xeer2000 – Page 55 – Something Odd!

Centre before aiming

I’ve read many times that you should be facing where the enemy is before aiming down the sight in first person shooters. If the single player campaign in Bad Company 2 or Modern Warfare 2 is good for anything it’s for practicing this. Disable aim assist and face your enemy before bringing the sights up. You’ll aim and kill faster. Once you get used to it anyway, as I’m still learning.
Leading on from this is the obvious advice that you need to know where your enemy will be in any situation.

This of course only applies to medium to long distance shots. Close up you should just fire from the hip as the target is so much larger. You still need to make sure the enemy is in the centre of the screen though!

It is of course much harder in multiplayer games. The NPCs in the campaign obligingly stand around shooting but not mortally wounding you as you take sight.

One incident where this would have been useful was on Arica Harbour the other night. I was running between two cargo crates and I wasn’t facing dead straight down the passage. A guy came around the corner, stood in the middle, and I was facing slightly to his left. In a fright I jammed on the fire button but round after round went thudding into the sand by his feet and he calmly dispatched me with one round.

Also worth considering is Geoff‘s technique of firing off a burst before you aim down sights, you’ll probably get a round or two in and then finish them off when they’re hurt and disorientated. Must dig up one of his videos where he demonstrates this.

I admit my aim mostly sucks in first person shooters, so take what you read above with a grain of salt and go look for better advice elsewhere. 🙂

Center?

Shotgun Montage BF:BC2

Great shotgun montage by TheXBLJMOR, but what I wanted to draw your attention to was his quick reload of the weapon. When reloading, once your ammo count has increased change weapon and back again and your weapon will be reloaded. Here’s a forum thread on the technique:

Reload

Wait until your ammo counter says the gun is reloaded (the animation won’t be finished yet)

Interrupt the reload (ie swapping out weapons, etc)

Kill something

Run out of ammo in magazine

Repeat

(via)

Rocking games. Quick summary as it’s la…

Rocking games. Quick summary as it’s late – we won almost all or maybe all our games of Battlefield Bad Company 2 tonight! I unlocked the engineer’s red dot sight, and 4x rifle scope as well as body armour. I also unlocked the Type 88 Sniper rifle even though I was running recon with the trusty M1. I leveled up to 14 too, and earned another 10091 points!

Numerous awards too. We were best squad at least twice. I got best player once, got an smg efficiency, surveillance ops pin, anti vehicle efficiency pin and and “superior service duty” for playing for one whole day! Not bad for a dad who plays for a few hours at night. Got one more dog tag too, Dave got plenty of those. Every few minutes I’d hear, Ooh dog tags!”

Unfortunately there’s a bug in the game where it doesn’t record M1 kills so apparently I’ve never used it. Grrr. I also spotted the magnum ammo bug. The client thinks it’s unlocked at level 14, but servers won’t let you use it until level 15. I’m almost halfway to level 15 anyway 🙂

Thanks to Dave, David and MJ for being such a great squad.

Before the others logged in I had joined a few other games but the squads I was put were rubbish. Attacking on Isla and everyone ignored the helicopters, even as I was calling to my squad to come back. How could they know I was rubbish at flying it? That’s the problem with playing alone, you’re inevitably put into a team that’s losing and someone has rage quit. Hey, I’ll rage quit too so I can’t complain too loudly. I joined David’s game when he logged into PSN, then Dave and finally MJ and we rocked as a squad.

Now that the stats have updated, I see my Win/Loss ratio has gone up to a very healthy 1.12. I only lost one game last night, and I remember that was when I joined a team on Port Nelson right at the end of the game when they only had one base left. So, we won 5 games in a row after that!
I stayed alive slightly longer and my KDR rose by 0.01. More importantly, I seem to have nabbed 3 dog tags! I would probably have four, as I had laid down a motion mine and spotted an enemy running across a road away from me. I snuck up behind him and was this close to getting him when Dave doubled back and shot him! I think I got a motion mine assist anyway, but it was one moment when I felt we had control of the confrontation which is very pleasing.

Defense Tips for Bad Company 2

Reddit user sadsadsadist has created some fabulous defense maps and tips for Battlefield Bad Company 2. Here are his original posts, I’ll upload the maps here too for my own convenience and just because I’m paranoid that such great content will disappear if it’s on another site!

First major session of Bad Company 2 on …

First major session of Bad Company 2 on the Xbox in quite a while and it was a mixed bag. I was joined by Eddie, Gavin and another player I didn’t know, Cerebrus (I think?)

