Seattleite

So, as I've mentioned, I have a total conversion mod I'm planning for Half-Life 2. And now, I have written the plot. Feedback appreciated. Binding Energy: It has been over a week since Nova Prospekt was hit, and it's still contested. Your character, a female Nova Prospekt prisoner (she needs a name, but I suck at names), awakens to find her containment pod has stopped working just in time for it to hit the ground, injuring her (only 20%). Meanwhile, gunshots and the death rattles of headcrabs and a zombie are heard. A badly injured male prisoner calls out her name, crawling to the pod. He pulls the damaged pod open and pulls her out, pausing to frantically shoot a zombie to death. He's introduced at this point as her older brother. He stands, barely, and starts limping towards the door. He explains that his pod was damaged like hers and a zombie tore it open, but the thing broke his leg before he could kill it. He needs you to find him some medicine, and points to a guard post across from him. He tells you the door is locked, and he can't get into the air vent with his leg broken. He gives you a combat knife he recovered from a dead prison guard to get the grate open. As you climb up towards the ventilation shaft, you can see a strange man in a suit is in the guard post. He's not there when you reach the other side, yet the doors all remain shut. In the guard office, there will be three medical kits and a pistol with one magazine of ammunition. There's no enemies in here, and once you disable the lock it's a straight shot back to him. Just heal yourself (only takes 2) and bring him a med kit. Once he's used it, he'll stand back up and limp his way to the door. He'll limp all the way out of the prison. Make your way down the hall. Your brother will kill any headcrabs he encounters with his pistol, but he takes too long to defeat zombies (they take one shot to the head, but eight to the chest and he's not very accurate in his present condition) so you'll have to use your knife if your pistol runs out of ammo. (Your knife deals 20 damage to them, and will kill in three hits. Frankly, it's pretty weak. But if you can get them from behind or by surprise before they activate, you can one-shot them.) Be careful, in the unlikely event a zombie actually hits you it will deal extremely heavy damage. (On hard, its two-handed downward swing can one-shot you and the one-handed swing takes off half your health.) At the end of the chapter, you'll find an abandoned (and very familiar) security station with two destroyed turrets and two available submachine guns. (Yes, it's the same station you defend with turrets in Half-Life 2.) Your brother finds the computer's security has been forcefully compromised (by Alyx a week before) and finds a way out. Unfortunately, it's being guarded by a combine elite, standing right in the room where Gordon killed an antlion guard, surrounded by dead antlions. Your brother isn't sure how getting past him is going to be possible, but it's the only way. He decides to come up with a plan on the way. White Giant: From here, you follow Gordon's trail backwards through the facility, encountering mostly antlions. Your brother still needs help, but since you both have submachine guns the antlions aren't very hard to kill and there aren't very many. Your brother discusses strategy for killing the elite at every break. He points out that the elite was carrying a shotgun instead of a pulse rifle, so his rifle must have run out of ammo while he was fighting the antlions. A shotgun isn't nearly as dangerous to you as a pulse rifle, not by a LONG shot, but you still can't take him head-on or he'll rip you to pieces. Your brother can't figure out a way in time, at least not that he tells you. When you get to the end, he takes a deep breath and tells you to sneak up on the elite and use your knife, he'll distract him. He sets down his weapons, and calls out to the elite with his hands up, saying he isn't trying to escape and just wants to go safely back into custody. The elite approaches him, weapon trained on his head, trying to contact dispatch about what to do with this. And then you sneak up and stab the fucker. He bashes you (40 damage, knocks you back) and shoots your brother in the chest. He moves to finish off your downed brother with a shot to the head, but you can kill him first if you move fast enough. Either way, your brother isn't going to make it. Now you have to make your way out of the facility alone. The immediate difference between preventing the headshot and not preventing it is that if you prevent it, he gives you more detailed instructions. He's already told you earlier in the chapter where to go, a resistance outpost near City 17, but if you prevent the headshot he'll tell you how to find a tunnel his group had dug trying to break into the prison, letting you skip half of the next chapter and giving you access to a supply stash, before telling you to leave him behind. As if to rush you, the wall nearby starts cracking, and he tells you to leave before the antlions get through. It breaks as soon as you're too far to return. Escape velocity: Escape the prison through the hole Gordon entered through. The man with the suit will, once more, be seen up on the catwalk to your right as you exit the hole. If your brother lived long enough, he'll tell you about a tunnel the resistance had been digging trying to break into Nova Prospekt, the very crime that got him locked up here, and you can take it from the prison's drainage system to a building at the bottom of the cliffs. You'll arrive in a locked supply closet, giving some medicine, ammunition and early access to an AR15. Find the other side of the tunnel, and take it from there all the way to a rebel outpost. If your brother didn't live long enough, you'll have to make your way down the cliffs and through a bunker. No soldiers, but there's plenty of headcrabs. Once at the bottom, head through a broken building at the bottom (the one Gordon walks past right before he reaches the cliffs) and follow it. You'll find a tunnel through the wall boarded up (same tunnel as the other method) and down to the same rebel outpost. This path doesn't allow you to reach the supply stash, and since you had to fight headcrabs (well, not really "fight", per se) you expended more ammunition and will likely be injured. It also takes much longer. Cruising speed: The outpost is fairly small. One rebel (he also needs a name and I still suck at them), one crowbar, one crossbow and a very familiar airboat, sporting a very familiar automatic scatter-cannon. He claims to have escaped from the destruction of Black Mesa East in that airboat and just stumbled across the place. Take the airboat with him, it's an easy trip to your destination with no combat until you pass Shorepoint. The only downside is that the airboat is only supposed to seat one and one can imagine how awkward sitting on his lap must be, considering you've just met. You'll be manning the turret while he drives. Your entire path is scripted, and for a while the only things you see are antlions on the shore you can use as target practice. Soon, you connect to the canal system. As you pass the dam, you should be able to see the man in the suit up on it. From there, you begin encountering Civil Protection and mowing them down with the airboat cannon. The route diverges from Freeman's after the same outpost that airboat received its cannon at, and soon you reach the outpost you intended to. And it's totally abandoned. The power isn't even on when you arrive, and it's infested with zombies. It was clearly shelled recently, though, since it was working the day Black Mesa East was destroyed. Xen Relay: All seems lost, but the rebel you're with says he's going to try to get everything working anyway. The rebel you met is a bit of an egghead, as he's explained on the trip. He was just an assistant at Black Mesa East, but he learned a lot. He couldn't build a teleport device, but he thinks with Kleiner's notes he might be able to repair the existing one. Maybe. He hopes. He needs you to get the main generator back online, while he works on the damaged teleporter. He also tells you to find yourself some armour while you're at it. First, you head to the armoury if you're smart, because it's a long way down to the generator room and there are... things... in the way. Well, really just a lot of headcrabs and zombies. Regular zombies, fast zombies, poison zombies, even the elusive gonome. And the special headcrab for each. (Yes, gonomes now have a unique headcrab as well. It isn't very different from the regular one, really.) The armoury path isn't exactly safe, but there's only regular zombies and headcrabs in that area. The armoury itself provides rebel armour, an MP5 and a Python, with plenty of ammunition in .357 and 12 gauge. The generator room will be more accessible afterwards, now that your resistances are so much stronger and you have armour points. (Replenish armour points with vests. Vests can be found in pre-set locations, and fully replenish your armour points.) Once you return, get in the teleporter and teleport to your destination: A large rebel facility in New Mexico. Calculation Error: You're in Xen. You're in fucking XEN. Your buddy fucked