Pronounced My-Key-On: by Michael Quach

Wooyay. Now what?

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

I finally finished up Mass Effect 2 clocking in at 41 hours and 30 minutes. I have to say, Mass Effect 2 was a big improvement over Mass Effect 1 and I thoroughly enjoyed it more.  The ethical dilemmas had more impact on me and I found myself trying to rationalize what would I do in that situation.

I’ll have to write up my review later on but I have to say, playing through Mass Effect 2 has me starting up a new character on Mass Effect 1 just so that I can play again on #2.

Meet Kaiden, saved part of a colony, learned more about the Collectors. After that, a floodgate of personal missions from the characters pop up. I’ve finished Jacob’s, Jack’s, and that bounty hunter’s missions and now on my way to Illum to get other henchmen and do Miranda’s quest. Picked up Tali and finally got an SMG.

I have my 4 main squad mates. Picked up Jack the convict, and the krogan warlord and now off to battle the collectors. So far, no romance options with the two available females on my crew and my hold is filling up with resources from probing the planets.

I think I’m about 18 hours in so far and just started finding side quests on the planets I’ve explored, I think maybe another 18 hours and I should be done.

Day 1 of my first play through of Mass Effect 2 and I’m still in the same star cluster. I’ve been to Omega station, collected two squademates, investigated a lost colony, and went to the DLC site, Normandy Crash. So far it’s been a pretty fun and engaging game despite some minor gripes I have.

Bioware has improved the shooter part of Mass Effect and the game now include some time sensitive cutscenes that you let interrupt with either Paragon, or Renegade options. The inventory and planet exploration have also been revamped; inventory no longer exists on your character and the only things you can pickup are plot items or decorations that go in your ship. Items you buy from the store are upgrades to your body/squad/weapons and you only get one armor, not including the DLC armors.

The armor you receive is customizable in paint and patterns and will change based on what upgrades you add to it while your henchmen wear the same armor throughout the game and will auto equip the best weapons in your loadout. No need to share weapons or buy multiples of them now as your buddies will get a copy magically and they will never ever run out of ammo clips. Yes, that’s right, ammo clips.

Remember how in the first Mass Effect you had to wait for the heat to dissipate on your weapon if you fire too much in a short time but that was fun because you had unlimited ammo? Not in Mass Effect 2, now everyone carries the state of the art ammo clips that let you immediately flush out the heat with the heatsink ammo clips without having to wait for your gun to cool down. Unfortunately these ammo clips only lasts for so long and are one time use so you must always be on the hunt for more ammo.

Mako exploration of planets has been replaced by a resource scanning/probing minigame. Now you just spend your time holding down a button and scanning a planet grid by grid and slowly turning the planet in order to mine resources that you need to upgrade your weapons, armor, and ship.

In game menus require multiple mouse clicks instead of having to press Spacebar to close the menu and scroll wheel on the mouse is only used for weapon selection. You cannot use your scroll wheel to scroll through the pages of information in menus and instead you must click and hold down on the scroll bar and drag it down.

Oh, and you can’t take your helmet off during cinematics. All that talk about how much facial expressions and the eyes are important in Mass Effect? Hard to see those expressions when you can’t even see your character’s own face. Other NPCs have no problem identifying you though and they don’t seem very surprised to see you considering what happens to you in the first five minutes of the game.

Now onto day 2, I’ll go visit the citadel.

This is only Day 1.

Solutions are on the youtube page of this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIVejv9sHLg

I’ve come across one of the best dungeons I’ve expereienced in a while. A dungeon where it relies on your thinking to solve and where you need to read the lore behind the world to understand. I loved the riddle puzzles as I actually read the lore behind each of the characters and found it a nice break to solve puzzles without having to kill a bunch of monsters.

The bridge itself is another example of a thought puzzle in the game, after figuring out that I needed a combo of two characters to keep the bridge up, a third to move around and open up a new path, and my fourth to walk across, I was amazed. Finally, a thinking puzzle. I took out some pen and paper and began recording which stones I needed to stand on in order to make a path across, testing each stone with a character moving all around. After about 10 minutes, I got my solution and was on my way to the Sacred Urn of Andraste.

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.

Never knew that Demigod could be such a hostile game. Me, Nayrhyno, and a random get a 3 vs 3 going on. The random claims it’s too laggy for him and quits in the first 5 minutes so Nay and I were left with just the AI. Apparently, two other players on the enemy team were new to the game and didn’t know what to do. Their teammate, Casper, raged hard on them in the public chat. I don’t know what he said in their team chat but I no doubt he was quite acidic.

I guess the Unclean Beast player just got pissed at being yelled at all the time and just spent the game running into us to die. He even killed himself with ooze and no health regen to keep him alive.

Another fail on their part as they don’t notice the uncapped celerity flag.

Games like this just makes me crack up.