I’ve been having a crack at this game recently, mostly because I paid 40 quid for it (you might remember back to my previous post on a small moment of madness) and thought I should at least take it out the case. I’m trying to get over my fear of first person shooters on pads because, lets face it, the only way I’m going to actually get any better is by playing with them.

Armed with a day off work due to a bad throat and generally feeling rough I fired up the game to continue where I’d been playing from over the past few days. I’ve stuck the degree of difficulty on Veteran and started off on that level, because er… well the best excuse I could come up with in typical laddish fashion was “I’m not a pussy”. Also, I know how painfully easy games on consoles are because of the limitations of the input method so I at least knew I *could* get killed.

Problem is with the game on this difficulty they’ve removed most, if not any room at all, for skill. What it comes down to now is constantly hiding, 10% skill and 90% dumb luck. You see, the enemy soldiers are superhuman. Be they German or Jap, they know exactly where you are at any point on the map. If you’re behind a wall you’re generally safe… generally. The funniest bit I’ve seen so far which opened my eyes to exactly what I was up against was where I’d been hiding behind a wall only for sniper bullet holes to constantly appear directly in front of my face. Proving 100% that the fucker is coded to know exactly where I am even when I’m hiding. Rather poorly coded no?

I appreciate elements of the game try to be “realistic” and to some extents they are, the problem is the realism only seems to extent to the person playing it, not your team mates or the enemy. Like I said before the enemies are entirely superhuman, and your team mates are unfortunately, dumb as fuck.

So aside from the tough job of controlling this thing from the point of view of the pad… lets have a little list here at what they’ve done right and what they’ve done wrong.

Right:

The game seems fairly well put together all things considered.

To be honest I’m not having much “fun” with the game at all, I’ve not really done anything that I’d consider an achievement because the only times I’ve managed to push through a map is because I’ve memorised where the enemies were and retried it about 60 times.

Wrong:

The grenade indicator icon often doesn’t work either not telling you at all that there is a grenade at your feet, or it tells you 0.5 seconds before one goes off in your face. On veteran this leads to instant death without anything you can do about it.

Grenades can often affect you through walls and objects, such as tanks. The blast radius sometimes gets dampened by walls but often I’ve found the walls / objects don’t actually affect the grenades at all. So you die. All seems a bit inconsistent to me.

The enemies are able for some reason to place 3 or 4 grenades directly at your feet to within a 0.03 micron tolerance in every direction going. Seeing as you’re probably hiding at the time because 4 bullets on veteran will outright kill you - breaking cover to get away from them will get you shot and throwing them back is impossible before one goes off and kills you. You = dead.

Enemies over 100 metres away will be able to hit you with 100% accuracy in the face even if they are running at the time of aiming. If you are behind cover you are generally alright, but they’ll still know where you are and if you have a single pixel exposed they will shoot you. Pretty pathetic, it’s like fighting robots with sniper rifles.

The enemies all have a tendency to go for you and you alone 90% of the time and the worst part is the AI of your team mates allows them to literally run straight past without so much as a hint of worry. They just dont go for the enemy at all, even the characters integral to the story line who dont get killed might only cap someone off once in a couple of minutes.

Enemies are able to make your gun flail upwards when you’re struck by bullets, not a bad feature and probably quite “realistic” but all together annoying when the same can’t be said for them. You can shoot them a few times and if you’re lucky they’ll be half dead and laying on the floor, but if they were about to lineup a shot at you before you jabbed a couple of holes in them their aim is entirely unaffected and you’ll die.

Your team mates are useless and don’t matter at all. If someone on your team gets shot, someone else will run up from behind and replace them. There are members of your team that can’t die as they are integral to the storyline (unless you shoot them, then its game over). You can’t get shot for deserting, as in running off to hide somewhere or generally trying to run away. So what it comes down to is, your team mates are fucking useless and expendable, as long as YOU don’t get shot and die you are free to do whatever you like. That even extends to shooting the ones who are allowed to die, there are no consequences and they rarely help you out by killing any enemies at all. From this perspective the game made me feel very isolated and any achievement was gained from purely my own play grinding away learning where enemies were going to spawn and finding the safest places to hide. I don’t see the point in having a team at all when they are so pointless and stupid.

Sometimes, its very hard to tell the enemy apart from your own team mates. Now this might be classed as being “a bit obvious” in the way that you’re in a group, they run at you, you shoot the people facing you. Problem is due to the before mentioned retarded nature of your team mates, they allow the enemy to more or less mingle into your own team as one entity without batting an eyelid. You sometimes have no idea who to shoot in the thick of battle because all the people look more or less the same, and then suddenly one guy will shoot you in the face after standing next to you for 10 seconds who your team mates have simply ignored. The answer of course is to mow down anyone at all in front of you as there are no consequences as long as you don’t hit the important team mate.

