Black Hole of Suck, Redemption

Had a little Modern Warfare afternoon delight with Reibo Monday. He unexpectedly got some invites while he was giving my copy of Battlefield: Bad Company a spin. (More on that in a future blog; suffice to say that I tried Battlefield 2: Modern Combat and kinda liked it. I don't have an XIM360 config properly cooked up for that game yet. I found an XIM360 config for Bad Company which worked pretty damn good for me, so I tried that game and wound up really liking it so far.)
    We went 4/1, but it wasn't because of any great deeds on my part. On one disastrous game on Scrapyard, I went 5/12, single-handedly causing a black hole of suck which threatened to pull down the whole team (and did). I was never able to consolidate myself anywhere, and any time I tried to reach a covered position with a good field of fire, I got picked off. I actually died enough times to get the Painkiller death streak bonus. Unfortunately, it did little good since the spawning gods put me right under Reibo's incoming Predator. I was able to spectate it while I was in respawn and materialized under it when it detonated inside one of the warehouses.
    I redeemed myself a bit on two matches on Karachi. I camped the chicken coop area in both games. In the first, I was torqued out because I was 0/4; I kept getting fragged over by the small pallet warehouse near the chicken coops. I finally spawned in the chicken coop area itself and got 6 kills in the last couple of minutes of the game. My best 2 kills were: Stitching a guy from his ballsack to his skullcap with the SCAR-H as he leaped down from the wall into the chicken coop. That netted me a promotion to 4 Star General, earned me my 1000th kill with the SCAR-H, and got me the Predator missile. It was especially delicious to deliver that Predator since I bought it down right on top of one of the douches who had been giving one of Reibo's pals a hard time earlier. I gave him the Predator hat and launched my Attack Helicopter with 20 secs to go in the game. (Hey, it's XP just to launch it, after all!)
    In the next Karachi game, I got into the chicken coop and held it on the right side. I managed to get most of the enemy trying to infiltrate on the right side, going 9/1. I was still supremely POed about the ass-pummeling I took on Scrapyard, so when everybody called mealtime, I was relieved and quit while I was behind... Reibo got online a couple of hours later for a couple of hours -- and he rocked. I looked over his shoulder while he went 13/0 on Estate with the silenced WA2000 and One Man Army. Despite his efforts, the rest of his team got their clocks cleaned, tho, and they lost.

• The hits just keep on coming: Word is percolating through the IW forums of an Xbox Live exploit that lets you demote your opponents to rank 1. Here's a YouTube link of the effect on one of the victims.
  
• As reported on Blues News, Modern Warfare 2 PC has been patched through Steam. BASHandSlash reports that the PC patch includes elimination of the care package smoke grenade speed glitch, which some have described as a game feature and others have derided as an exploit of a game physics flaw.
  
• Edge Online reports that Modern Warfare 2's 9 week run at the top of the UK sales charts has ended.
• Semi-related: Guardian UK blog interview with Mass Effect 2 devs touts MW2 as an influence.
  
• Review: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare DS.
• MW2 PS3 freezes linked to PS3 firmware update?
  
• Edge Online op-ed: Lessons Learned from "No Russian".
• YouTube: Good FFA with Marathon, Lightweight, and Commando, no stabby. Mostly P90 and UMP, with some shotgun thrown in. Coming in through the window on Highrise. Humor: Knife-tossin' 402.

• Rumor: No Half-life in 2010?
  
• GameTrailers Mass Effect 2 developer diary. Kokatu: Mass Effect 2 Elite console bundle announced.
• CVG Bayonetta review.
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2 news: DICE developer communication process update on BASHandSlash.
  
• Activision to focus on "quality".
• Destructoid: The Future: Thrown to the Wolves. A think piece on the process of immersion in games. Best quote: "...one finds conundrums such as in Modern Warfare 2, where details in the environment almost feel wasted when contrasted with the scope of the gameplay itself and the objects in the player's actual gaming foreground." I guess they're talking about the incessant blood-spatter effect thru which I watched the entire MW2 campaign, even on "Easy" mode.
• Joystiq has the Best of Big Download for 11-17 January 2010
• List of lists: Kotaku's Top 5 Top 10 List.

• 1Up: Top 5 Sci-Fi Cliches that Need to Die.