Buddy moments in gaming

Cafe Society
1

As fun as playing console/PC games is, playing them with a buddy can be 10x better in my opinion. Over the past year my friend and I were hooked on an online game called Planetside. We’re not as crazy about it now a year later (as flashier and cooler things have come along since then to divert our short attention spans :wink: ) but we still had some great moments in that game.

Just to give some info on this game- a lot of FPS games these days which let you drive vehicles have a very streamlined process that lets one player control the whole kaboodle. Command and Conquer: Renegade, and the Desert Combat mod to Battlefield 1942 are good examples. This is fun and all, but it doesn’t inherently encourage team play, since you have a battlefield of one-man wrecking crews, each set out to wreck havoc in their own way (erronously flying planes into the ground like lawn darts comes to mind) In Planetside most vehicles needed at least 2 people- one guy to drive and one guy to shoot. You generally wanted to pair up with someone you trusted, since you had to work as a team just to stay alive.

My friend and I played at his apartment, on two computers. We would fly the Liberator, the game’s bomber. He would fly, I would bomb. Oh man was that fun! Sometimes his outfit would organize bombing ‘campaigns’ where we would group up with as many as fifteen other bombers and intercept enemy tank colums, turning them into rubbish. It was a thankless job, we were constantly threatened by ground fire and prowling fighters. Our bomber was big, easy to see, and slow. It had a tailgun, but the gun couldn’t aim higher than 0 degrees elevation, which meant that if a fighter got behind and above us, we were generally toast (We were so sluggish that Reaver gunships could hit us with salvos of rockets! ).

What was really fun was seeing how long we could keep that tub alive. It was easy enough to find a base that could spawn a bomber, but a real challenge to not get shot down 15 seconds into a bomb run. It is also extremely nerve-racking when there are 150+ badguys on the ground and every rocket launcher, assault rifle and pea shooter is trained on us as we fly past. We’ve had some moments that reminded me of the movie Memphis Belle, and got some awesome screenshots of us dropping bombs amidst what looks like thousands of tracer rounds coming at us. It is also great to come back to home base for repairs and look at the hundreds of bullet holes and scorch marks on the fuselage :smiley:

2

My college roommate and I spent hours and hours trading turns on Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle on my Mac Plus. It must’ve taken us about a month to make it far enough to reach the Black Knight on the final level of the game, and neither one of us could beat him. It became an obsession. One day, I came back early from classes (I skipped an afternoon class) to sneak into the room and try to beat the game myself. I found the room empty with nothing on except for my Mac, sitting on the final victory screen. That sneaky bastard had finished the game without me!

We also played the adventure game Uninvited cooperatively, and in retrospect I think that’s why I have such good memories of the game. Because the game itself wasn’t very good.

It’s funny that I’d forgotten about all of these, since I was just wondering recently why there aren’t more cooperative videogames nowadays. I’d forgotten that you can turn any game cooperative if you’re dedicated enough.

I haven’t played the multiplayer version yet, but I’ve heard that Halo for the Xbox is the best “buddy game” there is. At my last company, we were in crunch mode when we got a pre-release copy of Halo to try out. Four of the guys decided to start it after work finished that day. I left around midnight, and they’d just started. When I came in the next morning at around nine A.M., they were all sitting in pretty much the same positions, still fixated on the screen. I said “Good morning,” and they looked up with bleary eyes and said, “This is the best fucking game ever made.” Solo’s just not the same.

3

Yea, Morelin and I run stuff all the time. Right now we’re fighting through Diablo 2 again and we’re going to go back to Camelot, since FilePlanet has a free 7 day trial. Games are way cooler when someone’s close by that you can holler at and coordinate with.

4

Back when I gamed online (with some dopers and some non, as well as one guy who’s a doper but whom I met in college), I used to play with one or two guys a lot. Eventually we got into magicfinding in Diablo 2 Expansion, and to make a long and technically complicated story shorter, I was doing a Meph run just to kill time before we left for a renfest. Nightmare run, probably 600-700 LH MF (crap, there went the “no complicated technical stuff”), but just because we were waiting for someone to show up.

So he’s looking over my shoulder as I kill Meph, expecting something from Sigon’s set, and maybe an ethereal cracked sash or summat (NM Meph isn’t known for his uber drops).