The team we were playing against were very good although they relied on snipers quite a lot in some games. When attacking they softened us up with mortar strikes and when available helicopters. I think we won one game and possibly lost 2? The games last so long it’s hard to tell.

On Nelson Bay we were attacking and I used the mortar strike to good effect, thankfully not launching a strike on any nearby trees. I took down the first Alpha building and the last Bravo building went down with a little help from my explosives. Only got one kill from the strikes, but destruction 2.0 netted me another 2 kills I think.

On Isla we thought we were doing well. They were held off for about 45 tickets. They barely made it on to the island. Then they changed tack, they were well organised launching flanking attacks around the back and sides and quickly taking both bases. Same story with the second base. We held them off for ages and they managed to flank us. When they set a bomb in Bravo a whole squad spawned on the soldier who was there. I don’t think they knew about the simple way to get the second Alpha. When we were attacking I got that with a few burst of fire! 🙂
While defending on Isla I got into the heli in the last base but we didn’t kill one single player and unfortunately our base was overrun in a matter of a minute or two. It was awful.

Tough games, but good to play with the guys on Xbox again!

Now that my stats have updated, I leveled to 12, my KDR went down 0.02, but Win/Loss ratio went up by 0.02 since the game earlier! That was a nice surprise! I’m reminded I got a Bronze star for the Saw, we also got best squad at least once and I unlocked the Carl Gustav, MP-412, high power tank optics and the Assault shotgun attachment. Oh yes, 2 kills for Destruction 2.0! Woo!

Swap teams in Bad Company 2 on consoles

The PC version of Battlefield Bad Company 2 has a nice handy UI for switching teams but it’s possible to do the same on consoles too. I should have realised this myself but I read it on a comment on this post:

You can do it, press the Xbox guide button in the middle of the controller, find the guy on the opposite team on your recent players list, join session in progress. It’s not easy as sometimes the guy will have set his online status to appear offline, but it is possible.

The Playstation 3 has a “Recently Met” players list too so it should be possible to do it there too.

Knifing in Bad Company 2 is very broken

Ouch, was that bad luck or does it happen to everyone? I dunno how Dave got 67 dog tags, or Geoff got 94. I’ve got 17 and 19, depending on which platform.

There was a reddit thread about this and a DICE rep said they’re aware of the problem and suggested aiming for the head…

Getting by with 2 in a squad

StoneFaceLock offers some tips and gameplay in this video from Battlefield Bad Company 2 on Laguna Presa. Good teamwork with his squadmate on the attack. He recommends assault and medic for two man squads, or possibly a recon but not with a sniper rifle.

Might be something for Dave and myself to think about for our next game!

Good news on the cable front! The Xbox 3…

Good news on the cable front! The Xbox 360 HDMI cable and Playstation 3 component cable arrived today!

Despite my misgivings after earlier testing I plugged the Xbox cable in first. The cable comes in two parts. A bog standard HDMI cable and a short “audio” cable with digital and phono connections.
Microsoft made it impossible to use the standard component cable with a HDMI cable because the connector on the Xbox side is so huge. This connector is thinner though. Profiteering?

Anyway, I plugged everything in, HDMI cable into the DVI-D converter and switched on. The screen looked dull like last time so I went fiddling with the colour controls. Instead of “Normal Preset sRGB” I jumped down to “user preset” and bumped up each of the green, blue and red channels and everything looked much better! A little more fiddling with the game brightness in Bad Company 2 and it looked perfect!
I even played a short game of Rush on Arica Harbour and kicked ass as an attacker. We lost eventually on the third base but I took Bravo on the second, and Alpha on the third! I think I was the highest scoring player on my team too! 🙂

The Playstation 3 component cables worked as advertised. I booted it up but didn’t play anything and all that distracting interference is gone! Woohoo!

Looks like the colour settings are saved per monitor input. When I switched to component or back to VGA it had bounced back to sRGB. Nice.

The only downside now is that the Xbox plays in 1920×1080 while the PS3 plays in 720p.

Get 400 MS points for Xbox Live when you…

Get 400 MS points for Xbox Live when you download the Red Dead Redemption multiplayer free roam trailer. Well, if you’re one of the first 5,000 to do so. The promotion started yesterday and I just started my download a minute ago when I remembered. Hope I got in on time. (UK only, but come on, I’m just over the Irish Sea!)