Monday, December 17, 2007

Retaliation is such a beautiful thing

I think I prefer shooters that give you the ability to respawn after you die. Yes, I know it's not a realistic thing but come on, is Halo 3 THAT realistic to begin with? If you respawn you get to retaliate and that can be a beautiful thing.

I always hate getting killed within in the first 30 seconds in Rainbow 6: Vegas only to sit there and watch all my other team members go on to finish the map. (Okay, not all my team members finish the map alive but one or two of them will . . . usually.) At least with Gears of War I lasted longer. Once I'm dead I usually get up, fix something to eat, go to the bathroom or do whatever as long as I'm back by the time the match ends. Don't get me wrong and think that I don't like R6V. Cause I do. It's just a different style of game play then what I typically like.

I like being able to come back and kill someone who just killed me. Playing Battlefront I knew where everything was. And since where you spawned was your choice I could figure out where I needed to be to get my revenge. With Call of Duty 4 where you respawn is random and for me that makes getting revenge so much harder.

I try to pay attention of where the other team is attacking from and how our team is doing against them. If they're trying to gain access to the three story house on Crash but my team keeps holding them off then I'm pretty sure they'll give up eventually and move on to another area. (Some teams don't appear to be that bright at times.) But I'm not all that familiar with the maps in the game so every time I spawn it takes me a moment or two to get my barrings and figure out which direction I should be headed in.

It doesn't help that every two story building looks like every other two story building on all the maps and my team doesn't have names for things. The names don't have to be descriptive either. Just something we can all remember. If we see a house that is more rubble than house we could call it "Pogue's house" then every one would know what we're talking about. Or the house Sand Dog calls the "the shit house" because it doesn't have a roof could just be called "Sand Dog's house" or just "the dog house". Or the house on the map Backlot (I think) that has some internal stairs that go up to a closed door so they're worthless could be the "hell house" because you can't get to heaven on those stairs. Stupid idea isn't it.

Anyway, Call of Duty 4 has an achievement just for retaliation. The "Cruelty" challenge is to "Kill an enemy, pick up his weapon, and kill the enemy again but with his own weapon". Sounds good to me (even though I haven't unlocked the challenge yet). I don't know if anyone on my friends list has completed that challenge yet, I'll have to ask the next time we play but I think it's a cool challenge. I also think it will be a long time before I get the opportunity to complete it.

There's a patch coming out for the game where the developers said they were added 9 new spawn points to every map. That's great and all but wouldn't it be better if we could pick our respawn points? Maybe divide the maps into zones and have a couple of respawn points in the zone. You could pick the zone but the respawn point you show up at could still be random. After all, retaliation is such a beautiful thing I just want to put myself in a position to get some.

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