Glancing over some of the games in my collection, I was struck recently by what so many people have already observed: Gamers LOVE killing Nazis.

I mean, seriously. It has to be a full-on fetish by now. It would not surprise me in the least to discover an entire server farm hosting nothing but pornography involving the killing of the soldiers of fascist Germany, but frankly I’m terrified to Google it. If www.BadGirlsKillNazis.com is an occupied domain, I’d just rather not know about it. (Must….resist…urge to click…)

This is nothing new, of course. Any gamer who’s been half-way paying attention could immediately list for you a dozen games that feature blonde-haired, blue-eyed bull’s-eyes. Me? Straight off the top of my head I’ve got Brothers in Arms, Medal of Honor, Company of Heroes…. right on this site you can find Day of Defeat: Source game servers and Call of Duty game servers. You get the point. IGN even named “The Nazis” the #1 Most Memorable Villain in gaming history. The game they were featured in? “Too many to count.” Tell me about it.

There’s just something hopelessly nostalgic about blowing away a bunker full of Nazis. Perhaps it’s just that the Nazis have been the target of choice for much of my formative years: my first ever game was Wolfenstein 3D at the tender age of 8 (thanks Mom and Dad!). As I sat in the posture I would soon lovingly call “my gaming stoop,” my legs swinging in the air above my dad’s office floor, I stabbed guards and shot German Shepherds and threw 20 pounds of lead at the ugly grump pictured to the right. Little did I know that that was just the beginning.

So what gives? Well, out of necessity, action games feature a struggle against good and evil and, well, who’s more evil than the Nazis? They’ve become such a catchword for unspeakable, zero-shades-of-grey über-evil that even Cthulu’s starting to think the whole thing is a bit silly. Be that as it may, you’ll have to look very hard to find someone who thinks that the Nazis were something other than scumbags, so a game pitting the player against the Third Reich has basically unlimited market appeal. A game against, say, the evil forces of the Democratic Party would find their potential audience cut neatly in half.

Another reason is the nature of the conflict in which Nazi shoot-em-ups are based: World War 2. If you’re looking for a setting that features epic real-world struggle and a universally despised antagonist, look no further in history than 1939! No wonder WW2 games have become an almost developmental cliché.

And while it may be that terrorists are beginning to edge in on the Nazis’ turf as the end-all be-all of video game bad guys (Counter Strike, America’s Army and Call of Duty 4 to name a few of the game servers we love around here), the Nazi, yelling his German commands to halt and surrender, will always have a special place in my heart… and in my crosshairs.

P.s. Good news! Upon further research, BadGirlsKillNazis.com is up for grabs! You’re welcome.

If you have any Source-engined game, you really should have Garry’s Mod. Mod players laugh whenever they hear GTA IV referred to as “the ultimate sandbox” - that’s just jumping through a series of car-themed hoops. Garry’s mod gives you command of fully realised physics, a boatload of tools (many of which either explode or cause other things to explode), and shouts “DO STUFF!”

And what stuff people have done! From Rube Goldberg machines to machina, to simply answering the question “Who would win between a thousand ant-lions and a thousand combine sentry guns?” (Answer: they will team up to defeat your CPU). One use you’ve seen more than most is making an introductory image to a game server - it beats the hell out of a block of text, because as the tabloids keep reminding us, all video-gamers are too busy practicing murder to read. Which technically means that you don’t exist, but we’ll ignore that and give you five handy hints for making your own server image.

1. Choose the camera angle first

Before you start flinging things around with the physics gun (as awesome as that is), use a more powerful weapon - your imagination! Don’t worry, we haven’t gone Sesame Street on you. Just pick the angle you want to take the image from and spawn a camera there right at the start. It will save an enormous amount of frustration if you know now what you’re trying to create rather than constantly re-evaluating. Especially when you’re hosting a Garry’s Mod server and have five other users to co-ordinate.

Use the quick-key to check this camera as you build - you might initially imagine you’re going to build a perfect 3D world, but you’ll save amazing amounts of time just making things look right from that one spot.

2. Save Save Save

If you’ve performed more than two actions, even if one of those actions was “breath”, SAVE! For Heaven’s sake, SAVE you mad fool, and if you detect a tiny shred of personal emotion in this tip then well done Mr Holmes. Every second spent rebuilding a ruined set-up is a second not enjoying the fruits of your labours on your newly-decorated Garry’s Mod server.

