FPSs aren’t just for shouting insults at pre-pubescent teenagers and informing your colleagues as to how and when you violated their parents; they are a vast sea of possibility for a gamer who loves to win and have fun! Below are ten handy hints and tips for people who want to make the most of their gaming time and teach their comrades the correct way to play.
1 – Pick the best gun.
After playing a First Person Shooter for a while you will notice that people complain about a particular weapon being overpowered or cheap. You will hear them cursing about the weapon and getting massively annoyed at anyone who repeatedly uses it. It may even be a combination of weapons or a specific add on. One hit kills are not uncommon and the general belief is that it takes very little skill or effort to use the weapon. “n00b”, “whore” or “fag” are normally prefixed or suffixed – n00b combo, noob-tube, nade-whore, P-90 fag, etc. Gamers understand its effectiveness on the battlefield and this bluster covers their fear.
Use it.
All the time.
It is the key to your victory.
2 – Camp
Camp does not mean acting like one of the Village People.
It means staying in the same, well defended spot and picking off the enemy at your leisure. You are actively challenging the enemy to come and get you, letting them know where you are at all times and still getting good scores. If you are getting killed regularly or people are not cursing at you, you’re not doing it right. Move to another spot and try again.
3 – Bounce
The developers put that Jump button in for one reason and one reason only: they are fans of Mario and understand that if you are a gamer, you are too. Walking and running is too easy and not using your abilities to their fullest extent. Take to the skies!
This makes it fun for other users too, as they rarely use the vertical axis.
4 – Find the spawns
When you die on the digital battlefield, IT’S OK! Miraculously, the scientists of the internet have harnessed an incredible function that allows users to re-appear as if they had never been blown up by that grenade-launcher you’re sure to have been using since you read section one. Spawns are like radar: they tell you where your enemy is going to be so that you can prepare yourself for combat.
Memorise all the spawns and make sure you are ready the moment your companions respawn. Set up traps, make sure you’ve got plenty of ammo and, potentially, pack some sandwiches. If you’re good at this part of the game, you may be here for the rest of the session!
5 – Celebrate!
After you kill somebody, it’s important to let them know exactly how you did it so that they can practice and become “full of win” like you. Go into detail! If you aimed for their head and it popped like a ripe watermelon, make sure you describe in full how hard it was to line the sweet spot of the grenade launcher directly with their cranium. Let people know exactly how many times you’ve killed them in a round, so that they can make notes. Don’t be afraid to exaggerate! Everyone loves a good story and a little embellishment can only add to the fun.
6 – Breathe
Breathing is essential to your continued existence. Without it, you will cease to be alive! Let people know you haven’t forgotten by breathing heavily into your microphone at all times. This is also the easiest way to let people know if you have an illness too! That little rasp in your breath may be the sign to your team-mates that you’re not on top form and they’ll band together to support you.
7 – Game with Pride
Let your love go out to the homo-sexual brethren online! It’s a well known fact that 75% percent of all gamers who play online are homosexual. Let them know that they have your support. Don’t phrase it like a question! Let them know you’re proud of their choice and that, even if they haven’t told their parents yet (both of whom you had relations with the previous evening) they should stand up and be counted. Moreover, let them know how much this pride in their orientation attracts you to them as a person. Once you’ve let them know that you “know”, make sure that they also know that, in a perfect world, if the two of you were in the same locale, you’d be more than happy to bump genitals with them. Specify that you’re a giver, not a taker. For example, a regular chat up line is “Hey! You’re a fag! If I ever find out where you live I’m going to fuck you!”. =)
Sometimes campers really are camp!
8 – Silence is golden
When everyone in your lobby has already taken it upon themselves to learn and practice the techniques detailed in section seven (above) remind them that they should take time to reflect on what they’ve said. Keep on repeating this, as a mantra for them to meditate with:
“Shut the hell up, you fucking fag!”
Use it every time someone slips up and says something further. REMEMBER: You’re also letting them know that you are aware of their virility and sexual orientation! Information is power!
9 – Drop out
If things aren’t going your way, there’s no point wasting other people’s time by continuing. They’ll become bored of lining you up in their sights and soon their kills will amount to double figures! Don’t trouble them with the hefty maths! Get out of there before they get confused! This is especially effective if you are the host of a game, as they will have to start afresh and will quickly forget all about that annoying section of their evening.
10 – Help your Team
There’s no B, C, D, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, N, O, P, Q, R, S, U, V, W, X, Y or Z in Team. Team only has four letters; T, E, A and M. There should always be a YOU in Team though. Let others know that you have their backs by aiming for them on a regular basis and sharing some of your ammo with them. You don’t have to shoot them enough to kill them, though this will help them find the Spawn points (see section 4). Just enough to make things more interesting for them when they encounter the enemy. They’ll be more cautious and their skills will improve! It will also remind them of section seven!
