One team has STICK!

Team Shitty Shotty enlisted a new member last night, wildpaintings, and the team went on another foolery-filled rampage on Halolz. I suspect that wildpaintings maybe in danger of demotion from TSS however, as he led the Team to their dramatic first ever win. 50 to 49!

The game started off badly, with a member of the opposing team immediately making it onto both my ‘Mute’ and ‘Avoid Player – Communication’ lists before the game even began for his ridiculously annoying screeching in the lobby. But there were no drops, and a nice lag-free game that was incredibly close on score all the way… with myself dealing the, not-at-all-lucky-honest, final kill to the enemy team as Navan Daughn distracted the enemy from the flank:

Much whooping and cheering ensued as the glory of Team Shitty Shotty lit up the rankings leaderboard… umm, well not quite. It was only a Casual Team Slayer game. 😉 Still, some delicious fiero in the face of agon was certainly felt all-round.

We even won again just a couple of games later, but it wasn’t even close, as the opponents were all on split-screens and one seemed to have turned into a stationary target practice dummy for reasonable periods of time which made the win rather anti-climatic after the previous excitement. However TSS was also fairly close to pulling off an upset in a number of other matchups against far more experienced and skilled opponents thoughout the evening. Definitely improvement was being seen in fact. I will attempt to counter this alarming trend with alcohol next time.

The next challenge is for Team Shitty Shotty to steal a victory from the pansies in a Ranked Match game, and perhaps to take their honed skills into other game arenas.

It was a rather good night of other gaming on top of this as well for me. I once again had some great Street Fighter AE matches with The Uberwarlock, who is an awesome Street Fighter opponent for me always. As usual, I was losing to him, but at least my game was reasonable this time – I even managed to beat his ‘Gief once. A fantastic challenge.

And, much later, I got out of bed for an insonmia-fueled 5am completion of Braid. Both of the Agoners crew are big fans of Braid with lordnaff in particular declaring it one of the best games ever. Myself, I am hugely enamoured with its existence as a 2D game & it’s aesthetic and design ideals, and would have bought it almost no matter what I thought of the gameplay. But overall as an actual game for me, I just think it’s ‘rather good’. The dissappointments that lower it to that category for me are firstly that I became very irritated with the manner in which the obfuscated game mechanics became a part of the puzzle themselves on one too many occasion – a problem a decent tutorial or smarter level design could have easily allieviated; to at least let you understand what tools you had available. And secondly I am feeling really let down by the storyline switch-up in the ending, which was far more poorly delivered than expected, and has pretty much ruined the game’s narrative for me. Then again, I prefer some good emo angst to some hard-hitting plot twist; your tastes may vary. But, I am named after Remy for a reason!

Fight For Futility!