IainWell it’s a new day and a new month, yes I know it’s halfway through April but I’ve been busy. March has come and gone and with it, the celebration of my year’s Xbox Live subscription renual. A year’s subscription pretty much wasted as the only games I ever played online in the first nine or ten months were Call of Duty 4 and the occasional scrap on Soul Calibur IV. This year’s subscription, on the other hand, brings about a new and improved me. If the old me was a Live virgin, this year’s already leaving so many notches on my gold account bedpost that it may be mistaken for severe case of woodworm.
Let me start by saying that online gaming isn’t a new experience to me. I’ve played many a PC game online and had a lot of fun doing it but my first live experience, which involved me and a small group of either 12 year old boys or 30 year old eunochs who thought they were being clever by camping for the whole match and resorting to racism and rubbish insults whenever they were killed, was an entirely different beast. Now as you can imagine, this isn’t the best way to be introduced to a service you need to pay around £45 a year for, but this is the man who has over £100 worth of Rotostak caging for one dwarf hamster. The months that followed my plunge into the live community were strictly single player affairs, only leaving the comfort of one man’s mission to blow things up in interesting ways for the occasional COD4 battle with a few friends. That is until January. Cue dramatic music.
In January I was introduced to a site called ready-up.net through an advert for new staff writers. In January I joined the forum of said site. In January, dramatic pause, I discovered the fun side of Xbox Live gaming.
Filed under: Ready-up
The following blog is taken from a thread on ready-up.net entitled “interview a forumer”. Incase the title wasn’t a giveaway, forum members will be asked 5 questions from various other forumers. Once the questions have been answered, the interviewee then gets to pick a new victim for interrogation. This blog contains the answers to my time in the spotlight
Question 1 – What is your most despised gaming ‘trope’ and why?
*runs off to wikipedia to find out what a trope is* I don’t know if this counts but I hate how games seem to tack on co-op modes, whether the game needs them or not. The why: because it just feels like a cheap gimmick to get people to play online. Failing that, the “big guns, big muscles, tiny brain” approach to most FPS characters is getting on my nerves because there’s absolutely no emotional attatchment to characters with a lower IQ than a bag of dead cats.
Question 2 – If you could be a character in any film who would you be and why?
I would be Cris Johnson from Next because a) it’s based on a Philip K Dick story b) it’s one of Nic Cage’s best roles c) the ability to see into the future would be awesome but if it’s only for a short space of time, you wouldn’t be expected to put on spangly leggings and become a “superhero”.
Question 3 – Which is better, jaffa cakes or hobnobs?
In an effort to avoid being stabbed for answering incorrectly, I’m going to say it depends on what mood I’m in.
Question 4 – Who would play you in a film of your life?
Apparently I look a little like Jake Gyllenhaal but I would like to see Keanu Reeves do it.
Question 5 – If you were to create a game of your own which genre would it be and what lessons would the story teach us?
Funnily enough, I have a huge stack of paper in my room full of game ideas I’ve scribbled down/drawn out etc. The most recent was the idea of making a FPS based around the animatrix episodes “The Second Renaissance” because it has such a great story to it. The story would be based around a kid growing up at the start of the trial of B1-66ER (the first robot to kill a human) and how he witnesses the abominations caused by both sides e.g. with the destruction and alienation of all robots, the machine city of 01 being refused a seat at the UN, the first strikes in the human-machine war, the machines torturing humans to find weaknesses, the creation of the 1st matrix program and the establishment of the very first Zion. The lessons learned would be very close to that of the animation so mainly focussed around the atrocities caused by both factions in war making them as bad as each other and how wrong segregating based on ethnicity/gender etc is