Enemies spawn at trigger points. You’d really think in this day and age the old troublesome method of having enemies literally “appear” in certain places as you hit trigger points on the map might be well and truly over. Sadly not so in COD5, as soon as you hit a position on the map enemies will just plain “appear” in set places and start slaughtering you and your team. One of the best ways I’ve found about getting through veteran is to simply memorise where the enemies will turn up, hide/cover and then shoot in that direction. Negates any real skill to handle the situation presented to you at the time and ends up being just a memory game.

In fact the entire way the game’s difficulty levels are structured is a complete joke. I don’t think the enemies or team mates intelligence actually change at all. Enemies don’t get any brighter and hide in a more sneaky manner. The ONLY thing that seems to change through out the difficulty levels is how much damage is needed to kill someone. So if we think about that for a second gaining skill with the pad etc will help you out to a point, but as soon as you hit veteran level and you’re being shot in the face from half a mile away by a pixel you can’t even see yet… it kinda goes out the window.

You can’t break the obvious. An example, on one map I was shooting at tanks that were advancing on me. Short of being shot from barn a mile up the hill I was free to clamber around and take out the tanks. One still remained on the map and I worked out that I’d have to launch a push through a house and assault people through corn fields. After repeatedly getting shot through thick streaks of corn and hay bails, swearing a lot because there was utterly no line of sight and I’d crawled my way through the field I finally made it up to a house. I took out the tank and then instantly another one appeared on the map. Now I could tell that this tank had to be either inside a building, or behind it.

After I advanced towards the tank icon, one of the guys on my team shouts “get that door open!” and instantly I knew what I was going to happen. Problem was I couldn’t run away in time and got shot. Ok not such a massive problem I’ve previously hit a checkpoint and was back to the bit where the tank was going to bust out through the door again. Only problem was without “triggering” that event on the map, the tank existed but the wooden barn door was impervious to my panzerfaust shots. I couldn’t break the door down at all and I had to play along with the games retarded trigger nature by running up to the door, then trying to run back to the house as quick as I could without being randomly pot shotted in the head. Why couldn’t i just shoot the door off its hinges and trigger the tank quest that way?

It just seems like this could be a fairly good game (I’ve love to try it on the PC) ruined by stupid little inconsistencies and an utterly retarded AI system. How the enemy can be so elite and super human and yet your team mates so baron of intelligence and brimming with retardation is beyond me. Just balance it out a bit, have your team mates save you once in a while and prevent the enemy from being so damned accurate with world war 2 weapons? I understand veteran is meant to be hard but the point of a game is that the user has a chance of winning, which OK this game does, but I’m talking about on your own merit from using skill, learning and thinking and maybe a little bit of luck. Not a fucking memory game where you memorise where people will appear, get lucky one time out of 60 tries and then advance / repeat.

There are so many people at the moment that I literally want dead.

Not specific people, mostly groups.
Nothing personal like!

Here is a summarised list of the people who I sincerely wish were dead:

People who care about Kerry Katona - just die you pathetic cunts

Human scum like “Carl” and “Lauren” who can be found here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7816500.stm who I regularly indirectly pay benefits to with my tax dollars every month. Amazingly glad that I’m able to help out such capable people with the likes of rent/housing/transport and other various benefits. Shame I don’t have a choice about where my tax money goes, because if I did these cunts would be approximately 234,408,253 rd on the list of causes.

Carl is evidently so poor that this month it was reported that he is even now finding it hard to maintain his obesity. Hard times indeed!

The Labour party - pays out so much in benefits that people like this are able not to bother getting a job at all and paying their own way because it’s simply not worth wasting the 45 hours a week required to do it. If they can’t find a job, ANY job after 13 weeks of looking they should slowly rot back into the Earth from whence they came because they’re clearly useless. So er, just die, the lot of you.

People who sit in the middle lane of motorways and won’t move - get out of my way, but ideally die.

Anyone who listens to the radio and actually likes what is played on it - passionless, talentless bullshit. ~(If you’re sat there thinking “Hey, I like some of that” then at least try to make an effort to listen to something that isn’t created to be purely pumped into your brain and forgotten about 2 days later. Find something to be passionate about eh?)

Anyone who thinks its a great idea to have a radio station that celebrates “Black Music” (1xtra) whatever the FUCK that is meant to mean anyway. I didn’t think the colour of your skin denoted what musical and cultural tastes you should enjoy but clearly I was wrong. I assume from the genre title that only black people are allowed to create music within the “Black Music” genre and as a given rule all black people MUST listen to “Black Music”. Which actually seems frighteningly close to the truth.

People who have nothing better to do but form pathetic gangs that terrorise entire neighbourhoods - bring in the army and shoot the cunts. Better yet, put them into chain gangs to do something useful, repair the railways or something. Then shoot them.

