5punk has a long history of loving terrible games. Games which are broken, buggy and ridiculous. I think I’ve mentioned that before. We love them because they’re perfect for comedy, and they’re even funnier when you have a deadly serious community playing them. Last night we found such a game.
Meanwhile in Russia…
Mr Johnson, on the Friday games thread, suggested we give Tactical Intervention a go. It’s touted as a team competitive shooter by the guy who made the original Counterstrike mod. Not really something I would normally be interested in. MJ touted it as being hilariously broken, which suddenly made it desirable. The first indication of trouble came from Steam, which suggested it was around 5GB. That’s pretty hefty for a free game played for laughs, but I suspect it was far less than that since it downloaded in about ten minutes.
At first there wasn’t much broken to see. It’s not a good quality game, that much was apparent. It looks like CSS rather than CS:GO, and the pay-to-win model is blatant and awful, but we don’t care about that. Not for the purposes of this exercise, anyway. Bits noticed that you could pick up the fire extinguishers, and then that you could use them on each other. So began the first experiments. Turns out they don’t explode if you shoot them while someone is holding them, but they do if they’re on the ground. So that was fun.
Friendly fire extinguisher incident
It would be unfair to not even give the game a chance though, so we tried to beat the other side for a little while. As a shooter it’s okay. No iron sights, very few weapons, but the game modes and maps are okay. I browsed the flailing clothes on the racks in the shopping mall map and bashed stands of aftershave to clear my line of sight. Roman pulled off a lovely move by creeping around with a group of hostages and shooting me when I didn’t notice he was with them.
Then we found the propane tanks. Shoot them and they scoot off to explode somewhere. Pick them up and you can chuck them towards the enemy team and then shoot them. Get shot while you’re carrying them and they explode. Ahaha, now we’re having fun. Standing amongst the hostages with a propane tank robbed Johnson of a chunk of XP from killing two of them when I died. It should be a game mode, mandatory propane tanks. The game would be far better with that. Or some equally ridiculous game mode.
PROPANE TANKS ARE MANDATORY
Ridiculous game mode you say? Tactical Intervention is happy to oblige on that. I have no idea what the game mode is called, but there’s a map which has the terrorists chasing the counter terrorists and their VIP in cars along a racer-style mountain road. It’s fucking mental. The cars handle like crap, there are bugs galore, and if we were taking it seriously it probably would have been frustrating as hell. We got the impression from the comments of the other players that they were certainly frustrated. We thought it was awesome though.
We played a good hour or so of this I reckon. The bear puns returned, we played badly (not deliberately) and punned at anyone who complained. We found out that if the VIP had to bail out of his car (usually because it exploded), you could pick him up in another one by running him over. Speed didn’t seem to make any difference to this, sort of like an Alfa Romeo skyhook. Every game was a calamity, from terrible driving to people accidentally jumping out of cars instead of reloading, to Roman accidentally driving the wrong way and going headlong into the terrorists, ending the game in less than a minute (much to the chagrin of the Serious Players). Those of you reading who weren’t here last night but plan on 5punkygames in the near future, take note. We will certainly be playing this again.
Cue Bohemian Rhapsody guitar solo
There’s only so much of this one person can take though, as always. And as always we fell back to our old staple of a few games of Dota 2. We managed five games last night, which was pretty good, and four were against real meat-people. I think we lost three of those. I noticed something interesting though – they were all very quiet. I attribute this to one of three reasons:
1. They just didn’t want to say anything.
2. They were scared of being reported and chat-banned.
3. They had already been chat-banned.
Which is interesting to me, so I’ll use it for my weekly Dota evangelism. MOBAs (or whatever the fuck you want to call them, but the fact that people argue over it only proves the point) are notoriously bad for trolling and abuse. The thing is though, I’ve never seen it. Okay, I occasionally see someone being a bit of a dick, but never the constant flaming and hostility people accuse them of. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, or don’t play the game often enough. Except every conversation I see about this is the same – people who don’t play accuse it of being hostile, while people who do say ‘I must have been lucky, because I don’t see it.’ It’s not just Dota either, I played League of Legends for a while and I didn’t find that to be particularly hostile either.
Bits and Johnson proving 5punk do occasionally win.
Either way, we’re nice. We were congratulating the other guys on good kills and wished them well at the end. With no response. So maybe silence is the new flaming, and if that’s the case then the internet just became a slightly better place.
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