Also, my internet's on the fritz. Don't think I'll be joining in tonight. I might go ape with the constantly dropping connection.

Good times last night, with the exception of that one game on Nelson Bay, where I was feeling really overmatched...and then murder4fun showed up. Ugh.

Still, I racked up 11 Ace Pins, and we had some pretty good runs.

But iz it kaput?

So I just ordered Dead Island: Game of the Year Edition, which is $20 on Amazon. It has what looks like an entertaining 4 playing co-op if anybody is interested in beating zombies with pipes and such.

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http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Island-Ga...ead+island+ps3

See if I can dig up the old rotating game night thread...

I have this game and might be willing to put a little co-op time into it. I do not have the GoTY addition and as such, none of the DLC.

Hopefully the DLC is independent from the main story. It looks like a fun game...sort of like Fallout with a focus on melee...and zombies.

Interesting news story on whether the M1 Abrams vehicle should continue or not, according to both the military and politicians.

Regardless of what happens in reality, it's fun to blow stuff up with it in BFBC2!

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(You may need to turn it down a little.)

That's some serious tank whoring. I think it's important when tank whoring to keep yourself positioned next to something solid or against the edge of the map. Too often, I get in a tank and end up getting hit from an angle I can't see.

Think I'll probably play a bit tonight....hope to see a few of you on.

I'm thinking the mistake I make is to try to take objectives with tanks, which puts you right in the line of fire. It's probably better to spam from the periphery of objectives to provide cover for your team.

On a side note, how dumb is it that tanks heal themselves in BF3? Who needs engineers when you have self healing fucking tanks???

Will be either shooting bitches in the face tonight...unless I get sucked into Dead Island again.

That game is super therapeutic. Had a bad day? Here...crush this dude's skull with a baseball bat with a circular saw blade on the end of it.

Freaking brutal night in BF tonight.

Had an hour to spare this morning so I popped on for a couple quick rounds of Rush that made me feel like I was actually a good player. Entered halfway through attacking on Valparaiso and hopped on the UAV. Racked up 20 kills with it not to mention dozens of spot assists and kill assists. Next round we defended Valparaiso and they couldn't even take the first objective. Racked up several mortar strike kills pointing them at all the classic up-on-the-cliff hiding spots. At one point, they tried to bring the tank up and over the hill instead of the road routes. Yeah, that got mortar struck, as did the two engineers who tried to repair it after a rocket blast for a triple kill for me.

After getting taken apart by the mortar strike so much in my early days of playing, I'm excited to get better at using it well. I hope to platinum it in the next month or two. I think after I platinum that and wrap up my marksman headshots, I may actually give Assault the chance it deserves.

I hate Rush.

To me it feels like all of the things that bother me about BF3...just fighting over small points by attrition and rewarding douchey behavior.

I know you've said Rush is "broken" but I can't remember what that meant to you.

Some of the reasons I've enjoyed Rush lately (off the top of my head):
- People actually PTFO pretty much the whole time.
- Maybe I've been lucky, but randoms seem more interested in using their mics and working as a squad in Rush than Conquest, these days.
- Additionally, the quarters are tight enough that while it can create some bottlenecks at least this keeps me from asking, "Where are the Blueberries?!" Well, mostly.
- It can be tough, but an outnumbered team can win, either Attacking or Defending.
- Remembering that BFBC2 is my first and pretty much only FPS aside from Goldeneye in college, it's fun to switch it up from the usual Conquest routine.
- It's fun to experience new parts of the maps that one doesn't get to explore during Conquest or even the single-player, for that matter.
- There are also some Rush-exclusive maps like Valparaiso which are beautiful and interesting which can be a nice change-up from the regular Conquest rotation.
- In terms of suspense and adrenaline, games really can go either way up until the last second... at least three times per game!
- Playing Recon a bit lately, I really, really like arming M-COMs, waiting three seconds, setting a mortar strike right on it, and then running away. I get a kill or two (or three or four!), then throw a motion mine and let my team do clean-up. Love this.

My experience in Rush is that if the teams are anywhere near even, the team on offense will always win. This is at least partly true because half of the MCOMs are in destructible buildings.

I also find a lot of players use rush for purposes other than PTFO, and that usually involves racking up kills with the recon class (sniping, collapsing buildings, mortar striking the area around an objective). Wookies gravitate to Rush because the decreased variables and increased concentrations of targets give them an advantage.

But when they are defending that IS PTFO.

I can best sum up my feelings about Rush by saying that pretty much every game I've been in has felt like a round of Operation Metro on BF3...which is to say it was annoying, grindy and not in any way fun.

Conquest for me is this. I also think it is way more campy.

Campers almost never win in Conquest because of the multiple objectives.

Every now and then you'll run into a map where two different squads are camped at two different objectives and are making the map miserable, but what I almost always find is that everybody is on the move and maps flow in a very fluid way punctuated by conflicts at or between objectives, usually between multiple players. To me, the flow of Conquest is what makes Battlefield...well, Battlefield.

Conquest IS what makes Battlefield... Battlefield. But Rush Mode is actually what makes Bad Company... Bad Company. When BFBC1 first came out, it didn't even have Conquest mode because they wanted to promote Rush (Gold Rush is what it was called in the first game) as it was the first and only of the Battlefield games to feature it at the time. Conquest wasn't patched in until long after release.

It's a shame you don't like it. Like Spatula said, there are parts of the maps you'll never see anywhere else and they play drastically different, especially in BF3.

As an example:
Operation Metro starts outside in a huge park next to a pond and finishes in the city. The subway portion that's featured in conquest is only 1/3 of it's Rush counterpart and pretty much the only "enclosed" part of the map.

Davamand Peak is another one. That map is HUGE in Rush mode. The tunnel part of Conquest is only the last section. The other parts are out in the open with the attackers rampaging down the side of the mountain (including base jumping off a cliff). Again, the section thats featured in Conquest is the only "enclosed" part of that map.

I don't dislike it in principle or based on the concept, but rather I dislike it because I almost never find a good game.

I can find you a good game. In fact, I think I get more frustrated by a bad Conquest game than a bad Rush game. If Rush doesn't go well, I'm still doing a little star chasing so I can shrug and work on that stuff. If Conquest doesn't go well, I get frustrated with my team, the enemy team, take stupid risks, and so on. That's just me, though.

In other news, my wife and daughter are going out of town for four days, Monday-Thursday, to see my wife's brother while he's home on R&R from his first Afghanistan tour (he was deployed in February, about a month after his first child was born). I can't make it because I'd miss one week out of a six-week course.

Huh. Whatever shall I do for the next few evenings?

Bet I can free up one or two nights. Rolled a bit with Lee, Hawg and Hurtt tonight.

Bet I stab a wookie or two tonight.