Garry’s Mod lets you play with all the physics in the game - even the ones you don’t know about. One tiny “I’ll just nudge the dispenser a little to the left” and your hundreds of handcrafted props can go up like you dropped a stick of dynamite. Onto a nuclear weapon. Some items have field components that you can’t see until you let go and they suddenly shoot out of place and halfway across the map like a wrecking ball at an antique china exhibit.

3. People First

Just like the real world, people are more important than objects. Unlike the real world, you can strap these people to gas canisters and set off grenades without being locked up. No matter how awesomely sophisticated a set up you’ve got planned, place the characters first and build everything else around them.

The reason is that the rag dolls are the most sophisticated objects in any Source game - it’s what makes the shotgun so satisfying, but it also makes posing them with anything else in the way an exercise in pure monitor-smashing frustration. Set the models just so, SAVE, and make only the barest of adjustments after the fact.

4. Noclip is your friend

Not just for you flitting through the walls like an omnipotent and strangely firearm-obsessed god, but for your rag dolls. Once you set character in place right-click with the noclip tool to render them immaterial to any other objects. Even for pictures which require things to touch, you’ll find the it much easier to engineer if they can pass through each other (for example, this is how you make any character appear to be holding something: noclipping right into their posed hand).

In summary: to make things look real, you have to artificially make them exactly the opposite of that. At this point you should be gaining a better understanding of advertising, Hollywood and politics.

5. Post processing

Get yourself a nice graphics program. You might find it hideously boring to work with a program that can’t explode things on command, but this is how people used to create images back in the old days. Before that was the dark ages, where it is rumored artists used things like hairs of animals and dead trees and goo and who knows what else to make pictures, but I’ll tell you something - those losers never made any image as beautiful as a wrench hitting a spy.

With Valve announcing that the Heavy will be updated next we can all look forward to TF2 servers filling up with glaciers made of miniguns. Two teams advancing towards each other at the speed of reforestation, with a few spies and snipers racking up scores like credit card numbers. So before the new unlocks download themselves onto your desktop, maybe you should learn to use the gear our Russian friend already has:

1. Guard Your Medic

Too many Heavies treat the Medic like a glorified janitor, cleaning up the bullets and rocket wounds that dare to sully the Heavy’s glorious torso. Worse, they can swear at this vital teammate for failing to keep them alive during their attempts to punch four level 3 sentries, and are then mystified why they aren’t being healed anymore.

Remember that you Medic is playing a game too! Be his friend! Say please and thank you, and if you’re being healed you should spin to check behind your medic every couple of seconds, no matter what else you’re doing. The Heavy is only slow for moving, not turning, and it costs nothing to spycheck by spinning while firing at full speed. Should hear your Medic scream while you’re demolishing the enemy team, he isn’t ecstatically overcome by your minigun prowess - there’s backstab one nanosecond from your spine, so spin and see if that spy can cloak past one hundred thousand rounds per minute.

(Protip: He can’t, and it is totally sweet when you shred him.)

2. Two steps forward, one step back

When your resurrected Russian steps out of the spawn make sure you’re holding the shotgun while stomping your way to the front. A Scout who knows what he’s doing can kill you before your minigun even spins up and I’m sorry, but if a Heavy gets killed by a Scout he has to stop playing for a week in sheer shame. It’s one of the rules.

It’s also a fact that the only back bigger than the Heavy’s back is the Outback. The Heavy spinal column is the Promised Land in the religion of the Spies, the glorious reward for good little boys who disguise well and sneak behind enemy lines. Turn to face backwards and backpedal at least one step in three, constantly firing your shotgun into thin air as you go. You get to the battle just as quickly while keeping your body conveniently free of Spy switchblades.

3. Jump into action

Spinning up your gun takes a couple of seconds, also known as “More than long enough for a decent Dustbowl chokepoint to murderise you to pieces.” Tip the odds back in your favor by jumping around corners facing the direction you want to fire, spinning up the gun in midair. You’ll start firing as soon as you land and should be able to take out one or two assailants before they can even aim, giving after that you and your healer have a much better chance. DON’T start firing before you go around the corner - the unaimed hail of bullets is a gigantic announcement screaming “ATTENTION SNIPERS, GET YOUR FREE HEADSHOTS HERE”.

