Pronounced My-Key-On: by Michael Quach

I just recently broke 100 hours with medic in Team Fortress 2, officially my most played class. Total, I have around 400 hours put into TF2 over the past 3 years. From the start I never really wanted to play medic, but I did want to win games. You’re not going to be breaking any sentry farms with unubered heavies/soldiers/demos so a medic is needed. It seems so odd right? That a class I didn’t want to play is also my most played class. Why would I keep playing medic if I didn’t want to play it?

 

Life as a medic is harsh

One of the reasons I didn’t like playing medic is that you have to take the passenger seat in killing and doing objectives. Your goal in the game is to keep your team alive and support them in the push towards the objective. Sure you’ll be top of the scoreboard with assists and healing but you won’t be getting the satisfaction of a kill. The second reason I don’t like playing medic is that you are the bullseyes that everyone wants to kill. Getting close to an uber? Count on a crit rocket or a spy coming around your way. As other classes if I get killed, I don’t mind but with medic, it’s often when I’m past 75% in an uber charge that just got wasted and now I have to build it back up again. It’s just one of those laws of life where you count on something bad happening to you as you near the climax of joy.

 

Try surviving this without an Uber

What I found to make playing medic a much more enjoyable class for me to play is to be an offensive, or as other people call it, battle medic. If I see a large chance of myself being killed and I don’t have faith in the person I’m supporting to protect me, I’ll break off the healing beam and go for the kill with my saw. If I survive, my ubersaw gets a nice charge bonus, if I die, I would have died anyways so it’s better to die while trying than to die with the medigun pointed at the enemy. Other times, I just can’t resist the lure of an easy kill as there’s something satisfying about getting the drop on enemies and humiliating them with a kill.

 

Your medic is mine!

I don’t know if by being a battle medic I cause more harm to my team by dying instead of staying back and safe, but I do know it’s a lot more fun to run around causing distractions as the enemy try to hunt down an almost harmless medic. Lately though I’ve been moving away from medic. If I see there’s other good medics on the team, I’ll just stick to medic for the initial push out of the gates until I die. Sometimes however, we end up winning the round without me dying at all even with battle medic attacks on the enemy frontline.

 

The next time you play with me and I’m your medic, remember, if I see an easy kill, I’ll take it, even if I have to kill steal from you. If you’re the enemy, don’t think I’ll stick around with my medigun out waiting for you to kill me, I’ll go down trying to take you with me.

 

Moments later, we discover an all medic team only gets you to the second point

By the way, I use to prefer playing pyro back in the days, now there’s too many pyros running around not doing a good job of supporting the team so I decided to give heavy a try.

Burn baby burn

 

I had a blast at GDC and exploring the show floor. I only attended for two days but it was enough to explore what the show floor had to offer.

 

NeuroSky

One of the first products I saw was the NeuroSky monitor headset. They were showing off how it can read your brain waves and did a tech demo on what you could do. The one I tried had me focus my attention on one object making it explode and another had me relaxing to have a ball float up.

 

It was an interesting technology and the company stated that they were looking for developers to use their tech in games. The focus was in rehabilitation for people disabled by injuries as the machine will help the player learn how to control their brain waves. These brain waves could be used in mobility devices so instead of a user physically moving a part of their body, they can just think it and the appliance will move as if it’s part of the body.

www.Neurosky.com

 

 

The screen showing the Brain Waves

Making the Ball Float 

 

 

Me with the headset on

Boryokudan Rue

When I first glimpsed Boryokudan Rue, I immediately thought back to the adventure games of the 90s. The game is built on the Adventure Game Studio engine. What immediately stood out for me was the use of a cover system and gun fights. Adventure games I’ve played were always light in heart, had comedic violence, and no real enemies that could kill you. Just delay you or reset you to an earlier part of the level.

