The Rusted Musket

Years and Years ago my core group of gamer friends and I started a Tuesday night gaming experiment, we called it Battlefield 2uesdays; yep, you guessed it, we played Battlefield 2… and then when Battlefield 2142 came out we played that… and then we played Battlefield Bad Company 2… and then Battlefield Vietnam (the remake diversion)… and then we went back to playing Battlefield Bad Company 2. I’m pleased to report Battlefield 2uesdays is still going strong, only now we call it Battlefield Tu3sdays!

(I’ll start negative and then go positive)

Disappointment can be summed up with two words – Resource Diversion (ie. Campaign & CO-OP) – Because of this resource diversion we have a comma rose without the rose petals of health and ammo, a camouflage system that resets default camo every round, and tanks that slide around serious earth tone terrain as if gliding on happy yellow plastic tarp. Sit and ponder with me, a Battlefield with 100 percent of its resources devoted to multiplayer. Did you just wet yourself? You should have…

But the universe is more complicated than that and so is this review, I totally wrote the previous paragraph before playing any CO-OP, I have since then played a few missions of CO-OP, and dang it, I actually like it. Now, I still haven’t played any campaign, but if the trend of not liking something BF3 related before playing it and then liking it after you actually play it stays true, I’ll bet dollars to SOFLAM the campaigns not terrible either.

Moving on – I’m getting older so for a game to grab any of my steadily decreasing time/attention allotment, to rise above almost unavoidable redundancy, it needs to be special. Battlefield 3 makes me feel special, like some young special twenty something. I have to admit, even though the Dice guys are Swedish, and their nation hasn’t fought anyone since Napoleon, they’ve got some solid nuggets of brass and lead.

Vehicle combat, by itself a rarity, has punch, volume, explosion, and satisfaction. There’s nothing quite like a few minutes of intense tank warfare resulting in a steppe littered with smoldering hulks of less fortunate opponents. But there’s a nasty good balance to it all, because just as I’m smugly smiling from my tanks cupola an attack chopper will swoop down, unleashing hellfire and brimstone; that or I’ll get slammed with multiple rpg’s from multiple rooftops.

For some reason I drive tanks with assault class… should use engi class (repair is good, I’m smarter than that)… Stubborn German…

The point of my game reviews aren’t to give full on, multi-directional, HD perspectives, you’ve got IGN and Gameinformer for that; I haven’t even officially mentioned the word “multiplayer” till just now (and everyone else is right about it).

All I know is this, I haven’t bought MW3 yet… The End…

I was placing together factoids and locations for my Youth Pastor Resume yesterday when I hit the proverbial traffic snarl, the gaugau game with no gaugau ball, the Pez dispenser with, well, you get it.

I had reached the span of my life, when for about eight years, I janitored at a private Christian school. I didn’t know what to tell myself, my resume, or anyone else for that matter about this particular stretch of seemingly wasted time.

But then something occurred to me, a thought, a memory complete, a mental nudge independent of resume buffing or career building. It was the night of the huge parent teacher conference and I remembered frantic light speed cleaning; the hallways swept, the garbage emptied, the locker tops dusted, and then there were the urinals. They had the normal staining associated with urinals, basically stratified pee salt layers (yep, gross), so with moments to spare before parent teacher game time I started scrubbing this nasty fossil record.

It was at this point, when all hope seemed lost, that someone kneeled next to me on that tiled bathroom floor. It was Ernie, the Vice Superintendent of HCS, who, with rolled up sleeves and abrasive pad in hand, started scrubbing urinals with me.

That night I started to understand servant leadership and associated humility in a new way because I saw servant leadership and the associated humility in a new way.

The stretch of time spent as “Janitor Ben” may not necessarily build my youth outline but I think it built something more important than resume; my character…

Clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. 1 Pet 5.5-6

Image Credit: Plognark @ deviantart.com