Blacklight Tango Did!

    I finally got to play some more Blacklight: Tango Down the other night. There was an update launched by the game when I first started it up. Once the update did it's thing, I launched me some deathmatch. The search seemed to fail and restart multiple times, so I backed out to the dashboard and restarted the game. The second time I managed to get into a match, tho. It's a nice little game. I'm finding that I'm not that good at it, tho. Still, I managed to land on the winning side in one TDM game, get mercilessly thrashed in deathmatch a bunch of times, once eking out a positive score by one measly kill.
    Based on my two hours or so of gameplay, I can say this: In Team Deathmatch, you're dead if you get bottled up in your spawn. The enemy dicks will hop in and out lobbing grenades and spraying you with gunfire. Most unsporting. In Free-for-All, when I use the HRV (the narc visor that highlights everyone on the map), I find that I get shot pretty fast (or, in one particularly egregious bit of unsportsmanlike conduct, bitchslapped and then ungraciously teabagged). I'm pretty sure that I'd like the game a whole lot better if all there was no visor mode in it at all. Sure, the Hyper Reality Visor adds an entire layer of skill to the game - a skill I don't have.
    Bottom line: The game is a lot of fun, but it's not a magic bullet. The update, whatever it was since I never saw any news items about it, didn't significantly impact the quirks of match-making I had encountered. It's decidedly faster, more UT-flavored (which I like) and well made for its price. A change of pace from Modern Warfare 2's BS is welcome, and I'll play the Free-for-all more, since it hearkens back to my halcyon days of playing Unreal Tournament 1999 for hour upon hour. Like any other game, it's likely to be a heckuva lot more fun with friends, rather than alone, and it's cheap enough that everyone can own it and not be too POed if it doesn't pan out for them.
    Slightly disturbing, tho, was how my abbreviated Blacklight: Tango Down session ended: My Xbox 360 froze up, a pixilated screenshot from Tango Down stuck onscreen. Hopefully, it's a glitch with my 'box and not a problem with the game itself...
    I still hope to get in some Medal of Honor beta play. Once I do, I'll try to get together some thoughts on it to blog here.
    Today's featured Modern Warfare 2 vid is Ken Burton sharing the RP Dizzle love with everyone in range. Also linked is a short series of knifing killcams by Bobby Lee Swagger. Moving on...

Featured Modern Warfare 2 Video
The Ken Burton Show Part 83 - RP Dizzle gets me a 13-2

• Valve bans 12,000 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 PC players, who protest their innocence. By way of apology for the erroneous banning, Valve is giving away a copy of Left 4 Dead 2 to the formerly banned players.
• BASHandSlash reports that the PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops will likely have demo recording capability.This self-recording function of PC games is often used for ajudicating competitve gaming disputes. Unlike CoD4, Modern Warfare 2 was virtually useless to competitive FPS gamers due to this and other shortcomings. In World at War, many PC players found the audio to be sub-par for competitive gaming. BASHandSlash reports that Call of Duty: Black Ops has greatly improved audio.

• Medal of Honor hands-on preview: Gamers Daily News.
• Gamasutra op-ed: Frustration and dissatisfaction in the videogame industry.
• Study of MMOG proves human interaction theory. I prefer Gabe's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
• Mental Cases: Video Games that Play with Dreams.

• Ten secrets of the first moon landing. 
• Glass 'invisibility' cloaks shield objects from infrared detection. But it does chafe.
• At World Trade Center site, an 18th Century ship is unearthed.
• 'Fresh' impact crater discovered in Egypt. Meteor-strike crater from 2000-3000 years ago may change assessment of Earth impact risk.
• The Avengers cast revealed, assemble onstage, bring tears to Joss Whedon's eyes.

• Cracked: The seven most insane things ever done to get out of something.