Old people who automatically assume younger people will be rude to them so are incredibly rude without prompting. Even keeping up appearances of being rude after you’ve been as polite as possible to them. What do they want a kicking? If a younger person was that rude to me I’d give them a piece of my mind and likely a good hiding if they were massively rude. I suspect a broken bone at that age would take the rest of their life to heal, so I’d suggest not angering me too much to the point of violence. Ideally, they can all just die.

People who are dumb enough to have to write in COMPLETE CAPS to get their point across on the net, a prime example here of someone who can literally die and it no one would even notice:

graham
TIME TO STOP PUTTING HER DOWN I WISH HER WELL SHE IS STILL A FIGHTER

Yes graham, Kerry Katona is a “fighter”. If by the definition of “fighter” you mean talentless, useless, bi-polar mess of a woman with serious mental issues, you’re spot on my friend! She’s as much of a “fighter” as our graham is a “complete cunt”. I hope someone stabs him quite forcefully in the testicles in the near future to give him a decent experience of how his actions made me feel having to write about this shit.

People who feel the need to regularly tell everyone on myspace and facebook that they “love their friends”.

What a fucking revelation, you’ve got so much to say about yourself you’re reduced to stating the fucking obvious in the first paragraph you’re using to define you. Of course you care for your fucking friends, that’s the idea of what a friend IS you bunch of sad bastards. Why not go out and look for another picture or movie that someone else made to add to your profile? After all, all that content created by other people clearly was intended for you to define yourself.

People who take offence on someone else’s behalf for no reason. - Half the reason the ridiculous PC laws exist in this country are because of these cunts. Having to ban Christmas in department stores because it might upset Muslims? Its unbelievable that everyone is taught to respect everyone elses beliefs no matter how obscure or unlikely, and then some cunt in authority goes completely ass about face and assumes that a minority has the absolute right to be “offended” by what the majority are used to? Even the minorities are usually dumbfounded at the idea of having to act like this, who are these people?! Lets hope they all drop dead eh?

And finally, people who moan too much. So I’m off too shoot myself. Later.

Sometimes you can’t help but wonder that things have gone a bit far, not only from a personal point of view at disclosure of details but morally too. Coming from me that might sound shocking I know but bare with me here.

I know there is a general mass spam of useless applications that sometimes verge on the line of decency when asking personal information or opinion. Today however this is what I saw when I logged into the thing today just to check out what was going on:

“Sarah XXXXX just answered the question ‘Do you think Paul XXXXXX has ever been unfaithful in a relationship?’ about you. Click here to see more. 2 seconds ago”

What the fuck?

Curious as to what the hell this application was I decided to add it to find out what this person thought of me! Unfortunately upon adding it I required more “pieces of silver” to reveal the answer so I instantly switched off, but I thought I would have a little look around before I removed it.

Questions that I was prompted about my “friends” were things as follows:
(And these are only what I was bothered to look at on the opening screen)

“do you think Mr X has used sex to further their career”
“do you think Ms X has lied on a job interview CV”
“do you think X has cheated in a relationship”

For a start, who the fuck cares and secondly this is a little close to the bone for my liking.
These are the sort of highly personal questions that surely shouldn’t just be assumed about other people. The idea that you can get some sort of “ranking” too as to how other people judge you… weird shit. Specially from questions that infer some sort of deviancy/illegal act/betrayall, things that everyone does all the time, but no one really wants to declare.

I mean at the end of the day it’s just text on the internet but its the idea that this pointless little thing is actively making you assume things about your so called “friends” and judge them on the spot about highly personal matters that any normal person might have utterly no idea about.

I wonder what she thought about me, have I cheated in a relationship before? How the hell is this girl going to know! Perhaps this comes down to how good a friend someone really is, should you just add anyone or should they actually be a friend you see a lot in real life? There is that argument, but what the fuck is the use of an app like this that just stirs gossip and assumptions. Not just innocent little things either like “such and such is good looking”, really deep personal things that you wouldnt normally want your mates to know!

Dirty little facebook, the people that actively use this shit need something called a life.
Stop worrying so much about other people’s business and go out and do something for yourself you pathetic little ants.

So I go into an O2 store in December and ask when I’m eligible for an upgrade, as according to the details on my account online, it’s pretty soon.  The very helpful (I was delighted with the service, it has to be said!) girl said I was eligible for upgrade on the, and I quote, “…xxth January, that’s early… really early!”

Brilliant! So the date arrives and I make my way to the O2 shop, looking forward to my shiny new phone, only to be told - by the assistant manager no less - that I couldn’t upgrade until June.  Huh? When?  June.  So I asked where the delusional little twat from before got the xxth January from and he kind of just waved at his screen.  On looking, the only place “xxth January 2008″ could have come from, was if you just picked a few random numbers from random sections of the screen.

