Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Game Review : GTA IV Part II : The joys of Multiplayer

After almost a month or so playing GTA IV, I am still engrossed in the game and have yetto even complete the main storyline(I am at 60% plus or minus). Yet during the time when I was in training(reservist), Lil Miss Whiney fired up teh mulitplayer aspect of the game and gave me good news.

Soon I was intrigued by this part of teh game that I did not want to touch till I completed the main game. Yet when I watched how much Fun LMW was having on it, I had to give it a go.

As with any multiplayer game, you can customize your avatar. As you play the game you earn money, this money denotes the rank you are and teh more money you earn, you get higher ranks. Ranks allow you to customize your avatar even more, as in more selection of heads, bodies, and pants are unlocked, similar to Warhawk's.

Only let down in mutiplayer is the fact that it only allows up to 16 players at one time. Just imagine if it can accomadate 48 players, or even 64..... that would be mayhem at best and anarchy most of the time. Also there is the occasional lag problems where cars jump from 2 meters away or so but that is forgivable.

In multiplayer there are several modes for you to choose from from death matchs to team games like 'cops n robbers'. All of a sudden multiplayer seems like a whole other game packaged with GTA IV. You can have hours of fun just going around killing other online players are work together to do jobs while competing with rival gangs.

On top of that, you see many weirder things happening in mulitplayer than in single player, you can always expect a real life person to do something crazy. The most memorable game I had was in 'Team Mafiya work' when our team just unloaded some NPC objective and this 1 guy from tehotehr team came to where were. Instinctly all of us(4 of us in super GTs) charged towards him in 4 different directions pinning him to a building. I wondered what he was thinking when he saw the 4 cars converging towards him.

I give the multiplayer adspect of the game a solid 5 out of 5 consoles and experience will be affected by the quality and quantity of players ina single game.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Reservist ???!!!

I have been too lazy to blog recently, even when I had a lot to say about the 3 weeks of reservist training I had recently, I still find it hard to come to teh blog and update it. Anyway just an update on why I think the army organisation is a failure at such

First thing you get to hear whne you report to camp is, that in order to shorten our reservistto under 3 weeks, we will hope you understand that we will have to stay back on sats till 6pm every week. Understand this, we all have families, even on the outside world, most of us hold jobs that does not even required a full days of work on sats, so how the hell are we supposed to understand that point.

We never asked to shorten the reservist period and on top of it, the make up pay that most reservist gets is actually a sum that they use your basic pay and divide by 22 days a montha nd pay you according to the days you serve your stint till. But there is a catch, this calcutaion is based on a 5 day work week which is stated on the NS website. Which just says that we are in effect getting no pay for all the sats we burn. How very fucking nice.

Then there is this lil game you like to play with us, coz during the vesak day week end, the whole battalion did evry thing chop chop and somehow you let us go early on that sat. yet you felt that we were ripping you guys off and decided to ask the whole battalion to book in on vesak day itself at 7pm. So you expecting the whole battalion to tarbao and come in camp to eat frigging dinner sibo? Then how about those whom have family engagements?

Every year they call us up for training and every year they have to prove to me that they are very inefficient as a organisation. We are either ruchingto wait or waiting to rush. Every single frigging thing seems to be a last minute instruction. How the hell we going to defend this country properly with such a mentality?

The highlight of this training? Anyway this incamp is our ATEC, which is supposed to assess the combat readiness of the unit, on the 1st mission (out of 3) our CO(commanding officer) decided to be very garang, he went to the front lines to try to kill some enemies toward steh last objective of teh mission and some how he got killed. A frigging CO got killed..... I wonder what that will do to the moral and confidence of the men. Throughout the rest of the incamp, everyone was talking about it.

In the end we manage to have a just pass to the units combatr competency, which is just fine for me. Afterall, I did go thru 7 days of no shitting and no change of cloths and it I had to do this all over again, I might have gone insane and go kill someone there after. Also they should stop treating us as nsf and let us stay out on our own, it feels like we are gawd damn babies or something giving us excuses why we cannot stay out or so.