A gold ballista drops. My jaw drops. His jaw drops. He stammers “That’s … that’s the–”

I continue “Holy hell. [expletive deleted, and there was a lot.] Magicfinding will never be the same.” Completely calm outwardly. I started mentally planning the build for the character that would eventually go on to log several thousand hours of magicfind, rush over a hundred characters, get up to level 97 and find probably close to 90% of the set and unique items in the game (at the time).

A few months before that (before we had figured out that higher resists were more important than insanely high defense on armor), I was shopping with either my druid or my paladin and came across armor with defense 1199.

“Rob, Lance, come. Now.” They came right quick and looked. There ought to be a dent in the floor from where their jaws hit it, but alas the human jaw cannot go that far. I try to buy it, but I don’t have the money. Worse, I’ve made a game with gobbledygook as the name and something similar as the password. I sell all the perfect gems I have, most of the runes (nothing altogether high), some other gear, and bring in another character to get his gold and sell all he has until we finally clear the 600K+ gold pieces needed.

We spend the next hour talking, and every five seconds or so, someone comes out with “and holy shit that armor’s defense is 1199.”

I would go on to find armor with higher defense (two Gladiator’s Banes and armor with defense of almost 1600), but at the time it was simply inconceivable.

Last story, then I’ll stop for now. This happened when the burizon (the character who used the buriza I mentioned finding earlier) was level 93 or so, doing Meph runs and cow runs with fair ease. Rob and I had been trying to figure out how to squeeze more MF out of her and get her running 500+ MF. He’d taken to looking at partial set mods, and found that Tancred’s boots and amulet gave 30% frw (important for any mfer), 78% mf and some other junk. We’d been looking. and looking. and looking. for those blasted boots. I’m talking months spent looking for boots that could spawn in act 1 of norm. Boots. Not heavy boots, not light plated boots, just tiny little boots with a defense of 2.

One day he’s farting around with a character and takes him through Normal Mephisto. I’m playing on the other machine, helping him but not doing everything for him.

Mephisto falls.

So do green boots.

Tiny little green boots.

“Trade screen. NOW.” I don’t want to lose those boots to the room lagging out. He’s having fun saying “Hmm, maybe I should put these on a mule or test them out…” but eventually I get my green boots.

That burizon’s MF would top out close to 500 before settling for a more reasonable 380 (also resulted in dying a lot less). She would yield to a barb with a MF that topped 750 with LH (the story of finding Skullder’s Ire and the Baraner’s Stars I’ll save for another time).

5

:confused:

6

I’m haven’t been much of a gamer since I used to have my Atari 2600. (Which I greatly regret getting rid of in a yard sale. Stupid. Stupid.) I could play a game like River Raid day after day, month after month, yet I grow tired of most modern games fairly quickly. Even when I was at university for a short time, I didn’t really jump at playing, despite many friendly offers. I often preferred watching others play.

The most advanced game system I have in a Super Nintendo, which I’ll probably get rid of. I’ll be keeping my original Nintendo though. And my laptop is in no way capable of playing the new games out there. StarCraft and Thief II are the only games I own. I grew bored of the former before really getting very far, and haven’t really started playing the latter. (I’m still dicking around on the intro level.)

Anyhoo, I have played some good games with friends in the past. I remember one game I played at university where they set the options so that grenades were the only weapons you could use. Of course, there were different types of grenades. And, while everyone else kept blowing everything up - including themselves - with the bouncing ones, I killed off everyone just using regular old timed-release ones.

As for working together in a game, I went to visit a good friend of mine out of town, and he had borrowed a game system from a co-worker for a while. One of the games was a typical first-person shooter (which I believe was basically a knock-off of a James Bond game). While you couldn’t play together as a team, we’d take turns depending on what kind of level we had to go through.

My friend was more of a charge-in-and-shoot-everything-up kind of player, while I’m more of a hide-in-the-shadows-and-peek-around-corners player. So things worked out pretty good when he wasn’t getting himself blown up in a kamikaze rampage.

And, Flander, I second your :confused: when it comes to some of the posts by more experienced game players.

Anyhoo…