Silly Wampa

I play some first person shooters. They can be fun sometimes. other times, they’re annoyingly frustrating. One of my favorites is Star Wars Battlefront II. I love star wars games. Had Jedi Arena and Empire Strikes Back on my Atari 2600. played X-Wing on my old DOS 486pc. I got SWBF I a few years back for my birthday. When SWBF II came out, I was all over it. Great Game! I play the single player campaign and the multiplayer online.

Lately, I’ve been playing multiplayer A LOT! I like the shoot-em-up aspect of the game. I find that many of the players I’m up against only care about one thing, getting kills no matter what. That means playing as one of the characters that has a rocket launcher(with mines) or the detpacks (triggered explosives). Those items are meant for destroying vehicles or surprising an enemy with a strategically placed mine. People have decided to use them as primary weapons of choice to get their kill rates higher. Instead of trying to shoot you, they just blow you up. On some maps, the battles are really close in tight spaces so doing that often takes out your teammates too. What team? They only care about kills, not the team. Personally, I like going head to head with a guy and we’re both blasting away, trying to get each other and one of us gets the other. Somehow it seems more honorable that way. You walk into a firefight and someone just throws a detpack or blows you up with a rocket, it isnt the same. I’m not above using rockets or grenades when necessary, but I try not to use them when teammates are around.

Now I’m not one to brag about my gaming prowess, and for good reason, I’m not very good. But as bad as I am, I could easily resort to the same “blow em all to hell” tactics and get higher kill counts. How much skill does it take to blow one player up with a bomb meant to blow up a tank? Not much at all.

The same people who do this also seem to ignore the goal of the game, capture all the Command Posts (or flags, if playing CTF). They only want to kill kill kill, and don’t bother going after CPs. I try to be sneaky and will sometimes avoid a firefight to get to the objective. Oh well, what can you do?

I’m just venting here. Not like I expect anyone to even care. Hmm, time to get back on and get blown up again.

I’ve been trying out both of these music services. These are both examples of how interactive radio is starting to bloom. Both operate under a similar premise. You type in the name of a band or artist you like, they find that artist and others just like them. For example, one of my favorite bands is the Descendents. On both services I searched for them and found them plus other bands like Black Flag, Pennywise, Less than Jake, etc. A whole bunch of punk and ska bands. Both services let you skip songs you don’t like which is a huge plus. You can also tag songs you do like so the service can try to match your preferences.

The services vary in how they get the music to you. For Last.fm I downloaded their player, logged in and started looking for bands. I like the standalone player idea. It will even let you use Winamp or another medai player, but it still has to launch to connect to the service. I just wish it would minimize to the system tray like winamp does.

Pandora is a web based service. Flash is required, and I’m not sure, but I think java is too. I don’t like the fact that if you skip too many songs within an hour, you can’t skip anymore. I think I skipped 10 songs in a row and then got a message telling me that due to their license agreement, they can’t let me skip anymore songs this hour. That’s a load of shit.

So, I don’t have any real conclusions or recommendations, just observations. I’d say I probably prefer last.fm so far though.