up, the relay didn't happen. You're stranded in some place in Xen. According to him, there's an old beacon or something that he failed to account for, and you're near it. He suggests heading to it, but only because he has no idea what else to do right now. This is the same area Barney went through in Blue Shift. The only enemies here are wildlife, with the occasional odd, spike-shooting monster and some very large humanoids firing blue electric balls at you. Pit drones and shock troopers. Here, you can obtain the shock roach and spore launcher, and you meet a grunt fighting a pair of shock troopers supported by a quartet of pit drones. Its ranged weapon can only weaken enemies and can't actually kill them, the electric shots are stunning it so it can't avoid the spikes or escape, and the enemies are all in places it can't reach. It will die unless you intervene. If the grunt survives, it will take you to a vortigaunt it was separated from, who will thank you for saving his compatriot and will guide you to the device you're searching for, and along the way you'll acquire a hivehand. If the grunt doesn't survive, you once again have to take the long way and miss the hivehand, though the vortigaunt will still find you at the device as a controller is hovering overheard relaying information to it. There is no second hivehand, make sure that grunt survives. Once at the device, the vortigaunt will communicate with its kin to get the portal open. Return to Earth through the portal (this time right at the device) and find yourself in New Mexico. For real this time. And to make that even better, the Xenians come with you. Military Precision: At the rebel base in New Mexico, you'll meet a group of rebels. They introduce themselves as the remnants of the USMC, and mostly the trainees of the remnants of the USMC. They explain to you what the plan was. Basically, they were staging an assault on Nova Prospekt, but every single step of the plan failed. The teleporter didn't work and they didn't manage to access the supply cache until after their dig team, your brother included, was captured without ever getting all the way in. Now they no longer need to assault Nova Prospekt, but they did locate the base they needed to raid and the teleporters are working. And they have something even better they can do. The citadel in City 17 has exploded, and they've been in contact with Magnusson, who has explained to them a way to drain energy off of the forming super-portal to slow its development through repeated teleportations. He recommends using their devices to teleport their trapped Xenian allies to Earth, and to teleport their own troops and supplies to where they're needed as well. And like that, it's time to enter the sealed section of this hidden military base. What used to be the HECU deployment base. Hazardous Environments: Once inside the armoury you find it filled with poison gas (deals poison damage, slowly) and overrun by Pit Drones. It isn't long before you also find Shock Troopers. Making your way down, you manage to clear out the facility and get access to the armoury. There, you get the AR15 if you didn't have one, an M40A1 and some new armour. A PCV. It's universally superior to what you've been wearing, is especially resistant to gunfire and it halves the special effects of all special damage types. Soon after, you discover that in addition to an armoury, there's also a motor pool. And unfortunately for you, you're the one who has to go through the back routes so the others can directly access it as nobody else can fit through the air ducts. Once that's open, you return to the main area to find them teleporting out troops and supplies en masse... And the combine has noticed. The facility is under attack. One APC full of civil protection, one hunter-chopper, and undoubtedly more on the way. You are now given a rocket launcher. You, your buddy, the xenian trio and a single squad of marines have to fight through the CPs to reach the door, and then take out the hunter-chopper so they can get the vehicles out of the motor pool safely. Your squad and the trio from Xen keeps the CPs occupied while you proceed to the roof to destroy a hunter-chopper. The man in the suit is visible on the other side of the (very large) roof as you reach the top, but he heads down the stairs on that side when you see him. The stairs he went down are, notably, blocked completely by rubble when you reach them. After that, the vehicles can roll out of the motor pool and get prepared for the next wave. Head downstairs to get properly equipped, as the soldiers now give you something new. A gift teleported in from Dr. Kleiner for your assistance. A personal tau cannon. It's exceptionally powerful, but it only has 100 units of ammo and you'll never get a chance to replenish it so you need to make it count. They explain the plan, and it's pretty simple. They're sending you to attack the local centre of power, a secondary citadel. Once inside, you'll find your way to their reactor. Your buddy will install a device that will detonate the reactor of the citadel and prevent it from ever being used to create a super-portal. According to the marine companion, these pushes are being made at *all* of the secondary citadels. You've Got Hostiles: It's time to strike at the combine. The motorpool has its vehicles up and running. You get in the back of an LAV and roll out after a local combine military base in force. You deploy just in time to see a strider being felled by an Abrams tank, and advance on the walls through a city full of synths. The man in the suit is visible in the window of a building as you exit the LAV. But the citadel's defensive walls seem impenetrable. There's a massive series of green flashes inside the outer walls, the turrets go still, and soon a gargantua comes smashing through the main gate. And now you head inside, escorting the gargantua, defending it from striders, on its way to breach the inner gates and let you in. Chain Reaction: It's time to kill a citadel. Once inside, proceed downstairs towards the generator. You will meet heavy resistance, and the gargantua won't be following you, but the Xenians are giving them some trouble and you have a full squad to help you out. Once you're in the lower regions, you and your squad need to defend your friend while he installs the device. There are a LOT of soldiers coming in to stop you, but you set up three lines of defence and between you, four allies, four reprogrammed turrets and a LOT of hoppers you seem to have it in the bag until the elites show up, blast down your turrets and push you right back to the second line. And then, of course, the second line of defence (hopper mines and satchel charges) fails as well due to the sheer numbers and determination of the combine, now augmented by elites. Things look hopeless as they start breaching the door to the main chamber, until the Xenians arrive. Now with your forces augmented by four vortigaunts, four grunts and four controllers, the combine get slaughtered when they enter and you push right back out through them to escape, device planted. Isolation: Once you're out, the LAV comes under fire from a gunship. It crashes and you're barely out of the city, entirely too close to the explosion when it happens. The explosion knocks the gunship out of the sky and tosses your LAV. When you make your way out, you find yourself alone again, everybody else is dead, including the man you've been with the whole time. You make your way up the hill and back to the station, now badly wounded, as hunters approach. The man in the suit is visible, back inside the town, watching you from the destroyed upper level of a house. The entire upper level he's standing in has been destroyed. You find a rebel outpost with some medical supplies, but no ammo or armour. There's no more ammo or armour (though you got your vest fully recharged at the crashed LAV) for the entire game. This trip is long and lonely. There's no allies, no ammunition, no armour, very few medical supplies and plenty of enemies. Hunters, overwatch, civil protection, zombies, antlions, bullsquids, houndeyes, even some Race X creatures towards the end. When you finally get there, you get into the base and find the place deserted. Everybody else left without you, thinking you were dead. This base is cleaned out and abandoned, and other than some curious wildlife it's empty. You make your way to the teleporter and find it still ready, and teleport out. Full Circle: But something gets fucked up again... You think. You're in Nova Prospekt, back in the same room you started in. And there's nobody there. Nothing. Not even the sound of fighting. Just silence. You walk, following the same path from the beginning of the game, right to the room where your brother died. Or did he? If you saved your brother from being shot in the head at the beginning of the game, he'll actually be here waiting for you. He'll reach out to hug you, having heard what you'd done, and slowly staggers along with you outside. Otherwise, you'll make this trip alone. Outside, you'll find the rest of the rebels you've met, who have taken over Nova Prospekt. The man in the suit can be seen on a guard tower. Everybody is watching as the super portal closes and the credits roll.

