Area Man's Still Got It

Ok, after a year-long absence, I've finally returned to my old love. The one game that could pull me away from WoW is new and improved.

For those of you (everyone except Dave) who don't know what I'm talking about, this is of course Day of Defeat (DoD), a Half-Life mod. I got hooked on it my senior year, and couldn't get enough. Gradually, my interest waned and then I stopped altogether when Blizzard began extracting my soul one level at a time.

But now, with Half-Life 2 and the Source engine, they've given DoD a much needed face lift and using HL2 graphics and physics, we have Day of Defeat: Source.

Is the game everything it was expected to be? Will it provide you a satisfying online WWII multiplayer experience? Will you make new friends and kill new enemies? Yes. All that and more.

This game will cure cancer. It will reshape the interior of your microwave oven to harmonicly balance it so it always heats evenly. It will vacuum and shampoo your carpets, while leaving your hair shiny and full-bodied, and eliminating split ends and dandruff. It will walk your dog twice a day, clean your cat's litter box, and tutor your children to improve their grades in math. This game has already balanced the Federal budget deficit while negotiating with North Korea and Iran to destroy any nuclear capacities they've been developing. This game, to put it in lay man's terms, is da bomb.

But the one prevailing thing about DoD and DoD:S. It's hard. It's a very, very hard game. This is the type of game where you die three times on the way to the store to buy it (or while downloading it and installing it, as the case may be). Back in my day I got pretty good at it. One of the best measures of DoD skillz is your Kills to Deaths ratio. K:D of 1:1 is average, and if all players on a server were equal skill, they'd all have a ratio around that. I could usually get around 1.5:1. On a good day I might even get 2:1. So my big concern was how much was I going to suck after my year-long absence?

Well...



That much. This is a screen shot from one of my first games after I started playing again. It's the score list at the change-of-level rotation. My score is the highlighted one in red. First column is player name ([OCIBTYC] Joe Cool), second is class (Axis Support; uses an Stg-44 assault rifle), third is flag captures (30), fourth is kills (81), fifth is deaths (28) and last is latency (ping; 23).

So my K:D is 81:28, which is 3 kills shy of 3:1. Other good final scores I've had are 72:25 (again, 3 kills shy of 3:1), and 62:32 (two shy of 2:1). So no, I haven't lost my touch.

If you're familiar with the game (Dave), then you'll also notice that we (the Axis) won 14 out of 15 times. In the Allies defense, I think they were actually a team of chimps organized by an Orangutan. So 1 win is a pretty good record for them.

I think my favorite part of the new DoD:S is how after one team wins, the winners keep their guns and can still fire, while the losers can't fire, so the winners try to find as many people from the losing team as they can to brutally gun them down and run up their kill count. I also like how the BAR is now a playable gun, how you can look down the sights of the K98 and M1 Garand rifles, but I don't like how the K98 lost its bayonette and the M1 lost its rifle butt ability.

Oh, and a shiny new donkey for whoever can tell me where and on what map that screen shot was taken (Dave).