Gaming Thread, Weekly Edition!

Good afternoon Morons! SilverGTP leads the thread this week. You can relax now; I know you’ve been trolling while eagerly anticipating the next Gaming Thread. Well here it is, just for you.

This week we'll be discussing a new Call of Doody game, Steam, Team Fortress 2 and other miscellaneous topics of interest.

Electronic Arts wants to hear from you. You read it right; EA wants your input about their Origin service. We can only hope they actually listen to gamers but I wouldn’t count on it, if past experience is any indication. Give EA a piece of your mind

Friday night we had an online Moron Meetup in Team Fortress 2. We had a great time and it would be even better with more Morons. Everything is better with more Morons! Watch the announcements in the AoSHQ Steam group for details about the next event.

Next up is the announcement of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, releasing November 13 of this year. This one is being developed by Treyarch and it will include Zombies. It better include Zombies damn it. It shouldn’t be Nazi Zombies this time because the story takes place in the year 2025. I’m hoping for zombie occupiers as the target. CoD BLOPS 2 pre-orders are already 30% above the original BLOPS.

The reveal trailer looks pretty awesome, so watch it:

It’s a player created story Yep, for the first time in Call Of Duty history the course of the narrative will be in your hands. Both through deliberate choice, and tests of skill, you’ll decide the outcome of missions (some of which can be failed completely) and the fate of key cast members. The game also features multiple endings, so my playthrough will likely be different from yours. (Mine’s definitely going to be better.) It’s gone sandbox Not completely, but an all-new mission type within the single-player campaign is introducing sandbox gameplay to the series. Known as Strike Force, these missions give you a squad of soldiers and a selection of futuristic tech with which to complete an objective, and they take place over multiplayer-style maps. It’s got fancy future setting and gadgets With the game mainly set in 2025 there’s a raft of new toys to play with. Armed quadrotors can be called in with a touch of a wrist-mounted display, assault sentry drones will wheel up and down like R2-D2 with a bloodlust, and then there’s the CLAW. Which stands for Cognitive Land Assault Weapon, but which really means ‘four-legged tank the size of a Volkswagen Polo with a ruddy great cannon on top.’

Although there will be missions that flash back to the Cold War 1980s, the majority of levels will take place 13 years from now. China and the USA are embroiled in an all-new chilly conflict, and this one is all about REM. Not in the sense that What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? is going to be blaring out as you mow down hostiles (sadly), rather the new global conflict concerna rare earth minerals.
HT – Official Playstation Magazine UK

As always, you can find me on Twitter

Hey, it's Lemmenkainen.

Some games are duds, obvious horrible duds, smelling like the bad end of a baby. An example I saw just this morning is a demo on Xbox 360 my son was playing called Spiderman: Friend or Foe. He was on a rooftop of a building fighting robots, and I said, "The robots can't fly or jump, so why don't you just web over to the next building?" and he said, "I can't the game won't let me." What kind of Spiderman game doesn't have wallcrawling and webslinging? No all games are bad though. Some are great and some are almost great.

Everyone has played those games, the ones where they were oh so close to something awesome, but didn't add the one feature, or a good enough story, to get there. I always loved zombie and survival games, but wanted one that was more than just a shooter and went the next step to interactive world. I want to build a base to keep out the walkers, with catwalks to nearby buildings. The computing power available now has to allow them to model a small town at least, inside and out. Imagine fortifying a Walmart to hold off the walkers so you could sit and eat twinkies.

In MMO news, Bethesda announced an Elder Scrolls MMO for next year. I loved all the Elder Scrolls games, and this one is supposed to span the entire continent of Tamriel. Most exciting for me is that one of the producers is Matt Firor, formerly of Mythic Entertainment, who did Dark Age of Camelot. I loved DAoC, and it's realm based PvP and three faction concept provided some of the best PvP fun I've ever had in a game.

This old and probably not interesting to anyone but me, but here's my old guild on Midgard Lancelot, Beware of the Penguins, running around 8 man slaughtering dirty Albs by the score. We never had a conventional group makeup at all either (usually skald, 3 healers, 2 runemasters, and a couple melee classes) , so we never were top tier, but we won against the best guilds on the server some of the time.

Afternoon Morons! Zakn Here!

Want to lead off with a big shout out to @gogman! He was kind enough to host our first Morons of TF2 Night. We had a bunch of fun, and it was on short notice. I went ahead and scheduled another one for Friday 5/11 at 10pm Eastern. Go ahead and hit up Aoxbox.net and click on the title. It should load up TF2 and their server. It's probably going to be on an achievement map, so just favorite the server and have it ready to go for Friday night. So yep, hit up The Steam Group, Get TF2 installed (It's Free to Play), and get ready to Join Morons of TF2 on Friday.

I'm not one for talking s... But, I was in the top 3 scores for every map we played. Silver? I had to hold his hand for even how to log in, let alone trying to get him on coms. Even then I still pumped hot lead in his chest. It is what it is...

I don't really have a ton this week. Been playing a shitload of Super Mario 3D land on my 3DS. I also regret that I didn't mention this gem from the online store. Pushmo is a 3D puzzler. It is fantastic, and it looks like there's tons of levels. Check it out 3DS types!