I clearly have gone too long without an energy drink. Because I just had one, and I feel... LIKE I JUST GOT HOME, AND I FEEL...

Marijuana is just slow in general, and not very strong. It takes a while to build up, and it's not building up to something big.

7/10 Scroll up two, I did already.

Anger is an essential emotion without which humanity cannot function.

6/10 Just a plug.

"In brief, I don't get Brink. Perhaps it's one of those things that's only good if you play it entirely with friends, but if you are able to successfully able to organize twenty nerds into the same game at the same time, than perhaps your talents would be better spent in the United Nations."

Mead and cheddar. Wishing I had blue cheese.

You won't. One marijuana cookie won't create a noticeable effect, just like one beer won't.

Which one? Zakhaev and Shepherd both explain themselves pretty well. Of the two, though, of course Shepherd explains himself better. Zakhaev believes the current Russian government is a puppet government set up by the west, and that Russia is collapsing under its rule. (Well, Zakhaev, if your Russia is anything like our Russia, you at least got the second one right.) He wants to overturn the current government and restore his homeland to power. In other words, he's an ultranationalist. Shepherd wants revenge. During the events of the previous game, he lost 30,000 men in a nuclear bombing. This ruined him. He wants to find Makarov, the last surviving member of the conspiracy, and doesn't care how much involvement he actually had in it. And more importantly, he wants to strengthen the American military and restore its international reputation as an untouchable hyper-power, to hell with whatever is lost in the process. He starts a war with the new ultranationalist Russia in order to do exactly that. He believes that once the people have an enemy, they will rally behind him. In other words, he's ALSO an ultranationalist. Oh, bullshit. You're grasping at straws here. They didn't use them, and I didn't say they did. I just said the countries they picked as enemies were cliche. But so you know, they did a good job of playing enemies from those nations WITHOUT making any racist statements about those nations. And they actually showed a few positives. Like when you're going into the city they planted a nuclear bomb in, you might notice it has been completely evacuated by all civilians. That's not a gameplay convenience, that's cannon. The arabs evacuated their citizens before the battle, and when they nuked the city they didn't kill any civilians. As for the Russians, your main allies in the game are Russian. Specifically, they're the actual Russian government that the ultranationalists are trying to destroy. The main thing about the first two Modern Warfare titles is that your enemies aren't a particular nationality. Your enemies might be Russian, Arab or American. The real enemies of these games is ultranationalism. And remember that at the time, we were at the tail end of a huge wave of ultranationalism in the states. I do believe they were making a statement, especially in the second game. And as for the third game, they probably realized their new demographic was too stupid to understand that, gave up, and just cranked out something the ultranationalistic retarded dudebros that had (for some reason) flocked to this franchise (that hated exactly the attitudes they exuded) would like and carried their money home in a freight train. And they spent all their time on the multiplayer because that's all the dudebros would ever play. And they threw in a new shock scene because it was expected of them, and didn't bother making it any good, or at all relevant to the plot. And so on. What you're seeing is the result of a previously good writing team that has given up and just doesn't care anymore. It's depressing, and a bit disgusting, and that's why I want nothing to do with it. I never played Ghosts. I'd given up on the franchise by then. I gave up on the franchise in the same game the writing team gave up on it, and never went back to it. It had all the appeal of a jar full of cold spunk then, and now it's about as appealing as if the spunk had started to mold. I'm not touching it, I'm not going anywhere near it, ever again.

A couple hours at a hospital and an enormous bill to make it only slightly better?

Do you watch the Simpsons? It's appeared there multiple times. And in kid's cartoons, like Psychotic Ninja demonstrated. It's also appeared in The Untouchables and other movies involving the mafia, since it's from an Italian play thus part of the stereotype. And many, many more. And it's the final verse, (1:55) that's the famous part. And not everybody is going to know every song, anyway.