The level being showcased at GDC was the tutorial level and the character you play, Delta Six, is a experimental subject who has lost his memory and the tutorial serves as a way to teach you the basic movements. Once the scene got to the gun tutorial, I was hooked. The player goes into cover and you have to manually choose when to go out of cover and aim. Once you aim there is a quicktime like meter where you have to hit the right range to get the headshot or a regular body shot. I didn’t see what happened after but as I understand, eventually you must figure out how to get the gun and break out of your containment.

 

Below are links to the developer’s twitter and the development thread.

 http://twitter.com/thejburger

http://www.jburger.blogspot.com/

http://www.bigbluecup.com/yabb/index.php?topic=35594.0

 

Monaco

 

Monaco was the gem of the show for me. I got a brief 5 minute play of it but the game, event though it’s 9 months from release, it’s amazing. Monaco is a 4 player coop game where you and your 3 friends must steal a trophy and escape while avoiding guards with guns and bystanders who will report you on sight to the nearest guards. All you need is the movement keys, and your ability key. Interactions with doors, windows, and alarms can be done just by walking into it. Each character has a different ability such as shutting off alarms, instant lock picking, spy cameras, and sedatives for guards.

 

If one character gets killed, another just has to walk over and revive them. This proves tricky however if the dead buddy happens to be in the line of sight of a guard. What the players need to do is either sedate him with the yellow character or distract him by having the guard chase another player. Teamwork is an absolute in order to survive and reach the end in this game. This is one game I’m looking forward to.

 

http://www.facebook.com/MonacoIsMine

http://twitter.com/MonacoIsMine

 

 

3d Games at GDC

The 3d games at GDC did not impress me. For one, the 3d glasses did not fit over my eye glasses. The games didn’t really look special with 3d on and it didn’t really pop out at me. The 3d effects suffer from the small pc monitor sizes and the distance to the monitors. The ones I tried had you 5-6 feet away from the monitor and the 3d was contained within the monitors unlike in the movie theatres. The problem I think likes with the fact that in theatres, the screen fill sup your entire field of view so everything you see is in 3d while on the show floor, you had the environment to contend with.

 

I don’t think 3d games will be big until people get larger screens into their homes to fill up their view. Also, the glasses never sat right on my nose and some of them I had to hold in place in front of my eyeglasses.

 

Overall, GDC was a nice experience. I think I’ll go back again for 2011 and might pay for the higher priced passes so I can attend the summits.

 

When I started off with Rainbow Six as my first first person shooter on the PC, I had no inkling of this game mechanic called "respawn." When you died in the game, you had to wait until the end of the match. Depending on the map and type of players, it could take one minute to the end or in some cases, 20 minutes. This is where I learned about patience as all the dead players talked amongst themselves and watched as their last teammates get lost within the map and keep passing by each other without noticing. There would be talks about nice shots, tactics, and general everyday life during these afterdeath waiting periods.

As I continued my first person shooting career, I moved onto Delta Force series which introduced me to elements such as medics, spawn camping, and most importantly, the "Press Spacebar to respawn or wait for a medic" popup. I was amazed at the idea of being able to be brought back to life and how it made so much sense to me. The Delta Force series is about large groups of people battling other large groups of people while in Rainbow Six it was just your squad vs another squad with limited numbers on a small contained area and not a battlefield. Essentially, on the battlefield between factions, the leaders would not just send in some small unit, they would send their army to battle it out and continue to send in reinforcements so that the battle can be won.

I continued my FPS career through the years and when I hit Team Fortress 2, that was the first time I came across people complaining about respawning. "Respawns are TOOOOOOOOO LOONNGGG!!!!!," "Valve should balance the game for instant respawns, it makes the game better!" "Respawn timers were put in because Valve is too lazy to make good maps!" were the arguments I heard against timers.

