America's Army Brings Pain. I Bring Overlong Useless Rant.
What, no one else is going to start a thread devoted to this? Am I the only one excited to see our Hard Earned Bling Bling Taxes at Work? Am I the only one wasting hour after hour (on a holiday, no less) trying to play this piece of poo and failing miserably? Am I the only one HACKING THE PLANET! in an attempt to get it to work? TELL ME I'M NOT ALONE.
In case you didn't know America's Army is a free downloadable government funded first person shooter for Windows that's, well, propaganda. It is an attempt to brainwash YOU, the big fat pasty useless computer nerd, into Being All That You Can Be. It cost about $7mil, which is probably a small fraction of the cost for all those stupid Army ads with King Arthur and games of Human Chess - y'know, the ones you'd see when you were a kid and think "WOW WHAT VIDEO GAME IS THIS FOR?!" and then you'd be real pissed off when you found out it was just for the stupid army. Yet I never heard anyone bitching about all that Masters of the Universe wannabe bullshit, but everyone seems to be going on about what an evil waste of money this is blah blah blah who cares. I bet they'll get more recruits thanks to a free downloadable killkillkilldiedie video game than they will with tv ads or giving away socks. (I'd tell the story about the time my sister enlisted my brother in the military order to get a pair of socks for herself, but I'm blabbing too much as it is.)
All the advance word I've heard about this game was awfully positive, but unfortunately the stupid thing won't work. Yes, I know - a Windows game that won't work. Wotta shock. Most people would just give up after the third try, but me. I'm stupid. If something doesn't work I always end up kicking it repeatedly until either A) it does work, or B) I break my foot. After 2 hours of trying to join a game (which is remarkably quick for me - you don't wanna know how much time I spent trying to get Neverwinter Nights to work. Ugh) I'm broken and bruised and ready to die and all. After I finish venting here, of course.
There are two big problems with this game:
1) Before playing any of the true maps you must complete mandatory basic training.
and
2) Users are unable to host their own servers - the Army has contracted HomeLAN to provide exclusive hosting. And HomeLAN - they're not doing a very good job of it.
Basic training is split into two portions: offline, where you shoot some targets and other dull stuff; and online, where you play on a team comprised of other trainees. Blew through the offline training, but I was unable to join any of the online training servers because there's like 2 of them. And thousands of people are trying to squeezee onto these 2 servers. Now you'd think that on release day it would make sense to have the majority of the servers set up as training, seeing as how _every single person playing_ is a newbie, but naw. They devote the other 48 servers to maps 95% of the users can't play on. Yee haw.
I dunno, maybe they think that overloaded servers = unplayable (free) game = controversy = news = raised awareness = more downloads = more recruits. Maybe they did market research and found out this would be a good plan. Or maybe they're just idiots.
Eventually I just gave up and cheated - I edited my save game so it told America's Spyware "Rummy Completed Basic Training. Let Him Kill Stuff" and then tried to join official servers hosting other maps. But of course NONE OF THEM WORKED. So I joined a game hosted by some kid who HACKED THE PLANET (I need to stop saying that so much - dang HBO for showing HACKERS every day in 1996, and dang myself for watching it everytime it aired) and set up an illegit server. I played for 3 minutes. It looked ok, and played ok, but I was getting pings of 300 (which is better than what evil Gamespy was giving me to the offical servers - 1000+) and, well, by this point I didn't even want to play. I was satisfied with SLAYING THE BEAST and managing to get online somehow. Now I will never play this game again. Unless someone else is foolish enough to try it and tell me how great it really is and how the servers are so much better and there's no more need for GameSpy and yeah yeah yeah.
Yes, I know it's free. Yes, maybe that means I shouldn't complain. But nuts to that. The whole reason I built this shitbox PC was so I could play free crap games and bitch about them nonstop. It's fun. You should try it. But porbably shoulda just forgotten about the bitching and gone with my original plan - violating the EULA by exporting copies of this game to Cuba and Libya. I'd probably feel so much better right now. Yee-haw!
RIDE THE PONY!