Let me get this straight. We're playing a trivia game, and you don't know the answer, so you want me to give you the answer to prove it's attainable? Really? Well fine then. It's Vesti la Giubba. It's the most famous opera piece in history, it's final verse (the one listed) is instantly recognizable due to its lyrics, strong delivery and rythem, and being used as the stock opera piece in everything ever made, ever. Like, seriously, if an opera is presented in media, there's about a 75% chance it'll be Pagliacci and if it is, it WILL be the end of Act 1, where Canio sings Vesti la Giubba, and it'll be right at the final verse. Here's a link to the song in performance. By Mario Lanza, who isn't even actually performing Pagliacci at the time, this is just a movie about an actor, so of course they had to throw in this song. (Almost uniquely, the entire thing instead of just the final verse.)

Modern warfare 3's shock scene has you playing as a civilian. The father in a young couple, walking along, holding a camera, filming his family (mostly his absolutely adorable daughter) visiting London. Then they're all killed by a car bomb loaded with poison gas. For no fucking reason. You clearly never played it. The FIRST and SECOND modern warfares were absolutely NOT that. In the first modern warfare, the protagonist nations are portrayed quite realistically and even their enemies have believable motivations. The marines are complete fucking moron lunatics acting with such near-sighted self-righteousness that they miss every one of a HUGE series of red flags and screw the pooch so hard that the pooch has to lock itself in the bathroom for an hour with a tube of soothing cream. (Specifically, they fail to notice the city they are invading has been COMPLETELY EVACUATED OF ALL CIVILIANS, that resistance is getting lighter as they near their target instead of lower, and that their target isn't actually in the city. And then the nuke goes off and kills the entire invasion force.) And as for the SAS, they're actually competent and the game's actual protagonists for sure, but they're morally questionable from the start, especially captain Price, and have NO regard for the rules of war. And in the second game? The game's villain may appear to be a Russian, but he's not the real villain. The real villain is an American. And when you kill him, he still wins because he gets the war he wanted while you get labelled a terrorist and go into hiding. Well there's your problem. But I'll summarize. Modern Warfare: Nothing really racist, except for using the stock Russian and Arab villians. While that was already cliche at the time the game came out, they at least did a good job making these stock Russian and Arab villains believable and didn't just go "They're Russian, so they're evil!" and "SHOOT THE SAND MONKEYS! GAAAAWD BLESS AMEEERICAAAA!" like many of the later imitators did. And like they did in later installments. Modern Warfare 2: Are we really expected to believe that one airport massacre would be enough to get Russia to invade the United States? That's bullshit, guys. Russia would just go to the UN, force the UN to do an inquiry into the incident to prove the US is at fault, and then milk the incident for financial compensation and political pull for the next century. And the scumbags in power in Russia would love every fucking minute of it, just like our government loved every fucking minute of it after 911 happened and they used it to justify all the COMPLETELY FUCKING UNRELATED HORSESHIT they did after it. And they presented the favela as a shanty town little fucking slum, with huge expensive houses all around it. Yeah, ha ha, huge class divides in South America. Because it's not like the class divide in the US is A LOT FUCKING WORSE or anything, you fucking hypocrites. And... why, exactly, are we fighting the people here? They have NO motivation to be shooting at us other than, you know, the fact that we're running through their streets with assault rifles chasing a guy. At least take two seconds to make an excuse, because unlike your new core demographic I AM going to question why we're shooting waves of brown people talking foreign and I'm not going to make the excuses FOR you. (Yeah, I realize they're probably paid off by the guy we're chasing. But they could have said that instead of just throwing a bunch of hispanic men with guns at us with no explanation. And wouldn't the soldiers be confused about the militia attacking them, even if that was the case?) Modern Warfare 3: Everybody not American or British is now behaving as a scenery-chewing, for the evulz card-carrying villain, bombing cities full of civilians with poison gas for NO FUCKING REASON, sabotaging a peace treaty by killing their own president and SOMEHOW still having the full military resources of their entire country. This isn't Russia, this is the way Russians were portrayed in 1960s fucking propaganda films, and it's just as fucking racist. Real Russians would not act like this. They can be total jackasses sometimes, and frequently are, but I can't see Russia invading the US, much less sabotaging a peace effort, bombing civilians with poison gas and then giving full military support to the terrorists that did so. And even more especially I can't see that when the group responsible was an ultranationalist rebel group two fucking games ago. NOBODY switches over that thoroughly, that quickly. Even if the rebels won, there's NO FUCKING WAY they could pull shit like this so fast after taking power, especially after they tried to nuke the US in the first game before they took power. And there's no more motivation given for the villains AT ALL! WHAT THE FUCK? This is bullshit, guys. I couldn't even FINISH this game it was so bad.

Alright, in the .cfg mod for Half-Life 2, I have just fought my first gunship. Let me tell you about how this went. Attempt #1: Ran upstairs a bit nervous. Full health, no armour charge. I figured I'd use the rocket to distract the gunship, keep it from shooting at me. I fired out away from it and guided the rocket back to get its attention, and that worked. I nailed it with the rocket, knocked it for a loop, and it promptly one-shotted me with its cannon. Then I paused to have a little drinky. Attempt #2: Alright, that didn't go well. As soon as the rocket hits I need to duck into cover. So let me fire and... It's ignoring the rocket ENTIHURGHFUCKBLEGH. *THUD* Attempt #3: Okay, make sure it's shooting at the rocket before going out, then duck back into cover as soon as it hits. Okay, good. Hit it, didn't get killed. Maybe I should stop and quickSHIT! *THUD* Attempt #4: Right. Okay. Gunship moves around, holes in the roof, forgot that. Let's try again. Okay, good. There's a hit. It's going for the OHSHITOHFUCKOHSHITOHFUCK! Okay... Down the stairs safely. Fire again out through the hole in the roof, guide from... Well, there goes a rocket. Try out the front of the building now... And another hit. And it's going back out and... IGNORING THE ROCKET. *RATATATAT* *THUD* Attempt #5: Okay. Play it safe. There's a hit. There's another hit... NEVERMIND! It's... SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT! Okay. Didn't hit me, and... It's following the rocket, good... And a second hit. Real quick third one before it turns around... And DOWN it goes! FINALLY! HAHA! WOO! It only took FIVE times, but I got it! And then the euphoria wore off as I realized I was still without armour charge (thus effectively at half health) with barely any ammo left, and only at New Little Odessa. Clearly, it was time for another drink. So, why am I telling you this? For two reasons. The first is I wanted to share my experience with this. The second is to explain why I am considering reducing the power of the gunship's main gun. I'll decide if I am, and if so how much, after the battle at Nova Prospekt. The gunship totally rocking my shit is perfectly realistic, I assure you, but I might need to restrict it for gameplay reasons. Also, I wasn't sure I handled the HL2 mod properly until I got to the fights with the Overwatch. Now that I have, I do have to say I nailed it. They perform almost exactly how I want them to. Which is to say they're about as forgiving as a roomful of Australian border patrol guards that all came off a low fat diet this morning.

