So, it's official. I'm a gamer. And not in the cool way either. I'm a super-nerd. A few months ago I
bought a game called Team Fortress 2 through an online gaming program called Steam. Steam is operated by a company called VALVe who creates games, including Team Fortress 2. One of my friends here on the hall bought it before me, and it looked really cool, so I bought it, along with my roommate and the roommate of my friend who bought it first. Then before Christmas break VALVe released another game, called Left 4 Dead. I played a demo of it, and I loved it. So I bought it. Now, let me describe these two games to you.
Team Fortress 2 is a 1st person shooter with two different teams, RED and BLU. Each team has a different color, and I'm fairly certain you can figure out which color goes to which team. There are a total of 9 classes that you can be, a Scout, a Pyro, a Soldier, a Demoman, a Heavy, an Engineer, a Medic, a Spy and finally a Sniper. The best part, is that each class is has an extreme personality. For example, the Demoman is an AfroScottish man with an eye patch, and the Sniper is an Austrailan with some of the most random lines I've ever heard. There are many different kinds of maps, the most common is control point, where teams compete to control all the points on the map (depending on how many a team holds, others will be locked so that teams don't have to defend all CPs at once). Then there are capture the flag maps where teams have to capture the intelligence of the other team. There are pay load maps where one team is pushing a bomb to the other team's base, and the defending team has to prevent the bomb from getting to the end. Finally there are arena maps where the whole point of the game is to kill all the other players, however, to prevent these from going on for too long, there is a control point that is activated a few minutes into the round so spys can't just go invisible indefinitely to prevent their team from losing. Then there are custom maps that are made by people who like the game, some follow these guidelines, others are completely origional.
(left to right) Pyro, Engineer, Sniper, Spy, Heavy, Demoman, Medic, Scout, Soldier
Left 4 Dead is a zombie game. It has 4 main characters who are known as the survivors, and they must work their way through a series of levels. There are 5 levels per every campaign, and there are 4 campaigns total. At first you would think that game play would get boring with such limited options, but with how things spawn (appear in gamer lingo) you will almost never find the exact same combination of items in the same locations or in the same quantities. There are 4 survivors you can play as. There is Bill, an ex-military type who is getting gray around the edges. There is Francis, who is a biker with lots of tattoos, but who is dumb as nails. There is Zoey, the only girl, who wears jeans and a pink track jacket. Finally there is Louis, he's an African-American businessman who is wearing a red tie and designer watch from before the infection hit. Then if campaign mode is getting a little dull and you want to switch things up, there is Versus mode where you play one round as the survivors, and the next as a special infected. In campaign mode special infected are bots that can be really annoying and deadly. There are Smokers, that pull survivors with their tounges, Hunters that pounce on survivors and rip at their abdomens, Boomers that vomit/blow up on the survivors to call the horde (a large amount of common infected) to attack the survivors. Then there are the speical special infected, the Tank which is a huge zombie that can hurl cars and slabs of concrete at the survivors as well as knock them back; there is also the Witch, who sits crying at random intervals (no more than 2 places per section of the campaign) throughout the map, if she is disturbed (ie, shot at, gotten too close to, etc) she will attack the survivor who startled her until he or she is dead, then she will run away. The Tank is the only one of these 2 that can be played in versus mode, but both can deal heavy amounts of damage.
(left to right) Francis, Bill, Zoey, Louis
There are my internet based game obsessions. I've also become an avid player of Dungeons & Dragons. I won't go into any detail, because there is just too much. However, I will say that it is one of the best ways to release your creativity, because there are really no limits to what you can do. Yes, there are rules, but if you can imagine a character that is a weird race, or can do strange things, there is more than likely a race and class that fit your criteria, and if there isn't, you'll probably find something that you like even more in your search for what you origionally thought of.
So there you have it. I'm a nerd. Not only do I play these things, but I'm also a member of an online gaming community that discusses games like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead. It's called Stompfest and the people there are awesome people, funny too, not to mention great gamers.
Oh well, I like who I am, and I wouldn't change it for the world.
Here ends a post that I started before dinner, and kept getting distracted from.
