Pumping Irony

After a few months of half-hearted attempts, Aaron from Anyway Games, Oakstout, my non-blogger but fellow pilot friend Scott and I finally all got together for some Frontlines: Fuel of War this past Thursday and had a blast. Come to think of it, all three of us bloggers are also Casualties of War remnants; I wonder if CoW ever got around to creating a presense on XBL?

It was Aaron and Oakstout’s first time playing the game online at all, and they’d only briefly tried out the single-player to get a bit of a grip on the control scheme. Oakstout warned us how much he sucks playing shooters with controllers but jumped right in anyway (take that Hudson! ) and fared quite well.

The four of us created an XBL Party so we could all voicechat then I created a private server so I could give a verbal tutorial on how the control scheme, objectives and the squad system work. After a few scrimmage matches, I switched us over to one of Kaos’ dedicated servers to get them into the real game.

When we joined, we filled the server, which had auto-balancing enabled. Scott and I managed to make the switch quickly to Red Star but Aaron and Oakstout were stuck on Western Coalition for awhile. It was fun, however, being on opposing teams yet chatting together. It almost felt sneaky or something, like we were traitorous spies working for the other side.

I memory serves, I got the first kill against Aaron, who was attempting to sneak up on me. He’d apparently been following me for a bit and was closing for the kill when I spun around and riddled him with bullets. A quick “Hi, Aaron” over party chat got some laughs.

Awhile later, I hear Oakstout giggling like a schoolgirl. “Tee hee hee!” I suspiciously ask what he’s up to but receive just a “oh, nothing…” for a reply. Then I hear him “tee hee hee” again. I know he’s up to something… Then he says “hey, Scott, turn around for me.” Huh? You’re on the other team! What do you mean turn around? So I turn around and see the barrel of a tank’s cannon pointed at my head a split-second before a deafening BOOM! shakes my living room from Oakstout firing a cannon directly into my face. How he managed to sneak up on me in a loud tank I’ll never know, but I’m certain my short attention span had nothing to do with it…

One of the biggest adrenaline-charged laugh-fests came later on the Oilfield map. By that time, Aaron and Oakstout had finally managed to find slots on the Red Star side so all four of us were squad-mates along with the other 21 players on Red Star faction. Aaron was sneaking into one of the Western Coalition objectives while Scott was piloting a helicopter in his direction. Scott picked up Oakstout and myself, who promptly took controls of the turrets and rained a hail of lead down on the unsuspecting Western Coalition troops. Suddenly three WC choppers rose up seemingly out of nowhere and had us triangulated. Scott was frantically jinking left, right, up and down as all three enemy choppers assaulted us with bullets and rockets. Oakstout and I were shouting instructions to Scott and it almost looked like we were going to escape when the WC players tricked us into a bad position. Oakstout yelled “Descend! Descend!” as I’m yelling “Climb! Climb!” when three full volley’s of rockets slammed into our poor chopper and the sky was filled with a fiery blast as the charred, smoking remains of our corpses fell to the ground. Even Aaron said “jeez, I heard that explosion all the way over here!” Oakstout’s laughter over that one was infectious! That was an exciting few minutes attempting to fight out of a hopeless situation and nearly pulling it off.

If you get into a game with Aaron, don’t be fooled: he’s good! That was his first time playing and he continually held the #3 spot for Red Star on that server, while I was typically down in the 7-9 range.

As much as I like MMOGs, sometimes it’s even more fun to get with some friends in a normal multiplayer game and just have fun in a cooperative/competitive environment.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 4:02 pm and is filed under FPS, Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.