Wondering why the fuck my nose is bleeding.

Remember when I used to hate whiskey? Well, now I FUCKING LOVE whiskey. Funny how that works.

There's also the entire rest of my list. Oh, and they have C4 being set off by bullets. Shooting C4 won't set it off. Hell, you can light C4 on fire and it won't go off.

1. Variations with a fuse that is already too damned short. Holding it for an extra second or two is just asking for it to go off in your face. 2. The way they do it in-game they simply remove the pin without dropping the spoon. The fuse doesn't ignite until the spoon is detached. Holding it then accomplishes nothing.

If the Call of Duty franchise is any indication, every single fucking game designer in Activision must be severely mentally retarded, completely batshit insane and PURE FUCKING EVIL. Here's a short list of reasons why. 1. CARS DON'T FUCKING EXPLODE. There is NO amount of ANYTHING that will make a car EVER explode. FUCKING EVER. 2. DOGS ARE NOT BULLETPROOF KILLING MACHINES, THEY ARE WEAK, PATHETIC LITTLE ANIMALS. There's a reason they're not used in war. It's because they would be dead in TWO FUCKING SECONDS, and are INCAPABLE of killing anybody competent enough to throw a fucking punch. 3. RADIATION IS NOT A MAGICAL FORCE OF INSTANT DEATH. Radiation poisoning isn't usually fatal and when it is it takes DAYS, often WEEKS, to kill people. When it does kill, it either kills through dehydration or indirectly through infection. 4. The radiation levels around Chernobyl were NOT that high. Especially as far out as Pripyat. They wouldn't cause radiation poisoning AT ALL, especially not in 1996. Pripyat was evacuated out of concerns that the contamination would seep into the local drinking water, NOT because of radiation levels on the ground, and the threat was that it could cause CANCER, not radiation poisoning. 5. EMPs do NOT disable most electronics. They can't stop cars, they can't knock airplanes out of the sky, and they certainly can't disable the RADIOACTIVE DECAY OF FUCKING TRITIUM that lights red dot sights and ACOG scopes. The ONLY things vulnerable are communications and sensory devices, and most of them will only be down very briefly because ALL the EMP did was cause a power surge and trip the circuit breaker. 6. ARMOUR IS A THING THAT FUCKING WORKS. I don't even need to really explain this one, do I? 7. Blowing up a baby in front of the player won't get them fired up, it'll just turn them off. There's a reason I snapped my MW3 disk. 8. Recoil in space means going backwards every time you shoot. 9. You can carry more than two guns, you fucking morons. 10. Bullets are speedy bits of metal, NOT magical killing curses. Gunshot wounds are survivable, easily stopped by body armour, and when they do kill they take a while to do so. 11. No army will throw away hundreds of soldiers to take out one squad. They'll try one platoon at the most, and if that fails they'll call in an air strike. 12. "Cooking" grenades is not a thing. 13. A .45 should do more damage than a 9mm, and the AK should do more damage than any 5.56. 14. The P90 isn't the bestest gun in all of everything, it's a shoddily made, overly fancy piece of plasticky shit that CANNOT penetrate body armour, couldn't stop a man if he was sedated first, will break if dropped, and jams so much it's more likely to end up getting YOU killed than anybody else, no matter WHAT the manufacturer says. 15. Story was the ONLY THING that made the first Modern Warfare decent and the second one playable. So WHY IN THE FLYING FUCK did you throw the story out the window for the third game? WHY? What the FUCK is wrong with you people? 16. Do you realize how incredibly racist you're becoming? The first game was just a little racist, but the second game kinda started to bother me and the third game is somewhere between old-school Disney and 1940's Loony Tunes racist. What the fuck is this shit? I get that the right-wing shut-ins you're marketing to are a bunch of racist sacks of shit, but they don't need racism in their games to enjoy it, and you're turning off EVERYBODY else.

That could also be either.

The argument or one of the mods?

While I appreciate the offer, more given the circumstances, I'm not going to accept it.