4. Back Off

It’s time for your Team Fortress 2 Maths Lesson: 300 is a finite number. Hell, the Spartans had 300 and they got their seminaked asses shot to pieces, so stop running out onto carpets of stickybombs and acting surprised when you explode. Running with the Heavy might feel like making a getaway in a dump truck loaded with grand pianos, but it is possible. You’ll never make the distance but you can make it around the nearest corner or onto the nearest medikit.

Every time you don’t just stand there and take it until you’re detonated holds the tide of battle on your side - it takes about four years for you to get to the front line, so you can’t afford to get killed after three seconds. That Medic will have an Ubercharge soon - make sure you’re alive to get it.

5. Play as Sniper

The Sniper is the natural predator of the Glorious Heavy. Any tactical text will tell you to think like your enemy, and on a Team Fortress 2 server you can literally do that. Rack up some time as the Ozzie assassin, hanging back and picking off the real men who do their killin’ up close. You’ll quickly learn which Heavy actions are giant “Please headshot me signs”, the importance of even the thinnest cover, and how to randomly crouch just often enough to be really annoying. For every second you’re “annoying” a sniper, you’re staying alive to “kill” everyone else.

And isn’t that what carrying a hundred and fifty kilogram gun is all about?

The latest patch might have added some beautifully free maps (thanks nVidia, it’s nice to get 1% of the money I’ve given you over the years back in trade!). The new kill cam might let 360 players know what it’s like to be nothing but a helpless human grenade that only kills people by dying (though with Martyr, most of them know that already). But a number of urgent PC flaws remain unaddressed:

1. Lack of “Get out of the damn way!” button

He’s killed us all, on every Call of Duty server we’ve ever played on. You know him - he’s found the perfect spot with a half-millimeter gap to a doorway on the other side of the map. Any day now somebody’s going to come through it, and this time he won’t miss, then he’ll get a WHOLE KILL to himself and until that point he will NEVER MOVE. Especially when you and two other players are desperately trying to get indoors before a little thing called an “Airstrike” immolates the entire team.

This guy is proof that there is no such thing as latent mental powers, because if there were, his stupid immobile face would have been punched into paste by rage-fueled psychic blows by now.

2. Spawncampers on Shipment are still not teleported directly to hell

Ah, the great game of skill that is Shipment. Appear, get shot in the back, die. That might be a wonderfully bleak cinematic vignette on the futility of war, but a fun CoD4 server level it isn’t. The enemies ability to ambush you as you teleport into the theater of combat doesn’t do the game’s claims of realism any good, and the fact that some syphilitic skill-lepers camp in those angled gaps behind the spawn point adds cheap, sportsmanshipless fuel to the terrible design fire.

Luckily this is only a problem on Shipment, so it’s not like it damages a real, non-”utter dogs breakfast of a flesh-blender” map.

3. Martyrdom still a perk

In a shocking oversight which at this point can only be attributed to a psychotic blind spot afflicting the entirety of Infinity Ward, the abortion of anti-skill that is Martyrdom remains a perk. This despite the numerous suggestions I’ve sent them, including
a) Remove Martyrdom from game
b) Players who select martyrdom are sent directly to the singleplayer training mission; not allowed to rejoin multiplayer until they learn to shoot
c) Team with most Martyrs loses instantly
d) Every time you get a Martyr kill you lose XP, as it is the exact opposite of the normal “gain XP by improving skills” idea

4. Frag x 3 kill weighting

Watching the Killcam on CoD4 servers that allow it can be very educational - you can learn from your mistakes, or from the skill of the player who bested you on the field of digital combat. Which makes it all the more galling when your 15-kill streak is ended by some idiot on the other side of the map with the Frag x 3 perk, unable to see a damn thing and just flinging the things out like incredibly-less-festive confetti before somebody who actually knows how to aim a rifle puts him out of his misery.

A simple script would fix this problem - if a player gets kills after flinging out three grenades immediately on spawning, he only gets half points. If he hasn’t actually killed anyone with his gun he gets no points, and a small insulting message pops up on the screen. Or if Activision doesn’t want to insult him directly, I’ll be happy to do it for them: “You are a cheap scumbag who fails even at pretending to succeed in a game.”

