Carrot
I Deserved This
After 14 — fourteen!! — hours of hard work I finally finished my end-of-the-month workload, no thanks to a horribly slow ISP. *Cough S###t#ro cough*
Come Monday evening despite my battered eyes, I invited my cousin to play a game of Warrock. While the ISP connection in my batcave frequently acted up and despite what people are saying about the Higher Powers regarding Doda Elektroda, the gods of gaming were fair; there was no sign of lag as we played two rounds of urban shoot-em-up-no-forget-that-shoot-them-in-the-face warfare in the streets of Montana.
There’s nothing like the sight of an enemy’s soldier rifle arm waving around wildly as you ventilate his rib cage with 5.56 x 45 mm NATO rounds; it’s just the best way to wash away office stress, hands down.
This time around, I played the game with my 450-Php earphones. Before, I regularly played with my Logitech X-530 at full blast (you gotta enjoy how your teeth and the walls of your room rattle when a tank rumbles by as you hide under a mountain of crates praying to your momma that you won’t be seen).
It was an epiphanic experience. Forget 5.1 surround sound.
The edge the things give you is more than substantial. For the first time, with uncanny clarity, I could hear the crunch of combat boots on street grit when enemy combatants ran. Consequently, this taught me the importance of crouching and crawling silently, a tip I often ignored the past months, so ingrained was old-school Quake in my style of gameplay. This impediment of movement as I crawled, stalked, and peeked around corners taught me to be more careful with my moves. (It IS frustrating if, after several minutes of careful crouch-crawling, without seeing anyone, you get shot in the back for your recklessness in choosing routes.) This in turn, forced me to look at the mini-map and observe where my comrades were and where they were facing.
It taught me the importance of firing arcs.
From there, it was a massacre.
When I noticed three of my team were making their way along one street, gunning down resistance as they popped up, I positioned myself in a corner, watching the avenues that ran perpendicular to the one they were taking. In this manner, there were no chances of enemies coming at us from the rear. (In the several cases that I got gunned down, my teammates noticed the ruckus their rearguard was making and reacted accordingly.) Or if I found myself alone in a hostile part of the map (enemy bases) I would wait for my team, anticipate where they were going to storm in, and set up shop in an area with a line-of-sight perpendicular to theirs. There were many cases were intense gunfights were made with both teams exchanging fire while I picked the enemy off one by one from the side.
It was an orchestra. Tactics and strategy, it all wove harmoniously in the cacophony and staccato of gunfire, smoke, and blood. And behind it all, my pair of earphones — who akin to a devious jester serving his monarch — was whispering and shouting to my ears with a sadistic glee and horrific precision. It was the maestro. It was the devil.
A massacre? Indeed it was.
And yes, after fourteen hours of shoulder-numbing work I deserved this: (last kill, first in the ranks with my cousin second)