Okay, nothing big, but here are five gameplay-related ideas for the total conversion mod: 1. Sneak attack bonus. Most attacks that aren't area of effect deal double damage hitting targets from behind. Melee attacks, crossbow bolts and animal strikes do triple. The knife and headcrab bites do quadruple. These multipliers all also apply to the first hit on an inactive/unaware target. If this is also from behind, the multipliers do stack. (Thus making a hit on an inactive NPC from behind do 4x normally, 9x for melee, crossbows and animal strikes, and 16x for the knife or a headcrab.) 2. Special damage types will have special effects, at the expense of doing less damage than in the other mods. A: Electric attacks will stun targets briefly. For instance, a vortigaunt's electric blast will deal 50 damage instead of 100, but will greatly weaken NPCs for 5 seconds. (-50% speed and melee damage, +100% weapon spread) This will also impact the player, except instead of a weapon spread increase the player will be blinded. A stun baton has the same effect, but only for 1 second. B: Fire damage will deal extra damage over time. Some already do this, of course, but all of them will now and it'll impact the player. C: Radiation damage will keep going for some time after exposure, but will no longer do any immediate damage. Overall this will be much deadlier, though. D: Chemical damage deals a stun effect similar to the electric stun, only with a fixed 10 second duration and a variable magnitude. It slows movement and reduces melee damage by 1% and increases spread by 2% per point. Chemical attacks of large magnitude are rare, the antlion worker, bullsquid and spore are the only ones that deal chemical damage and the two animals both deal fairly low damage, and the effect DOES NOT stack. E: Poison has the biggest change. Poison will damage you for a percentage of your *remaining* health. As you're not Gordon in this mod, you won't heal without medicine. Medical kits heal 5x as much poison damage as regular damage. Poison debuffs you -0.5% speed and melee damage and +1% spread for every 1% of health lost, (IE: being poisoned for half your health means losing 25% speed and melee damage and having 50% more spread) and this debuff persists until it is healed. Many enemies deal both poison damage and regular damage. Antlions deal 10, 15 or 20 regular damage on hit, and 10%, 15% or 20% poison damage. Antlion workers deal 10 acid damage and 10% poison damage. Only poison headcrabs and the hivehand fail to also deal normal damage. (50% and 20%, respectively.) Only headcrabs, zombies, antlions, synths and inanimate objects are immune to poison. 3. There will be new weapons, most fairly effective. A: AR15. A semi-automatic 5.56x45mm rifle. Very accurate, very low recoil, very long range, deals full damage against almost all enemies, but its damage leaves something to be desired. (Damage and penetration will finally be totally separate, so this gun does very little against unarmoured targets and just manages to do full damage to all infantry instead of falling off. It even does full damage to antlion guards. Hunters take 0.75x damage from it and are the weakest enemies not to take full.) B: MP5. A fully-automatic 9x19mm submachine gun. More recoil than the MP7, smaller magazine, slower rate of fire and doesn't penetrate armour as well, but does much more damage against unarmoured targets C: Knife. Two thirds the damage of the crowbar with shorter reach. However, where other weapons deal double damage in a sneak attack or from behind and other melee weapons deal triple, it deals quadruple. It also doesn't make any noise, so it can't alert any enemy but the one you're hitting, who will usually die in one hit if you backstab them by surprise. Deals full damage to all zombies and most wildlife. (Most wildlife and all zombies take reduced damage from the crowbar and especially the wrench.) D: Wrench. One third the damage of the crowbar, that's HALF the knife, with reach in between the two. However, it has a build-up attack useful as a big opening move that does four times normal damage. Deals full damage to all infantry. (Armoured infantry take reduced damage from the crowbar and especially the knife.) E: Hivehand. Deals 20% poison damage on hit. Counted as a penetrating animal attack for resistance purposes. Infinite ammo, 8 shots, recharge much slower than previous installments (1/6s). Incapable of killing targets, but weakens them rather substantially in fairly short order. Used by grunts to make an enemy much less dangerous and easy to finish off, and is usually followed by charging and bludgeoning them to death. For you, I'd recommend using a quick burst from it to weaken them a LOT, then switching to a more lethal weapon. (Note: If the enemy has no resistance, this will reduce their health 83%, reducing their movement speed and melee damage 41.5% and increasing their spread 83%. Most enemies worth using this weapon on do resist it, but it's still a very fast and very effective opening move.) F: Shockroach. Deals 10 electrical damage. One second debuff on hit. Infinite ammo, 9 shots, same recharge rate as hivehand but only recharges while equipped. Has a secondary "charged" mode that uses all 9 units of energy for a single shot that deals triple damage and has a three-second debuff. G: Spore launcher. Deals 50 chemical damage. Slows the enemy and reduces their melee damage by 50% while increasing their spread by 100% for ten seconds. Highly ineffective against armoured opponents, and this lack of efficacy also reduces its debuff. Highly effective against zombies, and also especially debilitating. H: M40A1. An alternative sniping tool to the crossbow, deals much less damage but is locational and more effective against especially heavy armour. Deals full damage to all infantry. High single-shot damage and headshot capability combine to allow for extremely high sneak attack damage, especially from behind targets. The only infantryman capable of surviving a sneak attack, to the head and from behind, is the overwatch elite, and only on hard when you're not using the scope. I: Tau cannon. Very powerful weapon that deals full damage to almost