So here’s something you won’t often read on a computer games news site: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t going very well, as far as the military is concerned. Yes, I know, politically divisive and all that. But what isn’t really arguable is that the war on terror is putting a weighty strain on the United States military, and recruiting has become a bit of a problem in that almost no one wants to sign up. Last year, the Army continued its trend of missing recruiting benchmarks, both in quantity and quality of new recruits, at a time when a robust military is clearly needed. To make up the gap, the Army has been lowering educational standards for recruits and granting huge numbers of wavers to allow those with criminal histories to join – and for all that, they’re still coming up short. It’s not surprising that the way in which the Army goes about recruiting is about to undergo a serious overhaul.

Here’s something else that is no secret: that game we love playing, America’s Army, is a recruiting tool. Every penny of it’s $6-8 million production cost came out of the taxpayer-supported recruiting budget. So what will happen to our game when it is longer needed for our recruitment?

Thankfully, that shouldn’t be a problem any time soon. In particular, news broke recently that Army recruitment centers may be heading away from the beige, empty offices of the strip mall and towards a hybrid creature that will look something like a Dave and Busters or an Apple store. As reported in Brand Week:

”The first new recruitment center is designed to be less intimidating and more ‘like walking into a NASA center,’ said [Edward Walters, CMO of the U.S. Army]. It will consist of three large simulators with full-scale mock-ups of Army equipment and wrap-around 270-degree video screens.”


The mock-ups will be accompanied by game stations where potential recruits can play on America’s Army game servers while hearing from recruiters about Army life.

So what’s this about? Well, direct recruiting it certainly isn’t. The officers who came by my high school and neighborhood mall those years ago may be on the way out, and it has become clear that simply asking kids what they plan to do after graduation doesn’t convince them to strap on a uniform. Further, in five years of playing AA, I have never felt particularly set upon by recruiters. There’s the Army logo and links to the Army site, sure, but they’re no more intrusive than any game developer’s credentials. When I play Call of Duty 4 I don’t feel hunted by Activision – their name just happens to be on their product.



What this is really about, then, is brand awareness. The Army is betting that if the concept of military enlistment becomes synonymous with words like “adventure”, “fun”, “service”, “bravery” and “heroism”, their recruitment will go up accordingly. The question is, then, whether this new interactive face will be enough to change the fact that insurgents and the 24-hour media cycle are working very hard to make military enlistment synonymous with words like “wounded”, “Iraq”, “casualty” and “post-traumatic stress.” Only time will tell.

Valve recently offered a free play weekend on Day Of Defeat: Source servers. This worked about as well as you’d expect a horde of uneducated, untrained idiots running out onto World War II battlefield to, without the real-world benefits of massively accelerated Darwinian evolution. Imagine a preschool in the middle of a minefield. Here were some of the worst effects:

1. Sorry!

The fearsome battlecry throughout the European theatre, at least during that part of World War II that took place during July 4-6, 2008. These people spend hours on end killing each other in all manner of virtual battlegrounds, but the idea that bullets can actually hurt people seems to genuinely shock them. Without the magic ammunition which teleports through teammates and weaves between your friends, many of the new players were actively worse than useless. There’s nothing like that feeling when a grenade rattles next to your from behind, and you hear “Sorry!” over voice-comms before detonating.

This picture of stupidity becomes a full three-dimensional hologram of stupidity when the revenge killings start, people actively hunting the accidentally homicidal teammate. The game is then pretty much over - the Germans don’t exactly have a hard time when half the Allied team is re-enacting the bloodier parts of the Civil War on the streets of Palermo.

2. Machine Gun The Sky

A glimpse into the mind of a newbie DoD player:
“Right, so this game has classes.”
“Oh sweet, a big machine gun!”
“Take this brakkabrakka-what-the-f” *dies*

Another fact of life on DoD:S servers is recoil. It turns out that a machine which fires hundreds of rounds per second by setting off explosions behind them moves a bit, unlike other games which would have you believe that an automatic weapon is as handy as an iPod that shoots bullets. Day of Defeat can’t yet simulate the effects of running while carrying twenty kilos of gear, but rest assured that it would if it could.

In the meantime enjoy the sight of new players firing their StG44 from the hip and the recoil flinging the gun barrel (and their vision) into the sky like they were trying to kill God. Oh, and you’re holding a gun and they are literally presenting their soft underbelly.

3. The Anti-Rambo

Teamwork is essential on a Day Of Defeat Server. The classes are so specialised as to make the Team Fortress classes look like nothing but changes of clothes. The central flags flat-out tell you that you need more than one-person, and if that isn’t clear the reinforcement respawn system is built to tell you “Work together you assholes”.

