September 21, 2013

I kind of got to sleep in this morning but not really because I only ended up getting about seven hours of sleep. Which didn't feel like it was nearly enough. Not surprisingly, I didn't really do much with my day. I watched some YouTube videos and played a little bit of Black Ops 2 and Battlefield 3. I only played Black Ops 2 because they are having a double XP weekend and that always means 24/7 Nuketown. I managed to level up two or three times but I was still unable to get the last Bloodthirsty medal that I need to get gold camo on whatever shotgun I'm currently working on. I got close several times but either lost it because I got outplayed or because of lag. I'm not very good but the majority of the time it was lag. Overall it seemed better than the last time I played but it still sucks shooting dudes point-blank and then getting turned on like I hadn't obviously shot first.

As for Battlefield 3, the beta for Battlefield 4 opens up for premium members on the October 1st. I do own the game now on both Xbox and PC but my premium membership is for Xbox so that is what will unlock on the October 1st. I think a few days later I'll be able to try it out on PC but I'm not sure. I have put way more hours into the Xbox version, it isn't really comparable, so I am more comfortable with a controller, but it looks better on PC and I like the accuracy of a mouse. Even if it feels better pulling a controller trigger and navigating with joysticks. I still haven't decided if I want to get the new game considering how infrequently I play FPS games at the moment, but if I do get it I need to decide whether to get it on Xbox or PC. I played the beta for Battlefield 3 on both which lead me to choose the Xbox because I was still pretty new to FPS games on the PC and it just worked out better on the Xbox. I plan on doing the same thing this time around and I would prefer to get the game on PC, if it still run decently on my computer. I would prefer this because my Xbox is really old. I still have an original black Elite one and who knows how long it will actually hold out. They have a "deal" where you can buy the game on 360 and upgrade to the new Xbox version for $10 if you end up getting the new Xbox. And I think all your progress and stuff gets transferred. Maybe. But I pretty much fully submerged in the realm of PC gaming and, at least at the moment, I have no plans to buy the new Xbox. Or the new Playstation. Unless some amazing game comes out and it is actually exclusive to one of those consoles. Most games these days eventually come out on PC, if not simultaneously released on all platforms, and they usually look way better on PC. And most don't take very long to go on sale. Xbox games take forever to drop in price and by the time they drop a little I can get them for $5 or $10 on PC. In terms of Battlefield 3 on PC, my main gripe is that it takes forever to join a game. I like the server setup better on Xbox but maybe it'll be better with Battlefield 4.

Another downside to my old Xbox right now is Grand Theft Auto 5. After beating Saints Row 4 I am in the mood for an open world game but currently Grand Theft Auto is only on consoles and there hasn't been any mention of a PC release. And I would prefer to have it on PC because of the modding community on PC. I dabbled into that a little bit with the last GTA game but I also didn't play that game more than once or twice. So if I really want the GTA experience I could go back to that game, or any of the other ones because I have all of them on PC, but I'm apparently not that desperate. I have also been wanting to play Fallout: New Vegas for awhile now but have yet to get around to it. Open world games are such a daunting commitment.

Back to Battlefield 3 for a second. I played Air Superiority and Gun Master today. I really like any game where I get to fly airplanes but Air Superiority has taught me I am awful at dogfighting. And it is killing my K/D. I have probably been shot down over a hundred times, maybe a lot more, and I think I could count all my kills on two hands. And most of those kills were because the pilot I clipped once or twice ran into the ground or some other object and I got credit for the kill. I have only gotten one or two kills with the cannons or missiles. I try all the evasive tactics I know but I can never seem to get away from guys on my tail. But when I'm chasing dudes they disappear like ghosts. I did much better with Gun Master, going positive in every game but the one I joined where half the players were already halfway through the guns. I like Battlefield 3 because it takes awhile to kill guys. And likewise, it takes awhile to be killed. Most of the time anyway. It feels like you're actually doing something when killing guys, or that you have a chance when guys start shooting you. Unlike CoD games where you tend to be killed before you even realize you're being shot.

At work tonight I continued reading The Shadow Of The Wind but I also started to re-read On Killing: The Psychological Cost Of Learning To Kill In War And Society by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. I read it awhile ago and found it really interesting but have forgotten most of the details so I decided to read it again. I'll include some quotes at the end of this entry. Near the end of the night I watched the last half hour of Riddick. Yikes. I can't really say anything about the plot because I had no idea what was going on, but it seemed like the script was written by a child. It was pretty awful. Like a made-for-TV or straight-to-DVD movie with a slightly better budget. And then I got to go home thirty minutes early. It was still after one o'clock in the morning but better than almost two o'clock in the morning.

"Gunpowder's superior noise, its superior posturing ability, made it ascendant on the battlefield. The longbow would still have been in the Napoleonic Wars if the raw mathematics of killing effectiveness was all that mattered, since both the longbow's firing rate and its accuracy were much greater than that of a smoothbore musket. But a frightened man, thinking with his midbrain and going "ploink, ploink, ploink" with a bow, doesn't stand a chance against an equally frightened man going "BANG! BANG!" with a musket." (On Killing, p. 9)

"[A]fter the Battle of Gettysburg, 27,574 muskets were recovered from the battlefield. Of these, nearly 90 percent (twenty-four thousand) were loaded. Twelve thousand of these loaded muskets were found to be loaded more than once, and six thousand of the multiply loaded weapons had from three to ten rounds loaded in the barrel. One weapon had been loaded twenty-three times." (On Killing, p. 23)

"During World War II more than 800,000 men were classified 4-F (unfit for military service) due to psychiatric reasons. Despite this effort to weed out those mentally and emotionally unfit for combat, America's armed forces lost an additional 504,000 men from the fighting effort because of psychiatric collapse - enough to man fifty divisions! At one point in World War II, psychiatric casualties were being discharged from the U.S. Army faster than new recruits were being drafted in." (On Killing, p. 43)

"Swank and Marchand's much-cited World War II study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties of one kind or another. Swank and Marchand also found a common trait among the 2 percent who are able to endure sustained combat: a predisposition toward "aggressive psychopathic personalities."" (On Killing, p. 43)