all enemies. Its charged attacks can even damage synths and vehicles. Uses rare uranium ammunition, more efficient (but lower DPS and a long delay) when charged, especially damaging to vehicles when using charged attacks. Deals about half as much damage at full charge as a rocket, twice as much to a strider (striders take 1/4 rocket damage, but now have 1000 health to a gunship's 3000, which still means 4 rocket hits instead of 3), and unlike the rocket cannot be shot down. Unlike the prototype, it cannot overcharge and will never injure the user. Two fully charged shots (20% of your ammo) will kill a strider on hard. J: Satchel charge. Equal power to a hopper, placed and detonated by the player. Deals exactly enough damage to one shot an overwatch trooper, after resistance. But that'll never actually happen because it's a blast and the damage will fall a little before it hits them. For best results, place alone for CPs (except riot), in pairs for overwatch or riot CPS, and in trios for elites. Make sure not to detonate on riot CPs with shields until they're past it or you'll hit their shield and only do half as much damage. 4. Enemies now have harsh resistances to attack. Just a few examples. A: Citizens (25HP) take 3/4 damage from buckshot, chemicals and bites, normal damage from everything else. B: Metrocops and rebels (50HP) take 1/2 damage from buckshot, chemicals and bites, 3/4 damage from 9mm bullets, knives, penetrating and energy animal attacks and 40mm grenades, and normal damage from everything else. C: Special "riot" metrocops (50HP) take no damage at all from bites and chemicals, 1/4 damage from buckshot, knives, penetrating and energy animal attacks and 40mm grenades, 1/2 damage from 9mm bullets, the crowbar and blunt animal strikes, 3/4 damage from crossbow bolts, .357 bullets, low-power pulse rounds and grenades, normal damage from everything else. D: Overwatch troopers (75HP) take 1/4 damage from buckshot, chemicals and bites, 1/2 damage from 9mm rounds, knives, penetrating and energy animal attacks and 40mm grenades, 3/4 damage from .357 bullets, low-power pulse rounds, the crowbar and blunt animal strikes, normal damage from everything else. E: Overwatch elites (100HP) take no damage at all from buckshot, chemicals and bites, 1/4 damage from 9mm bullets, knives, penetrating and energy animal attacks and 40mm grenades, 1/2 damage from .357 bullets, low-power pulse rounds, the crowbar and blunt animal strikes, 3/4 damage from crossbow bolts, 4.6mm bullets and grenades, normal damage from everything else. F: Houndeyes (20HP) take 3/4 damage from the wrench, physics objects, bites, energy animal attacks and blunt animal strikes and normal damage from everything else. G: Bullsquids (160HP) take 1/4 from chemicals, 1/2 damage from the wrench, physics objects, bites and blunt animal strikes, 3/4 damage from the crowbar, penetrating and penetrating animal strikes and normal damage from everything else. Immune to poison. H: Zombies (60HP) take 1/4 damage from the wrench, physics objects, bites and blunt animal strikes, 1/2 damage from the crowbar and penetrating animal strikes, 3x damage from fire and energy animal attacks, 2x damage from buckshot and chemicals, 1.5x damage from 9mm bullets, normal damage from everything else. Immune to poison. I: Gonomes (80HP) take 1/4 damage from the wrench, physics objects, bites and blunt animal strikes, 1/2 damage from the crowbar and penetrating animal strikes, 2x damage from fire and energy animal attacks, 1.5x damage from chemicals, normal damage from everything else. Immune to poison. J: Antlion workers (30HP) take 1/2 damage from buckshot, chemicals and animal bites, 3/4 damage from 9mm bullets, knives, penetrating animal attacks and 40mm grenades, normal damage from everything else. Immune to poison. K: Antlion soldiers (30HP) take 1/4 damage from buckshot, chemicals and animal bites, 1/2 damage from 9mm bullets, knives, penetrating animal attacks and 40mm grenades, 3/4 damage from .357 bullets, the crowbar, low-power pulse rounds and blunt animal strikes, normal damage from everything else. Immune to poison. L: Antlion guards (900HP) take no damage at all from buckshot, chemicals and animal bites, 1/4 damage from 9mm bullets, knives, penetrating animal attacks and 40mm grenades, 1/2 damage from .357 bullets, the crowbar, low-power pulse rounds and blunt animal strikes, 3/4 damage from crossbow bolts, 4.6mm bullets and grenades. Immune to poison. M: Hunters (100HP) take no damage at all from buckshot, chemicals and 9mm bullets, 1/4 damage from .357 bullets and animal bites, 1/2 damage from knives, penetrating and energy animal attacks, 4.6mm bullets, low-power pulse rounds and 40mm grenades, 3/4 damage from crossbow bolts, the crowbar, blunt animal attacks and 5.56mm bullets, and normal damage from everything else. Immune to poison. Got the basic idea on the resistances? Moving on. 5. Your rebel character is very vulnerable to start with, and increases in resistance to damage later in the game. A: When you start, you don't have any body armour. Now, as a protagonist you're still unusually durable (100HP), but you have citizen resistances, take double damage and can't have any armour points. B: Soon, you join the rebellion proper and are issued the standard issue armour of the rebels. You now have rebel resistances and you can have 100 armour points, but still take double damage. C: Following Freeman's raid on Nova Prospekt, things pick up and you get a powered combat vest, the same type that was once worn by Adrian Shephard. This means you finally take normal damage, and have a unique set of resistances. These resistances are comparable to an overwatch elite for the most part. It provides markedly better bullet resistance (you are immune to everything up to the .357, the 4.6 only does 1/4 damage, the 5.56 only does 1/2 and the 7.62 only does 3/4) but is weaker against energy and pulse attacks (1/2 from energy animal attacks, 3/4 damage from low-power pulse rounds, nothing else resisted). This is the best armour you'll ever get. This suit can finally be recharged with batteries and wall chargers. That's all I've got for now. How's it sounding so far?