Which doesn’t stop the flock of newbies scattering every single time, running as far away from each other or support as they can get, and basically proving that a lone commando triumphing over a horde of enemies only happens in movies or games with a single player mode.

4. Snipers Sucking (even more than normal)

Fact: 90% of snipers on every FPS game in the world suck. If you disagree with that it’s because you’re one of them. But on a game like DoD, where even the standard combat class is a long-range high-accuracy fighter, this problem is turned up so high the knob breaks. The M1 Garand rewards accurate shooting, while the Kar 98 will practically marry you for a headshot (or at least drop the target, which is the main thing).

Which is why seeing rejects at the bottom of the score table, who honestly couldn’t hit a tank from the inside with one of these workhorse weapons, taking up a teamslot with the specialised bolt-action sniper rifle is sickening. They’re still never going to hit anything, and now you can’t even use them as self-propelled enemy detectors.

5. Accusations of Camping

For the last time: “Camping” comes from random-running around killfests like Quake, where rocketjumping was more of a glitch than a feature and perching yourself in an impossible location and killing anyone who walked under really was an asshole action.

In an objective-attacking map, where the entire point is to destroy fixed targets and protect your own, the idea of somebody deploying a machine gun to actually defend is not called “camping”. It’s called “understanding the game and being a much, much better player than you”.

Team Fortress 2 - as the name subtly suggests, you can’t be a lone wolf. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best Engineer since Scotty first rubbed against a warp drive, if you’re being held off the last dustbowl cp with two teles already up it’s time to don surgical gloves. Most players on TF2 servers can handle a few classes, but there’s always one mooching at the bottom of your “time played” table - and every second of those few minutes was spent swearing. Here we look at your weaknesses and tell you how to improve.

1. Scout

Symptom: You keep exploding! Or burning. Or just falling over dead when an enemy gives you a stern look.

The Problem: You really want that kill! You die because you allow an enemy to see you for more than a second. The Scout was never designed to go toe-to-toe with anything but a capture point, and even then only when he’s lucky. If you land two good hits of any description on anything your job is already done - your mission is now to escape before somebody decides you’re worth the splash damage. And for the love of god, when you’re chasing that retreating engineer, try to remember that they can build things that begin with Ess-Gee.

2. Soldier

Symptom: You consider the Soldier boring - you and your skills are more important than that!

The Problem: You know what’s really boring? A Team Fortress 2 server with two scouts, three snipers and four spies failing to hold a single CP for a single second. It turns out that in a game based on blowing the opposing team to smithereens, a man with a rocket launcher is pretty useful. A soldier is NEVER a bad addition to a team, now learn to rocketjump and rain splash-damage death down on the enemy!

3. Pyro

Symptom: You’re stuck at a 1:1 kill ratio, at best

The Problem: Argh, you REALLY want that kill! It doesn’t matter how “on fire” they are - running straight at someone who has a rocket launcher is ALWAYS a bad idea. If you want to be a good pyro learn to love the assist. Love it, want it, value it more than the kill - once an enemy is ignited your work is completed. Yes, you know they’re running for a medkit or a doctor - and every step they take back to that pickup is one they’re not taking towards their objective. A good enclosed space barbecue does far more damage than even the most critically sniped headshot - you and you alone can turn an entire offensive wave into a screaming pack of (burning) little girls, running home and crying for their medic mommy.

4. Demoman

Symptom: Even scouts beat you up, and that’s frankly embarrassing

The Problem: The Demoman requires an unprecedented level of tactical planning for an FPS, requiring you to think three, perhaps even four seconds ahead. It’s best to think of having a “personal space” radius of four meters, and anybody closer than that is way the hell TOO close. One-hitting scouts into chunky soup may be one of the best sights in this or any other game, but it’s not something to count on - back off and back often, lest you give the enemy the second best sight: an array of sparkling crit stickies disappearing from the CP in the white light of a demoman who died before his time.

5. Heavy

Symptom: Twenty deaths, no kills.

The Problem: Basic math misunderstanding - three hundred does not equal infinity.
Also, scientists at the Fortress for Team studies recently proved that Heavy skulls actually magnetically attract sniper bullets. Suck them right out of the gun into their brains. Damnedest thing they ever saw. The Heavy isn’t the home of the keenest tactical mind on the team, but you still need some spatial awareness. Specifically, being aware of which spaces have medkits or snipers in them.