These tips will make your gaming a lot more interesting in FPSs and some of the techniques can even be applied anywhere online! As an additional suggestion:
Snipe!
People love snipers and combining this with sections 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 is sure to set the world on fire!
Innovate!
That's all for now, my virile homosexual companions!! Next time I'll teach you how chat to real live girls online! Feel free to add to my incomplete list in the comments section!
The original story was on many major websites and probably has a foundation in the truth but we're going to have to wait a little while longer for this idiotic race to be conceded. Suggestions that it could be as soon as tomorrow bode well for consolidating of this format war and I, for one, will be more than pleased when it's over. Especially as I haven't bought a HD-DVD player. =D
Actually, it's quite nice to bring up this subject every now and again, much like it's quite nice to talk about infinity, the presence of a higher being in the universe and what end of a soft-boiled egg you should slice off (for me, the fat end because you can get more of your toast-soldier in for dipping purposes). Sure, it's gonna rage on with people who can't accept games as art or people who want all games accepted as art but, really, is it that important.
I mean, look at some of these pictures...
Oops, wait, not that one...
Ok, so, they're all beautiful, right? They're what we ooh and ahh about and contain moments that we'll hold with us and chat with our friends, debate online and dream wistfully about when the crappy sequel comes out. Games have got to be art, right?
Then someone comes along and stamps on your ideas, specifying criteria by which games must be judged in order for them to "become" art. No matter how pretty, no matter how thought provoking or engaging, there will always be a dissenting voice whispering "They'll never be art and that's just final".
At this point I like to think about tomatoes.
Yes. Tomatoes.
Are they a fruit or are they a vegetable. Biologically, they're classed as a fruit (it's to do with seeds and stuff, go look it up ya lazy bums!). They will never be classed as a vegetable in biological terms. Yet we use them like a vegetable, they taste like they should be a vegetable and for all useful intents and purposes (aside from I'm sure some obscure sexual ones and, of course, throwing) they are, in fact, vegetables. Well, you know what?
THEY'RE VEGETABLES!!
Chefs classify them as such. They know that biology classifies them as vegetables and they accept that, using certain criteria, they're right. But they know food in a different way to the biologist. They know that it's all about taste and ripeness, flavour and combinations. So they take the tomatoes and all the other food types and use them as they're meant to be used. Sure, some chefs won't agree as to how certain ingredients should and shouldn't be used but they're all pretty much on the same wavelength when it comes to the big stuff.
So why don't we just do this with games? We're all much more knowledgeable about games than some art professor who's probably only watched his nephews’ tea-bagging someone on Halo 3 or read something about a warm beverage mod for Great Thief Otto. We can just look at all the games around and know which ones are art and which ones aren't. There will still be debate, just like there is around fusion cooking in the chef-world or the correct wine to serve with a meal. Some people will flock to one corner and some to another, praising MGS but denouncing Tempest 2000 as just a flood of mindless colour and vertices.
At least we can stop the pointless bickering among ourselves if we accept that it totally depends on what criteria are involved in deciding if it's art or not, right?
I’ve had a cracking weekend so far. Xbox live is still playing up every now and again so I wasn’t able to send any friend requests initially but, once I did manage to get playing with the DToiders, well, WOW, what a difference having good people on your internetz makes!
DTOIDERS RULE!!
Atheistium, NihonTiger, Martijn Mumbles (pronounced Mar–tine), xomb13 and a few others managed to indoctrinate me in the church that is CoD4 and much fun and japery was had. Let me recount some of my highlights for you.
I was a total newcomer to the world of online CoD4. I’d literally never played a match when I first went in and boy did it show. I took to following people around but a lot of the time they knew the maps so well that they’d lose me if they got even a few metres between us! Everyone was already high level, map ready and kicking ass before I even saw my first enemy. Who gunned me down and ran on like it had never happened. Devastating. Yet, somehow, even with a liability like me on the team, we won all out matches! I levelled quickly and even managed to bag a few kills here and there. A very cool game, I thought, though I can see why people hate some of the Perks. Great when they’re yours to use! Sucks when they’re used against you.
This was my performance for the first several games...
I sometimes have win!
Of course, the winning didn’t always occur. We faced a proper clan at one point, rather than our rag-tag, laugh-a-second crew and had our asses handed to us. But overall, we won more than we lost and had a hell of a lot of fun doing it! Some of the matches were so close everyone was on the edge of their seat. One match in particular stood out for me.
It got tied 730 – 730 and a few of our team had just died. I was alone in a large, grey room, lit up green by my night-sight. Three of the enemy walked into the room in formation. Now, a real soldier would have gunned them all down then and there. I whimpered and hid in a corner! “Guys? There are loads of them right in front of me! AHHHHHH!”
BLAM BLAM, BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!!
