For a while the Friday Diary was a staple of the 5punk front page, delighting us with tales of our hilarious Friday gaming sessions. Then two-and-a-half years ago, for reasons of procreation, they had to be suspended. But no more! I am once more in a position where I can ignore my children in order to make people on the internet laugh.
Laughter not guaranteed.
We return to 5punk.co.uk in a similar situation to where we left. Frigames still occur every week, we’re still shit, and we’re still not funny. What has changed is that we are now composed of 100% less Dota 2, and we use Discord instead of Teamspeak. These things have caused minimal disruption. Popular staples can be found on the front page, along with random crap we’ve picked up recently in a sale.
I began my return to diarying last night with an hour-and-a-half delay caused by the very thing that caused me to stop writing in the first place. Fortunately, through the modern technologies of Steam and Discord, I could see that everyone was having a delightful time playing Counterstrike Hide & Seek. You may remember this from the old diaries.
We’re about as subtle as this
By the time I made it people were playing Overwatch. We’ve been playing this since beta and it became popular quickly. Of course, as with any 5punky game that requires a specific number of people to play, we did not have that number of people. So we played a few custom games instead. As an action game the conversation mainly centred around people squealing about their latest kill or death, but we did take a little time out to get the discussion around to shitting on mouse mats. I forget why, but I do remember it was Pnut’s mouse mat which was in question.
The other significant thing about Overwatch, other than the numbers thing, is that the idle kick timer is remarkably aggressive. No pissing between games for you, says Blizzard, this is a game for athletes only! So drinking beer is not conducive to a good experience. When Pnut needed to empty his bladder and I went to get a beer, the game ended. Bali was destroying everyone anyway.
Fuck you, Genji.
To counteract Bali’s awesome we switched to Rocket League, which he sucks at. This has been hugely popular for about six months now, getting regular play even mid-week. Despite that we’re all pretty crap at it. Even better, it’s so much fun to play that you don’t care! As with Overwatch, the game’s frantic enough to dominate the conversation. That’s not to say points don’t meander their way to other subjects though, and I’m pretty sure someone’s special van got a mention, as well as Fritzl’s basement. It’s just that it all kind of blurs together in the chaos that is Rocket League.
I do recall Discord making Pnut sound like a robot for a little while. This naturally led to the insinuation that he has sex with fax machines. It’s not such a great leap of logic. I believe it’s about this time we also realised that nobody could hear Roman, after someone suggested he may have fallen asleep. Until then, he admitted, he just thought we were all being cockends to him because he was a noob. That’s not such a great leap of logic either.
Fair play Pnut, look at the buttons on it.
Next up came Quiplash, a sort of party game we play over Skype. Quiplash is naturally hilarious because the whole purpose is to come up with funny answers to questions, and vote on the best. It was a little lacklustre last night, but normally is has us in stitches. I’m not sure what went wrong really. Maybe the questions just weren’t that great, maybe it was because there were only five of us, and maybe we’re just not that funny. I’m sure we’ll be back on form tonight though.
Our last game of the night was Golf With Friends. We picked this up in the Steam Sales because it looked silly, and we weren’t disappointed. It’s a reasonable crazy golf game on the surface, but when you start adding the mutators, like ball collision (all players play simultaneously) and low gravity (everything’s better with low grav) then it gets even more crazy. The many cries of anguish and dismay, often aimed at each other, is worth the frustration of how ridiculous the game is. We concluded, in the end, that we hate it. And yet we keep playing anyway.
Why can’t I leave you alone, ball?
So the gaming ended on that bum note, although I’m sure we’ll golf again. 5punkers love golf for some reason. A few stragglers stayed back until the wee hours because Pnut had half a beer left, and drinking on his own makes him sad. We talked about Celebrity Big Brother, and so we all ended up feeling sad with him.