It just doesn’t make any sense for me. Respawn time is there for you to observe your team, learn from their movements and strategy on where to go, what to do, and to celebrate awesome kills that people perform. Respawn time is also the perfect time to get up, stretch, relax, or use the bathroom. In an Arstechnica article I read, (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/02/study-fps-deaths-provide-sweet-relief-to-victims.ars) , there was a study into the effects of killing and dying in the videogame, "James Bond 007: Nightfire," and the study showed that with each kill a person got without dying, their stress increased while being killed gave them relief. I would say this mirrors my response in every shooter I play. When I kill another player, it adds to my kill streak, I become fixated on keeping my kill streak high and staying alive. I become even more paranoid of everyone around me, and I notice this happen to other players as well. As their kill streaks increase, they retreat out of battle faster and faster in fear of losing their awesome streak.

 

I always value each one of my deaths in any multiplayer game. I think back about my actions and how I would have handled it differently instead of staying stuck in the past about what should have or could have happen. I imagine the new scenario and practice it so I can change my timing. One example I would use is with the airblast on the pyro. With the Demo/Soldier update, I have dramatically increased my airblast reflection rates after many deaths and trying to understand when each soldier fires their load off and what is the best time to reflect.

Personally, I hate instant respawn in all first person shooter style games. For one, it doesn’t give me any sense of consequence for doing a foolish action that gets me killed and the game just says “It’s ok, now get back out there and do it again and again. ”I always feel like there is this pressure on me to move as fast as I can as soon as I spawn and I keep my body and senses in the "fight or flight" mode for an extended period of time. The body thinks there’s a threat everywhere, your heart starts beating, chemicals start filling your body and your brain shuts off non-vital processes of your body. Eventually, your body will deteriorate from this heightened state of alert and now things become more serious as video games start having a detrimental effect on your body.

 

To my readers, what kind of respawn mechanics do you like? Instant vs timer?

 

 

Games with one life are also fine

So I entered into the Maximum PC podcast contest last week, found here http://www.maximumpc.com/article/no_bs_podcast/no_bs_podcast_121_windows_7_live , on identifying the Windows startup sound they played and explaining which one was your favorite. Below is what I put as my favorite startup sound.

I first encountered Windows 98 in 1999, when we got a new computer and my parents allowed me to buy my first pc video game. That game was the original Rainbow 6 and every day, the Windows 98 startup sound would echo through the house from my speakers as I began my PC gaming career. Windows 98 is my childhood; it was there when I began PC gaming, it was there when I began my foray onto the internet and all its wonders and horrors; and it was there when I finished elementary school. Windows 98 is why I am here today. That startup sound will always remind me of my childhood and I will always hold it dear to my heart.

To explain further, that was the operating system where I truly began exploring other games available to me. Before then, I was just another kid who sat at home all day watching tv, but now, with my 56k modem and AOL, I began learning about things like other internet speeds, lag, and courtesy (back then where I played, there was no flaming, people were actually nice and helped each other out). It was like a sort of awakening for me. Windows 98 was the platform when I started making friends who didn’t care how I looked, just that I was a nice guy who played games with them. That’s all they needed in order to start a friendship and become a community. It was because of these friends that I made I was gradually introduced to other kinds of PC games such as real time strategy in Age of Empires, Role Playing Games in NeverWinter Nights, and text games called Multi User Dungeons (MUD). I would even say that because of Windows 98 and its introduction of video games, that I began geeking out and learning about technology and made me the “computer guy” in my family.

Without Windows 98, I might not have become a PC gamer, I might not have begun my education into learning the latest tech, I might not even have all these e-friends that I now have and the communities I belong to which has lasted longer than real life groups and friends. So to Microsoft, Thank you for Windows 98 and beginning my career of pc gaming.

P.S. I also won Cities XL, woot!

A recent search on Facebook shows that there are over 7,000 people with Quach somewhere in their name. Looking through the various Quach groups on facebook, I’ve come to find out that I’m not alone in wondering just where do I fit in.

All the Quachs I’ve met in San Francisco have similar backgrounds, born in San Francisco, parents are from Vietnam. The differences among the group is the language they speak. I’ve met some who speak a dialect of Chinese called, TeoChew and Vietnamese, while others grew up with only Vietnamese as their primary language. All the relatives in my family  can speak both languages fluently but can only read and write in Vietnamese.

