::A Geek in Korea::

Today, in regular Sunday fashion had me playing video games again with some foreigners. This time, however, I was gaming with people on two different continents.

I got word that there would be another gaming challenge going down at the Xbox room. We didn’t expect a lot of people to show up, so I got word to set up a cooperative game of something. I had chosen Gears of War, to see what it was like, but when a third player showed up, we ended up playing Halo 3 campaign. Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve ever played Halo for an extended period of time.

Gears of War was subtitled, but Halo 3 had full Korean menus and voice acting. This meant we had NO idea what the story was the entire time we were playing. If we were required to do something, we had to figure it out, usually by destroying things or pushing buttons. This lead to a lot of backtracking, guessing, and traveling to corners of the map “just to see” if this way where to go.

I’m not sure about the Halo 3 gameplay. It’s bright and colorful, and there is no blood, but there were a LOT of weapons that seemed mediocre and useless. There were would be some awesome weapons you would win off your enemies, but they lasted a few hits and you needed to scrounge something else up.

Occasionally there would be large battles that were really fun (TANKS! WARHOGS! WRAITHS! FIGHTING!) but the rest of the levels were normally “hit a button, now BACK TRACK!” The repetitive levels DID not help when you needed to find someplace new to visit. When we were in the open areas fighting HUGE things, it was a total blast.  I like Call of Duty 4 a lot more. Nothing in Halo 3 made me care when I died, but Call of Duty makes every death seem intense.

I had to leave the Halo game (my eyes were almost bleeding because of all the light bloom anyway) because I had made a promise to play Wesnoth via the Internet. I have a new webcam that works flawlessly in Linux. We set up a Skype video chat, then went at it. I won the first game handily, then got disconnected from the next two just when they were getting interesting.

This was a problem with previous versions of Wesnoth games I played on the Internet too. While the local player and hotseat stuff works perfectly, the disconnects didn’t get resolved when I rejoined the game online. I’m not sure what was causing the problems. I hope the next time we try this sort of game it’ll work better than this.

Next weekend we’ll play a few hours of Magic the Gathering. Hopefully, my copy of Brawl will arrive in the mail sometime this week. Then I’ll play through trying to unlock as many characters as I can, and then host a series of games with foreigners at my house.