The part you cut explicitly said that it does less damage because I have to COMBINE damage and penetration in-game. I have NO DOUBT of the OSIPR's power, and it's hard to completely stop a blast-type attack so it would affect stronger enemies at least a little, but any amount of armour can *reduce* blast damage. Heavy, thick, well-padded armour like those of the combine would be very effective against a blast. If none of the enemies in-game were armoured I would probably have assigned a higher value to the OSIPR's damage. And when I do a more in-depth mod, I will. (Probably 20.) But the downside is that any armoured enemy would take at least a little less damage from it. And if you're so huge on vanilla damage values, consider that my original value for the pulse rifle was already significantly stronger than the original, and it's now almost twice the vanilla power and does more damage than the .357. All I'm assuming is that it functions the way it looks. And it looks like it's very well padded. Padding would A: Put space between the blast and the wearer, B: Disperse the energy of the blast and C: Insulate the wearer from the thermal component. All three translate to less damage from the blast. This should also reduce small-arms damage, but I have to keep the small arms doing decent damage for gameplay reasons. (And who's the say the small arms aren't using superior powder now, twenty years after the first game? It's as good an explanation as any.) Occam's razor. 1. This has no in-game support. 2. No, it doesn't. Its impact blast has a similar colour to the light around the mini-teleporter, but it doesn't have any of the other visual effects. 3. All combine pulse weapons have the same animation. 4. There's nothing that says the energy ball is the same tech as the pulse rifle. In fact, lots of things contradict that. A: They have wildly different flight characteristics. B: The energy pellets are a different colour altogether. C: The energy pellet container is totally different in design from that of the pulse rifle's magazine. 5. If it really was teleporting chunks of enemy out, which there's no evidence for and doesn't match anything in the game's visual effects and thus anybody with enough logic to understand Occam's Razor knows is bullshit to assume, it would actually be EVEN LESS EFFECTIVE against their heavily padded (thus very thick) armour. The added space between the user and the teleportation field would result in less of the teleported matter being from the target and more from the armour and would also mean the matter teleported out would be more superficial and thus less organ damage (likely none at all) would be done. 6. This was an argument about whether the pulse rifle could damage somebody's torso after hitting their arm, remember? Your idea of it being a teleportation weapon makes putting an arm out to stop it EVEN MORE EFFECTIVE since there's not going to be ANY effect from the pulse hitting the wearer's body now, where before there might be some fragmentation. 7. How exactly would synths resist it if it's teleporting chunks out of a target? If it really is, it should still deal at least a little damage to absolutely everything, even if very little. 8. Gordon's armour defeats the "teleporting" energy pellet and it does VERY little damage to him. How could it possibly do that if it's a teleporting weapon? 9. The energy pellet doesn't "teleport" most things it destroys. Even things like small cardboard boxes. Explain that, if you really think the energy pellet is a teleportation weapon. Actually, don't. There's no explanation for why it performs so wildly differently on different targets no matter WHAT model you use. Probably because the energy pellet is TOTAL FUCKING BULLSHIT. Seeing as I also remembered Alyx's gun having a blue muzzle flash and firing pulse projectiles, I'm just going to wait to respond to this until I actually get there. I'm in Ravenholm right now, won't be too long. Although I tried the airboat gun, also a pulse weapon, and found NO impact mark on ANY target, so it's clearly not teleporting chunks out, is it? Ah, there's the problem. I wasn't thinking of the same turret. I was thinking of the turrets from Episode 2, since you mentioned it blowing a zombie in half and the turrets in Episode 2 appear to have done exactly that. Also, keep in mind there were multiple turrets shooting that zombie on full-auto with their silly-fast rate of fire. Also, it's a zombie, which is probably not nearly as hard to rip apart as a healthy human being. 1. The .50 only does 20 in Black Mesa. It does 8 in Half-Life 1. Which is the same as a Glock 17, not more, but my point about their damage values being totally worthless still stands. 2. A shotgun wouldn't BE worthless against the unarmoured opponents the overwatch frequently tangles with. And I made the pulse rifle MORE powerful than it was in vanilla, and you're STILL complaining about it being too weak. MAKE UP YOUR GODDAMN MIND. I gave the thornet gun its damage value entirely for balance, then changed it when the balance changed, because I knew little about it. I also assumed it to be poison because that was the most likely option for it with how it was presented, JUST like I am now when I assume the pulse rifle to deal blast damage. 1. It can still totally do both of those things. 2. There's no evidence the thornet gun EVER killed an HEV-suited scientist. None of the scientists are EVER found dead around grunts, and even if they were there's still the chance they were bludgeoned to death as the grunts are VERY strong. 1. The overwatch mostly fight UNARMOURED opponents, and their loadout supports this. Penetration would not be a logical priority. 2. The weapon still works on an armoured opponent. 3. You're assuming you know the motivation of an alien empire in a video game. Maybe they use the pulse rifle because it's great against unarmoured enemies, or because it's hard for armour to completely stop it, and don't care that it isn't *AS* effective for those in between. Maybe they use the pulse rifle because for logistical reasons. Maybe they use the pulse rifle for its psychological effect. There are a LOT of reasons other than armour penetration to pick a weapon. Most of them are more important than armour penetration most of the time. 1. Wrong. Environmental damage sources don't draw blood, and neither do the attacks of a couple enemies. ONLY kinetic attacks draw blood. 2. My memory is not to be trusted, wait until I get there. 3. Actually, that's not true. The tau cannon (when charged) and combine sniper can both deal damage to an enemy close enough behind an object. They're the only weapons that can, though, and in the sniper rifle's case you basically have to be pressed up against the other target. 4. Yes, I have. Then I took Occam's Razor to that idea and threw away its mangled carcass because EVERY SINGLE OTHER EXPLANATION made more sense. 1. You know what I fucking mean. There's no research involved, they just made it smaller, that's it. 2. It can go ahead and be inferior in several areas if it's superior in even one other. Guns, when first invented, were VASTLY inferior to bows and crossbows, and they still got REAL reasearch and REAL development just because they were loud and scary. Here, we have a weapon technology that already exists and has at least some valuable advantages, it just wouldn't be as effective against all the armoured enemies the Combine don't have. 3. There's no reason NOT to do it. Whether they want pulse weapons for greater stopping power against unarmoured targets, its ability to impact larger and better armoured targets (blast damage is harder to completely stop, it's just easier to partially reduce) that a rifle wouldn't do anything to, or just for logistical or psychological reasons, those are all very good reasons to mass produce them and start handing them out. 4. Who's the say the Combine don't issue regular rifles? They might also issue submachine guns other than the MP7, and pistols other than the Python and USP Match. They can have things and they not appear in-game. If Valve thinks "Well, they'd probably have that, but it'd really be superfluous to include it." they won't include it. 1. Well why don't they use the fucking Overwatch vests then, huh? Those are clearly a lot better, so why not use those? 2. The in-universe explanation is the exact same as the gameplay reason. If they look like their enemy, they'll get shot by their own side. 3. The rebels wearing the armour are slightly bulkier than those that don't. It's possible their clothing is just really thick, but maybe they're wearing the jacket UNDER their sweaters, just so the sweaters will help reduce friendly fire incidents. The vest couldn't be, because of its size and shape, but the jacket could. And you know, this is the second time I have said that. This is bullshit. Barney doesn't have a HUD until he puts on his armour either, and his helmet doesn't have a visor or any other means of producing a HUD. In fact, if you do it right you can pick up JUST the vest and you get the same effect without the helmet. This really isn't a good argument. But just so you know, I've always been on the fence about his helmet's existence. And for that reason, I've always given him an in-between value for headshot damage. So can you stop bugging me about the helmet, please? Also, just did an update that reduced headshot damage 20%. Not a big decrease, usually just means one more shot to kill, occasionally two. The most it can increase it by is (I think) for SMG rounds or shotgun flechettes (yes, I'm assuming they're flechettes now, but only because otherwise the current damage value makes NO sense) to the head of an overwatch elite, where this has increased the required number by 3. (From 12 to 15. For the shotgun, that means a double blast will no longer do it for an elite, which is the biggest difference.) Also, for some reason, the shocktroopers in opposing force only take double headshot damage despite the setting being at 4 (previously 5), so I've decreased their health 20% to compensate. Male Black Ops are apparently immune to headshots entirely, so I've reduced their health 50% to compensate. But that's only for Opposing Force, so what do you care? And I've got some ideas to pitch for the TC mod. I'll get on that now.