When I asked my mom if we were Chinese or Vietnamese, she would always tell me to tell everyone else we’re Vietnamese. The only problem was that I never learned Vietnamese from my parents or even learned much of TeoChew from them. Things get awkward when I meet other Quachs and they begin to speak to me in either Vietnamese or TeoChew and all I can reply is that I never learned the language.

I never even knew how to spell out the name of the language I grew up learning until a few years ago when I found the Facebook group called, “Quach is better than your Last Name” and found out that TeoChew is the official name. My family pronounces it “Chew Chao” which is also known as Chaozhou, located in Eastern China.

Image from the Facebook group 郭 family (Guo, Kwak, Kwok, Quach, Kaku, 곽)

For the family name of Quach, it turns out it has different spelling and pronunciation depending on the country but maintains the same character of 郭. In Mandarian, the character is Guo, Cantonese it is Kwok, and Vietnamese is Quach. In my family, we pronounce all the letters in the name. It sounds almost like “crouch” (a nickname some kids would give me in school) as the “ch” in the name are not silent. Another version I’ve heard makes Quach sound like “Kwok” which I guess is the more mainstream version as every teacher I’ve ran into pronounces my name as “Kwok.”

I’ve figure that if anyone asks where my family is from, I’ll just tell them I’m Vietnamese that speaks a dialect of Chinese. I have relatives in California, Texas, New York, Germany, and the rest in Vietnam, but none that I know of from China as all the family my parents have grew up in Vietnam. My ancestors probably did come from China but seeing as how most of my relatives live in Vietnam all their lives, I say it’s safe to say I must have some Vietnamese blood in me.

Mirror Post here: http://game-central.org/2009/reviews/ghostbusters-the-video-game-review/

There’s nothing like eating gods for breakfast as the Ghostbusters return to save the world once again from the minions of evil. Developed by Terminal Reality, Ghostbusters the video game is, in the words of its co-creator Dan Aykroyd, “this is essentially the third movie” and it shows through the cinematic and interactions with the main characters.

For those of you who don’t know who or what the Ghostbusters are, Ghostbusters is a science-fiction comedy film made in 1984 about parapsychologists, doctors who study the paranormal, who decide to open up their own ghost hunting firm. Things start off slow for the Ghostbusters but an increase in paranormal activities rockets the Ghostbusters ahead in jobs. Two movies later, a few possessions, and the defeat of a Sumerian god, Ghostbusters became a hit in the late 80s and becoming a classic.

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June 1st, 2009, the day I lost faith in Valve. Left 4 Dead 2 was announced and I was in utter disbelief. I come home from a hard days work and start reading the rants on my twitter stream about a Left 4 Dead 2 and I could feel the anger that they were feeling. Announced seven months after the original, and to be released one year after the original at full retail price of $50,  that’s just not something Valve does.

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YouTube Insights, YouTube’s version of analytics, is a wealth of information to content creators who want to know who watches the creator’s videos, how time people spend watching the videos compared to other videos of similar length, and even tells you where the viewers are coming from.

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Gasp! Greetings and welcome to my website. Nothing much here future content will include editorials, reviews, and general thoughts of the day.

Now onto the title of this blog, “Pronounced My-Kee-On.” Quite an odd title isn’t it? Well the alias I’ve been using for since 1998 in the online world is “mikeon.” I was a kid at the time, trying to think up a name for a multi user dungeon (MUD) game called Arcane Nites. I wanted an RPG sounding them and “mikeon” sounded RPGy at the time and thus, “mikeon” was born.

It wasn’t until I started playing in games where voice communication started to emerge that I began to realize “hey, everyone is pronouncing my name wrong! They’re calling me “mike ON” instead of “my-kee-on!” It never really bothered me though and I just went with whatever people would call me. When asked how to pronounce the name, I would reply the correct way. Although, I have to admin, I have no idea what kind of tonal sign I should but on top of the name to make it easier to tell it’s not “mike ON”

Perhaps with this blog, things may change.