Great.  Either she was just lying to me, or she cannot read.

You shit bitch.  I am displeased with O2 at this moment in time.

As you may have all worked out by now I’m fairly anti organised religion, to put it mildly.
I firmly believe it has no place at all in future society for all the destruction it has caused and will continue to cause in the coming years, all the promotion of closed mindedness and a large tradition of brainwashing. Controlling kids with messages of fear into beleiving archaic ideals with utterly no foundations etc… it really has to go.

So this article both gave me a laugh and made me quite angry at the same time:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7818980.stm

To quote a madman:

—

But Stephen Green, national director of Christian Voice, said: “There is plenty of evidence for God, from people’s personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.

—

This guy is fucking nuts, sorry but there is no other way to put it. There is “plenty of evidence” for God? What with God’s complete abandonment of humankind a few “thousand years” ago after supposedly creating the entire planet and everything else in the universe in 6 days. Obvious living breathing proof of such deeds in the form of… translated and horrendously rewritten scripture should not be overlooked… that a living, breathing man happen to write down in the first place. From er, voices in his head. ITS CALLED AN IMAGINATION.

This could go on for a while, and would likely start making me quite angry. I could quote a multitude of facts, figures, information, logic thought processes, oxymoronic paradigms etc… but lets sum it with the final quote which to me says it all:

—

“I am sure that Stephen Green really does think there is a great deal of evidence for a God (though presumably only the one that he believes in), but I pity the ASA if they are going to be expected to rule on the probability of God’s existence.”

—

And there we have the crux of the issue, this dellusional fuckwit is 100% convinced that God exists because he can see things around him he can’t explain. He doesn’t want logical answers to the issues that perplex us, he doesn’t want to further himself and actually grow a person to work things out for himself, he’d much rather read a 2000 year old story book responsible for killing millions and sit there content on his fat asshole. Probably tossing the salad of a dog.

Still, at least he’s 100% convinced and comfortable in the knowledge that the God he happens to believe in has supporting evidence to be real, at least in his own derranged head. God forbid (ahahaha) that one of the other multitude of religions be correct instead of him. Apologies but the argument of “you can’t prove what I’m saying is wrong so therefor it’s just a legiable as anything else” is one of the most rediculous arguements ever. It’s up to someone with a theory to prove it true, not just assume out of “belief”.

What a prick.

People that just amble along in the middle lane of motorways, especially when the fucking thing is packed and slowing down anyway, need a serious kicking.

I’m talking a restructuring of their face.

Usually these people are the majority of the reason things slow down for everyone else, they the see the distant rear lights of a lorry about 2 miles up the road and then just move into the middle causing other people to be limited to 1 overtaking lane. The whole thing starts to choke. Then all you need is one cock end to actually drive 5 mph faster than them whilst overtaking and the whole thing falls apart. I was doing 45 mph home on the M3 on a sunday evening from band practise because a whole pack of utter bellends were just sat in the middle lane with absolutely no idea of what was going on around them. Probably sitting there going “hrm.. lot of traffic tonight, road is really quite full” without realising there was a FUCKOFF CAR SHAPED GAP TO THEIR LEFT in the form of ANOTHER LANE that they could get the fuck out of the way into.

The thing is, as if that isn’t bad enough the ones that SERIOUSLY rage me are the utter cunts that sit there doing 60 in the middle lane and then flash their fucking main beam lights at you after you undertake them and pull back in.

Now I know undertaking isn’t the safest thing in the world as someone may not check another vehichle is approaching from that side, but really, if you’ve got time to be safely undertaken in the fucking first place you had time to move out of my sodding way.

When you drift past them and move into the 20 car length gap between them and the other cunt who is doing the same thing just up infront and they dare flash their lights at me it makes me want to knife them in the face, with a meat cleaver. As if I’VE done something wrong? Af if driving like an utter inconsiderate prick isn’t bad enough they get angry that you’ve dared undertake them and decide to blind you for your troubles? That is the thing though, those people have 0% idea that they are actually doing anything wrong at all. Undertaking isn’t actually illegal and if going past someone on the inside is the only way of doing a decent speed on the motorway I’m going to do it.

The sort of person that fucks up like that without realising then lashes out at anyone else needs a bit of verbal in their ear and then my fist in their fucking bracket. Bunch of utter thick, inconsiderate cunts. Get out of my fucking way.

It seems that the BBC, amongst telling us who’s bombing who in Israel/Gaza, how many people have died in a plane crash and just how useless the VAT decrease has been, thinks that the UK public simply MUST know about the forthcoming revelation of the 11th actor to play as Doctor Who.

Seriously, who gives a shit?