'Unreal' Musings

2004-03-25T15:26:53+00:00

Warning: Rambling post. First part of post (up to horizontal line) also kind of detailed regarding a computer game you may not care about. Under horizontal line, more general.

I’ve been playing a fair amount of Unreal Tournament 2004 of late. For those of you who do not know, this is one of those violent videogames which are to blame for juvenile delinquency. I like it.

There are, of course, different ways of playing any first person shooter (FPS). The most simple is the old-fashioned “Deathmatch”, wherein players and computer-simulated players grab ludicrously powerful weapons and try to kill as many of the other players as possible before time elapses or someone reaches the goal number of kills. Then there is Capture the Flag (CTF), where there are two teams, two bases, and one must attempt to capture the other team’s flag by stealing it and transporting it to your own flag (without someone killing you and picking their flag up). In Unreal Tournament 2004, there is a new game mode called Onslaught, a team-based game where there are various strategic points you must capture before destroying the enemy base, and a panoply of fine vehicles as well as weapons.

I’m not very good at Onslaught. Oh, I’m not usually at the bottom of the rankings, but I seldom reach the upper levels either. I really enjoy it – there’s nothing like being able to run someone over who’s trying to kill you with rockets, after all – but I’m just not that good at it. It’s occasionally frustrating, and I realized last night why it’s so frustrating – I am quite good at Deathmatch, and reasonably good at CTF. When I played deathmatch regularly, it was fairly rare for me to slip out of the top three or four on a server, and sometimes I completely dominated. Of course I had my bad days – but there was usually a rhythm that I could easily fall back into. I don’t think I have a rhythm for Onslaught. Maybe it’s the large expanses of territory – I spend a fair amount of time trying to get where I’m needed, and then die promptly once I get there – but I just don’t have a rhythm for it. Whereas Matthew is good at Onslaught, and I think I can usually beat him at Deathmatch.

Something different in our brains, I guess. Which brings me to my second point. I realized the other day that none of my female college friends or female friends of today play FPSes. N-O-N-E. Now of course, as a girl who loves FPSes, I hate to hear guys say that it’s a “male game” or “girls don’t get it”. But as a girl, I’m curious why my female friends, who don’t usually seem particularly bound by gender stereotypes, and many of whom at school were engineers and so forth – otherwise prime candidates for FPS playing – find it unappealing. Perhaps they just never try. I once taught a dear, sweet, Quaker, slightly Luddite friend of mine to play Quake III. She was horrible at it, but she loved it. Maybe it’s just a matter of picking up the mouse…thoughts?

Posts tagged with "first person shooter" - Faerye Net

'Unreal' Musings