervor, this system could, theoretically, be implemented and put to good use. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

P.S. Things like this wouldn’t happen if this system was used properly

In game footage of Dave Brown (head admin) at TnB

In game footage of Dave Brown (head admin) at TnB

Afforded Rebuttal: Faust on Paradox RP

0
Posted by Guitarfreak on July 17, 2009 – 7:09 PM
Filed under Garry's Mod

This post is mainly to direct readers of this blog to a post Faust made on his own blog which you can find here. I’m providing a link because his blog seems rather new and I’d like him to have the forum for his defense that he deserves, as I have mine. The post is in reply and rebuttal to my previous post critiquing Paradox RP. There are only a few things I’d like to comment on in his post but before I do I’d like to make a few things noted. The first being, I was quite surprised to see someone of the GMod community mustering a respectable, mature response to one of my own posts. As such, I’d like to express my appreciation to Faust for being so respectable in this medium as such posts are becoming fewer and fewer (or so I’ve noticed). Furthermore I’d like to thank Faust for his notes on our community in his opening paragraph.  That being said, I’ll begin.

In regards to the current Paradox admins not having “ran” Aftermath RP, I’ll clarify. I hold to the belief the community members, not admins, run the communities, admins simply maintain them. This is what I saw going on at Aftermath RP (and it’s how things should go for the most part, the members are the most important aspect of the community), as such, it is what I was referring to. My statement was simply a guideline with the rest of my post ; it was no attempt to trivialize any person or community.

Furthermore, about “putting your fist down” as an administrator: I agree with said policy. I do believe, however, that it can be done without such a use of invective and vulgar demands to the community. I am not afraid to act strictly as situations call for it, as I’m sure my fellow administrators can confirm.

As far as making this public goes, I felt it was the only effective way to get Snaggy’s attention. Perhaps I wasn’t rhetorically skilled enough to grab his attention before, as I tried speaking to him on the issue several times (some of which were before he even began his community). Additionally, with the increasing number of blogs in recent months, posts such as these are beginning to seem increasingly casual, and for that I apologize.

In closing, Faust, I respect your defense of your community as I respect just about anyone who is willing to, respectably, stand up for their community. I’m glad you took the time to respond and I welcome to you to contact me on Steam Friends (guitarfreaksg) if you wish to discuss anything further, in private. Additionally, I’ll welcome you to post on this blog if you want to. Also, I don’t believe you were coming off too over the top or condescending in your defense. I don’t see any carried away writing in your post so I would advise you not to feel the need to justify it. And finally, thank you for taking the time to read and anyone who finds this direct response to Faust irrelevant or boring, I apologize.

Ernest Goes to Paradox RP

6
Posted by Guitarfreak on July 17, 2009 – 1:33 PM
Filed under Garry's Mod

The title explains most of it, I decided to check out this Paradox RP community run by Snaggy. I’m still not sure why it’s called Paradox RP of all things. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they’re trying to improve upon things that have failed in the past (Stalker RP, post apocalyptic RP) while using the same methods of execution. Or maybe the name just sounds cool.

I began by checking out their forum, nothing too notable. Though I was a little surprised by the admin system they have. Their admin team consists of some jumbled, constipated ranking system that’s not quite clear to understand in terms of who has power over who. They’ve got ERAs, BAs, TAs, OSAs, and so on. So many As they don’t seem to know how to fit them into a clear ranking structure. I can’t help but note this admin system. I can’t help but note this system is strangely similar to TnB’s admin roster.
 Additionally, many of the admins are some of the people who were running some similar, prior communities (Aftermath for example) right before they all collapsed.

Paradox RP Admin Roster

With a final note about the Paradox RP administration I’ll show one “announcement” made by an administrator on their forum.

Paradox RP Forum Announcement

I’m a firm believer that a comunity’s administration should have some respect for maturity and decency when interacting with the community. Emotional posts such as this one are unprofessional, immature and disrespectful. Even if the community is behaving unruly, one should never match their behavior by cussing them out through the authoritative voice of an admin. If the post wasn’t so whiny sounding I might’ve confused it for someone trying to play the Drill Sergeant from Full Metal Jacket.

Finally, I went into the server for about fifteen minutes and was bored out of my mind. There were eleven people on, it was running a version of LemonadeScript with some edited GUI. There were no titles to see as the scoreboard was removed from the script version, I assume to prevent metagaming. Most players seemed to avoid me when approached, and it had an overall feel of the “private” RPs that go on at TnB (no, that’s not an allusion to cybering). It was quite dull and the only thing amusing I noticed was this individual conspicuously attempting to fling some gas cans at me that he had glued together.

Maybe I happened to choose a bad day on their server, maybe that individual was not like all the rest, MAYBE I’m just bad luck. But if not, Paradox RP would do best to follow some friendly advice.

In conclusion, this post is mainly a message to Snaggy. Since talking to you directly didn’t work I’ll give you this post so you can look back and reflect on my advice a bit more. I respect you and I respect the fact that you’re trying to make a fair community. I also believe, however, that if you don’t avoid the ways of previous failed communities you will see undesirable results. Your community seems to be run by most of the people that were running Aftermath RP right before its demise and your community seems to have mostly the same ideas for storylines with the exception of Stalker RP (and we all know how well Stalker RP has done in the past.). The short solution: listen to others, get some new ideas in your community, don’t kid yourself or anyone else with that jumbled, “formal” admin roster, and encourage some interraction on your server. If you don’t try to change some of your ways you will most likely see untimely and undesirable results within your community, regardless of how well or how poor everyone might RP there.

Developments – 7/13/09

3
Posted by Guitarfreak on July 13, 2009 – 4:45 PM
Filed under Developments

Today is another day I must acredit DSRP with some influence, but first, I’ll tell a story.

It seems today, after the supposed decline of GMod RP, that one can only find two things in Garry’s Mod RP: servers attempting to be “serious” and servers with no hope of being serious (Dark RP). While the middleman is faced with disgust in Dark RP servers and isolation in “serious” RP servers. The last time anyone saw something generally appealing to the middle of the spectrum was in GMod 9 at DSRP’s Sathyr Punk server running on rp_oviscity_b3. I first saw this server in July of 2006, right before I joined DSRP the following month.

OB has had access to a smaller server for a while now so we’ve decided to try something at the middle (lower-end) of the spectrum and host some relaxed RP on rp_oviscity_b3. The storyline will be vaguely reminiscent of Half Life 2 RP. This, however, will not be OB’s only committment in Garry’s Mod in the near future, so stay tuned for more updates on that. Before moving on, I’ll leave a screenshot of RP on DSRP’s El Taco Banana server in GMod 9. Ah, good times.

Screenshot by Kenji

Screenshot by Kenji

Now, with this new server we’ll need another server name. I had the pleasure of coming up with the last server name, but I’ve decided to let you, the reader come up with something this time. You can post entries on the forum in the appropriate thread once it’s up. More information can also be found there.

my neighborhood

4
Posted by Guitarfreak on July 12, 2009 – 1:50 PM
Filed under Other