6. Engineer

Symptom: Tending a sentry gun is boring!

The Problem: The Engineer is actually a deeply exciting and rewarding class, as long as you focus on TEAM rather than your own score. It’s a critical indictment of human nature that this focus is so rare, but when it happens it can turn the whole tide of the battle. Helping other Engys raise level 3 sentries quickly rather than raising a patch of level 1s to be flattened by the first Soldier to look at them, constant spychecking, even a single good teleporter route can make all the difference.

Watching the filthy BLU tide breaking against the rocks of your defense (and professionally rebuilding within instants of the inevitable uber) is greatly entertaining - and the meaty thump of a wrench hitting a spy is the greatest sound in the Team Fortress audio files.

7. Sniper

Symptom: More deaths than kills.

The Problem: Valve has cunningly balanced the richly interlocking skillsets of all the classes, but one fact is unchangeable: if you’re a crappy shot you will be a crappy sniper. There’s an easy test - do you headshot the enemy sniper, or is it your brains splattered on the gravelpit? If the latter, hit that “,” key and choose a different class. You should also change if
- Your team has a sniper with a higher score. No, it doesn’t matter who was there first.
- There are more snipers than medics. Medics are ALWAYS better than snipers.
- You find yourself catching fire, thereby proving you don’t even have the remotest idea of how you should be using that class

8. Medic

Symptom: You die before deploying an ubercharge/kritzkrieg.

The Problem: If you are not getting at least one complete charge per spawn you are failing as a medic. This problem has been particularly bad since the update, with hordes of demented doctors running around waving bonesaws like they’ve been possessed by Jason Vorhees (with a corresponding drop in intelligence). Your job is to heal people, get the hell out of there when things get rough, and help smash sentries to rubble.

9. Spy

The Symptom: You don’t like playing spy because you’re bad at it

The problem: No problem! Keep it up, and god bless you for not being a spy!

If people who suck at spy would just stop wasting playerslots running around failing backstabs and catching themselves on fire the average TF2 IQ would increase tenfold. Every failed spy is a valuable bullet-absorbing soldier your team doesn’t have, extra points for their pyro, and at best - at best - all they’ll manage is to sap an unimportant dispenser for all of a second before they get spotted, desapped and shotgunificated. Even if Valve released a update with a “James Bond” class and a map called spy_espionage, there would STILL never be a good reason to have more than one spy per team.

Honestly, this has to be one of the best CS videos in existence. These guys really know their stuff…when it comes to spending too much time practicing walking on your friends head in counter-strike.

You’ve got to love the hand grenade scene near the end too. Wow. Digg this video so the newbies can check it out.

If you’ve made a gaming video on par with the classic pubmasters video below, please submit it - we might publish it (likely) and you’ll be famous (unlikely).

Exhausted, seven fellow geeks and I sit around a dimly lit coffee table at three in the morning. The others munch on chips and gurgle Dr. Pepper like there’s about to be a shortage at the bottling plant.

We’re taking a break before diving back into the game. Someone finishes a drink, stands, stretches and says “You’re all going down.” Collectively, we groan. The rule is that once a challenge is issued, the game must begin again – no matter what. We split into different rooms and, stepping carefully over crisscrossing Ethernet cables and router hubs, we begin another round of Halo’s spectacular multiplayer on our Halo Server.

What? You were expecting 20-sided dice?

Halo: Combat Evolved, the original that was to spawn a phenomenon and a franchise that dropped cash like a Grand Theft Auto hooker, was a video game pioneer. Halo changed the way that first person shooters were made and set a new bar for multiplayer combat through Halo servers. In a genre peppered with little else but Counter-Strike and clones thereof, years later, Halo continues to be a popular alternative to newer multiplayer FPS games.

It is with a bout of nostalgia, then, that we take a look at one of the most irritatingly effective enemies ever produced for an FPS title: The Flood. We pose a simple question: which is a more dastardly enemy – the Flood or Venereal Disease? Both are gross and funny when they happen to your ex, sure, but which is more terrifying?

Flood vs. VD: Grotesque Appearance

To begin, both the Flood and venereal diseases cause disgusting growths and deformations in the infected tissues. To illustrate, here is a picture of a UNSC soldier after complete infection by the Flood:

And, just below this, a picture of a disease-ridden appendage has been (thoughtfully) replaced with a silly kitten.