The screen went grey and we’d won! I’d taken out one of them and someone else must have taken out the last guy.
“No man,” said xomb13, “you took out both of them! Fucking yes!!”
=D
WOOHOO!
Most of the time I have lose
Now, ok, the rest of the combat had a more traditional feel to it. I accidentally picked a sniper rifle and had to have my ass saved numerous times by MartijnMumbles, one of the shots taken over my head as I crouched and fumbled with my rifle. I saved him later but I think I owe him another 5 or so before we’re even!
I got flash-banged in a small room, the world swimming and my vision slowing down. Two enemies slinked in, guns turning to my huddled body. Suddenly, atheistium stormed into the room from the side door and, without pausing or even noticing my presence, double-taps both and moves onto the next corridor. LIKE A NINJA!! She did this later as well! Having a really bad round, she started moving up one side of a long, uphill street. “Watch out,” I cried, “there’s loads of them over there!” I took aim and watched as, one by one, each of the targets was taken out, one knifed and two shot.
But I always have LULZ!!
Perhaps my favourite moment was when my friend Don Joff, who’d joined us for a few round, got killed by a lucky shot from a guy on the other side of a window. I’d picked up the shotgun off a body previously and blew the guy away but Don was down, his pistol pulled for a last stand, with no-one to shoot at.
“I’m sorry man!” I blubbered, crouching beside the body. “I got him for you, buddie! Just hang on, a medic will be on the way soon. Don’t you give up on me soldier! No…no….NOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Classic.
Anyway, what was more fun than any of the shooting and blowing stuff up was definitely the crowd. Couldn’t have asked for a nicer, funnier bunch of troops for several hours of roaming around battlefields.
THANKS TO YOU ALL!! You made CoD4 a good game, not the development team.
So, I have a great tolerance for doing things… right. Some people would just call it stubborn but I follow a distinct logical path. Bioshock has been my “after New Year’s” game and, regardless of the fact that I have Half Life 2: Episode 1 & 2 AND CoD4 sitting, staring at me, I vowed to complete my copy of it before I even unwrapped the lovely cellophane surrounding the life-sucker that is Call of Duty 4. All my friends have raved about the multiplayer, the Perks and. well, Friday Night Fights is up again tonight and I was intending to have Bioshock done and dusted yesterday evening.
Fate has cruelly intervened.
At a critical juncture, at what I judge to be the denouement, the finale, the beginning of the end, a disk read error occurred. I’ve cleaned it, reloaded it and tilted my console several times now and nope, no luck. It’s dead. It’s a second hand copy and it doesn’t appear to be badly scratched or anything, so I can only assume that one of the small scratches touches something critical or my Xbox is once again acting up.
This hurt my happiness. A lot. I love completing games. I’ve very rarely not completed a game and normally with good reason. Some day I’ll tell you all about my trials with FF7 (one playthrough took me over 3 YEARS!!!) but I always get there in the end. Now I’m going to have to work more than I had intended just to get this game finished. I think we have a copy at work in the library so I can borrow that but the disk itself? It’s going back to the shop. It works perfectly for most of the game and it’ll be fine after a good clean, so I’ll see what I can get them to do OR I’ll just trade it in. I’m not going to worry about it any more.
Regardless, this means that I’ve been playing CoD instead! YUM! What a game! Sure, it’s not the best single player experience overall (so far) but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed a few of the missions. I’m looking forward to hopping onto the multiplayer game tonight. Which brings me to the point at the end of all this.
I’m about to start adding people to my friends list on Live. If you particularly don’t want me as your friend, just tell me to fuck off or cancel the request but I intend to try going through the entire list of Tags on the forum and adding everyone I can!
Now, one of the things that I had to do for my degree was a detailed study of some facet of new tech. At the time, DVD was just about to emerge as a format and I was fascinated by the prospect of optical storage that could hold so much more than a regular CD. I mean, seriously, it was a WOW moment for me back then when I was checking out all the work that had to go into standardising a format for the DVD players, etc. Massive companies were joining with Philips in an attempt to make sure that consumers and developers weren't going to get messed around. So, even though I didn't want to get sucked into this debate, the subject matter still fascinates me.
BluRay is the better format. I don't care one way or the other that Sony have used this as the backbone of their system. If MS had gone with it and Sony had gone with HD-DVD I'd still think it was better. It's more innovative, it stores more and it's got a less confusing frickin' name! It's got drawbacks still, at the moment, with the need for the expensive diodes, etc, but it's still the one that should win this race, and this turnabout from Paramount might be the big turning point.
Basically, if you can't be arsed reading the Financial Times, Paramount had a clause in it's exclusivity contract that allows them to slink their way across no-mans land to the Blu side IF Warner Brothers go there first.
Destructoid is an independently-run publication forged by our love of video games and the gaming community's need of accountable enthusiast press living the dream since March 16, 2006
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