Easter Eggs

In the spirit of Easter, I decided to do my blog about easter eggs. But not the brightly colored plastic eggs with candy packed inside. No, these easter eggs are located in video games. A video game easter egg is something that is hidden in a game, and you must find it. Easter eggs can range in size from a piece of paper on the ground, all the way to an entire story hidden inside of a game mode.

One of the earliest easter eggs is located within the adventure game labeled Adventure. The game places the player as a square on the hunt for keys to open doors, bridges to cross chasms, all the while dodging dragons (which look more like seahorses actually) to gain access to the castle door. The developer of the game made a certain key which unlocked an empty room with the developers name written as a wall divided the room. That is it. Of course easter eggs have evolved from that.

Borderlands 2 is full of easter eggs and out-of-game-references. One of the biggest is the Minecraft Easter Egg. This easter egg has the player go off the main path of the game and faces him with a wall of Minecraft blocks that look completely out of place. After the player 'mines' the block with their melee weapon, the wall opens up into a giant cave, with many Creepers (which are not in the game anywhere else) and one giant boss creeper at the end. Once defeated, the Creepers can drop extremely rare weapons (like a sniper rifle that fires arrows and a shotgun that fires a pixulated wall of fiery death) and can drop a head skin which will make your character have a block head like Steve from Minecraft has.

Possibly the biggest easter eggs ever are the ones from Call of Duty Black Ops Zombies. To the casual player, Zombies really doesn't have any secrets. You kill zombies, rebuild the barriers they break down, buy new weapons of the walls, and so on. But, to those who know where to look, it is full of secrets. From little teddy bears that play music when activated, to entire hour long easter eggs, the game is riddled with it. The easter eggs in this mode offer an entire back-story to this one game mode. Also, there are achievements built into the game for these easter eggs, so if somebody is a completionist, one has to do these to gain 100% on their game. 

Well that is it for my blog today. See ya.

Why I Play Airsoft

Why do I play airsoft? Because it simulates real combat strategy without real guns. Airsoft is the only sport I play (other than dodgeball). People say it is not a sport. Well, people also think that chess is a sport, so people have no knowledge of anything. Airsoft is a game of skill, tactics, team coordination, and luck. The rush of spotting the enemy and unloading your ammo into them is so much fun. What is not fun is running out of ammo and having to run as fast as you can away from the enemy. 

For those of you who do not know, airsoft gun fire small, plastic spheres called BB's  The inward mechanics of the gun either use spring, battery or CO2 powered gearbox to fire the BB at anywhere from 200-410 feet per second. Thus, when a BB is put in contact with a human being, great pain occurs. Airsoft is a lot cheaper than paintball. Also, there is more diversity. Pistols, shotguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles, grenades, mortars, claymores, rocket and grenade launchers, and even RC cars with turrets are all of the many weapons of airsoft.

In a world filled with high powered sniper and fully automatic assault rifles, I still love to use my shotgun. Pump action, three round burst with loadable shells that holds ten shots each. But why do i love my shotgun? "Well, shotguns go back to the day and age where combatants respected one another, where shooting someone up close said 'All men are created equal, except I am slightly more equal because you are dead (not literary dead, its just airsoft) and I am still alive'. Plus, when you are that close you have a chance to say some nifty one-liners, like "Doctor Abbott suggest taking two shells of buckshot and call me when you  are dead. Ring, ring. Hello? Yep, your dead' (Paraphrased from Sarge of Red Vs Blue)."                                

Well that is all, but before I leave, I need to make an advertisement. Every Sunday from one to three, my friends and I play airsoft at Luke Zockoll's house. He has a large woods and a perfect airsoft field set up. We are in need of more people so anybody that could come would be awesome. If you do not have a gun, you could rent a gun from Matthew Medley for around two dollars. Well thank you for your time. Goodbye everybody.

Gamer Jargon

1337music.tv

In the video game world, there is a distinct language used. Some of it makes sense. Some of it is complete nonsense. This language is used heavily in the forums, blogs, and Youtube videos of the gaming community. Here is just a few of the many, many words used.

1337: If one takes the number 1337, flip it upside down, then read it backwards, it spells 'LEET', which looks like ELITE. As you may know, the elite are the highest order in anything, so people decided that if they use 1337, then they think that they are the greatest. This number has spawned a whole style of language called "Leet Speak", which replaced letters with numbers. For instance, Sir Galahad would be S1R G4L4H4D in Leet speak, and computer would be C0M9U73R. Tricky to use, the only gain from doing this is saying to people "Hey, look what I can do".

T-Arty.com

N00B: A n00b is leet for a newbie, or someone who has just started playing a game. Used as an insult, the term has shifted from describing  a novice to someone who uses cheap tactics in games. Some common tactics are bunny-hopping (jumping up and down constantly to make the jumper harder to shoot), camping (hiding out in one spot waiting for another player to go by, then the camper shoot the player in the back) and n00b tubing (using a rocket launcher to overkill a player). Although these tactics are frowned upon in the gaming world, practically everyone has been a n00b at one time or another.

Wordpress.com

PWN3D: Pwn3d, or Pawned, is the act of being utterly defeated by an opponent. Pawned (pronounced Poned and just shortened to pwn) is best remembered by the Spanish word Poner, which means to put. Just add to the definition 'to put into its place' and you have pwn down pat. Pwn is generally yelled by the victor after a difficult victory, or if the victim is defeated in a spectacular way.

 

That is it for this week. There are plenty of terms out there, and I'm not going to even try to learn them all. Well goodbye everybody.