You’re welcome for that.

Most Hideous: VD

Flood vs. VD: Dogged Persistence

This one is a little easier to call. Some VD can never be cured, or cured only after years of painful treatment. Other types of VD can be erased with a simple shot or an antibiotic regimen (or so I hear), making VD contraction a mixed bag as far as persistence goes.

The flood, however, never stop coming. They swarm together so that - once you’ve fired every bullet you’ve ever owned - you get to start using your pistol like a hammer to finish off the leftovers. The Flood have been known to come back to life just for the pleasure of stabbing you in the back.

To illustrate, here’s a video of a headless, armless Flood following a player around. That’s right – this Flood can no longer fight, bite, or infect Master Chief, so its fall-back position is just to follow him around like a lost puppy. A lost, hideous, stinking puppy.

Tell you what, the next time we have to nuke Los Angeles to get rid of Herpes, we’ll call this one a draw.

Most Persistent: Flood

Flood vs. VD: Sneakiness

The ability to transmit itself relatively undetected is a great asset to an communicable disease. Crippling its victims and turning them into bed-ridden germ factories is exactly how the Black Death managed to approach a filthy, hygiene-challenged populace and only managed to kill 30% of them. You want a

sneaky virus? This is not a sneaky virus:

Massive, spore-spreading explosions? Very subtle.
Most Sneaky: VD

Flood vs. VD: Effects on Health

The worst of all VD will result in certain death after sucking the life out of you over a period of several years. For the flood, the above prognosis is often replicated from beginning to end on Tuesday before lunch. Also, there is no such thing as a “minor” bout of the flood.

Most Detrimental: Flood

It is a close call at two points each, but the final verdict must go to the Flood. The horrors of either infection are numerous. With the Flood, however, all the really crappy stuff is no less horrible just because it happens to you after you’re already dead. But for that small act of mercy, the Flood deserves a sincere thank you. Congratulations, Flood.

But seriously, no hugs. We don’t know where you’ve been.

The Unreal Tournament franchise has long been connected with fast paced, imaginative, action packed game play, and the third installment is certainly no exception to the rule. Few things can be more satisfying, and fun, then using the Redeemers secondary fire to chase down your nemesis with a nuclear rocket and watching him get blown to oblivion.

Arguably, one of the more popular maps on Unreal Tournament 3 servers is the CTF (capture the flag) map, Suspense. The map itself is essentially a large suspension bridge, with small bases at each end. People can go on, over, or below the bridge to reach the opposing team’s flag, and then run like a bat out of hell to get back to their base.

In vehicle capture the flag many players seem to find themselves drawn to the Goliath tank. And why is this? Well, it’s a huge tank, with a huge gun. What more can you ask for? However, on Suspense most people will simply try to power the Goliath down the bridge and get destroyed by an incoming AVRiL (anti-vehicle rocket launcher). If you find yourself drawn to the Goliath your best bet might be to sit back at the end of the bridge and try to blast any enemies who step on it to dust. You’ll still have to roll back and forth to avoid AVRiL rockets, but at least you won’t be storming head on into them.

The tops of the bridge make great spots for the skilled sniper, and also give you access to two different UDamage power ups. The only real way up to the top is to walk up the narrow cables, or fly a raptor up there. One of the reasons why this spot is so powerful is because if someone wants to come up and take you down, they’ll have to traverse the narrow cables to reach

you. This will leave them helpless to dodge your sniper fire.

And everyone’s favorite personal nuclear weapon makes an appearance in Suspense, the Redeemer. It spawns under the bridge and upon spawning the manhole covers on the bridge will open to allow easy access to the weapon. The rocket launcher is also an extremely powerful weapon on Suspense, especially due to the popularity of vehicles. Using multiple rockets and the lock-on feature is a basic, but devastating strategy.

As with many CTF maps speed can be your greatest ally. Make good use of the hoverboard and remember that crouching on it while grappling a vehicle will help to steady you as you avoid incoming fire. Grabbing the armor before making a flag run can also greatly increase your survivability on the field.

And lastly, good luck out there. Especially if you venture onto a UT3 server playing Suspense and with me on it. Oh and remember, doing tricks on your hoverboard won’t make you a pro, but at least you can die with style.