On the Super Mario 3D Land front, I'm at that oh god I need go back and get Stars mode. I had been doing a pretty decent job, but obviously not. The game cracks me up because I'll hit a wall of death and failure, and I think to myself, Nintendo doesn't hate their gamers what am I missing? Eventually I figure it out, but I seriously despise the ink ghost Mario. Such a PITA.

This and a lazy Saturday afternoon Reminded me of my days in Nuclear Power School with my Nintendo 64. I was watching Goldeneye on TV and I totally flashed back to all the hours I played in that game. Seriously even though I had a small TV in my Barracks room we would spend hours playing that horrible lets break the screen in to 4 tiles multiplayer mode. That and Mario Kart. We would record Ghosts of time trials and totally take turns trying to beat each others times. We literally had one of those mini dry erase boards on my wall, and people would post thier times and messages of hate. And then of course there was versus mode. I learned to be EVIL in that mode. Pull off bank shots with green shells, all kinds of stuff. Yep I was on Vols, under 21, and engaged....So yep that's what I did to kill time in Orlando. If you have some memories of an old Console, or Games in the past, Share the goods!

Also Goldeneye had a great Intro. Notice that Lenin Leaning Forward thing? Yep me too. The game followed movie almost to a tee.

I kinda ruined some of the memories by looking at youtubes. Gah so spoiled by modern Graphics.

I don't really have alot on the Eve front this week. Been busy, but nothing really notable. Hulkageddon is going gangbusters. The killboard ticked to over 500bil in kills so far. So stay frosty you Bears! I have all my stuff staged, and my team set...I'm just waiting for people to be complacent! Also, Eve hit it's 9 year anniversary, so make sure and select your free gift!

CCP did a dev blog about Burn Jita. Lots of Graphs. If you like graphs, you probably already play Eve and already read it. Goons had a post, but it's behind stuff. Apparently in Plex conversion over $20,000 in stuff was blown up. It's amazing how insulated Eve players are. If you are outside the game, you often just have no idea on WTF is actually going on. Heck Helicity points out that even if they are active, people don't Pay Attention in Class!

I started playing because of massive in game events like Burn Jita and Hulkageddon. Alot of this I blame on just playing/living in High Security Space. Feel free to post about it, but I know once I started doing PvP, I started paying attention to blogs and podcasts about the larger game. Who is moving where, whats happening in my area etc. You had to do it, or you'd run into a brick wall of f*** and die horribly. Now that I'm going on 6 months living in null, it goes doubly. I HAVE to know whats going on, or else I'm going to lose money and take the quick trip back to a station. Hell, if you go too AFK and your alliance Failscades like I witnessed in Branch, you could lose almost everything you own if it's at station that you no longer control. I think back to Red Dawn: It's a Real War kid, it's here every day.

Giant Bomb brought up Burn Jita this week during their podcast

There's so much wrong there, but if you don't play, I could totally see where the misconceptions would spring from. It was a good laugh. Eve is 1980's Lebanon. I had a flash back to a Vince Flynn book :)

This is New Eden Spot Light. Seriously fighting in frigs is probably my favorite thing about living in Null. Feel free to laugh at the hair. I know I did.

That's all I got Men (and Ette's). Enjoy your Sunday.

Oh on the Ette front. I will include a recipe. Zakn's Red Beans and Rice:

1lb of Red Beans preped Quick Boil method. (Feel free to do the overnight soak)
1 and 1/2 lbs of Kielbasa (Feel free to substitute ham or left over turkey. Soaking a ham hock is so darn tasty!)
4 cups of White Rice (mix some wild rice in if you are that cool)
Cayenne pepper and Tabasco to Taste. I tend to hold back on the Tabasco because it's so Vinegary. Franks Red Hot works well. But in time it's better if you just season it yourself with a mix of red and black pepper. Plus Tabasco is easy to tap onto your dish to kick it up a notch.

Anyways. I like the Crock Pot method, but you could do it old school on the stove like my Mum did. But you really have to stir the shit out of it, or you risk crapping out an entire batch by burning the beans.

Crock pot method: Wash the beans and boil in Chicken Broth for 2 min and then let them soak covered for an hour with no heat. Cut up kielbasa/meat, add both to Crock pot plus the a big ass can of Chicken broth (if you strained the broth you boiled them in). Turn the Crock pot to high and let it cook for 6ish hours. Stir it randomly just to make sure you aren't having beans stick on the crock and burning.

Use your spoon to crush up a bunch/some of the beans to make a sort of mash. Add in some rice to soak up the extra broth and re-cover as you cook the rice.

I like to use broth to cook my rice. So boil the broth, add the rice, cover, and remove from heat. Fork it to get some fluff.

Serve the Red beans/meat over the rice. Feel free to not use meat. I know when times were lean that's what we did. Use Tabasco to flavor if you like to up a notch from the rest of your audience.

PS I don't like celery or other stuff, so Mom accommodated me. Feel free to add vegies to texture the dish. Also, if you aren't sweating when you eat it, it's not hot enough.

posted by Gang of Gaming Morons! at 03:52 PM

| Access Comments