Monday, August 15, 2011

UT2004 with Wacom mouse is the best.

Ok, I love my tablet...but...

I tried playing UT2004 with the tablet mouse wheel to switch weapons.  The problem is that the tablet wheel doesn't act quite like a normal mouse for older games, since Wacom emulates the mouse wheel or something.

It makes for a hilarious handicap, because use of the mouse wheel on my tablet also makes my character stare at the floor or roof at a 90 degree angle.  With random rotation.

Thankfully, the auto swap when out of ammo is pretty smart...so I can just use the first 6 numbers on the keyboard to swap to a gun and let the auto ammo system find a similar ammo on it's own.  Assuming of course, that I last long enough in the arena to get those guns in the first place.  But it seems a good compromise, right?

Except for the Link Gun.  Normally, the right click on the link gun boosts the attack of a team member also using the link gun.  So it's good to fire the right click at a team mate.

But the auto ammo swap for the next gun is the UT Rocket Launcher with triple fire.  Oh, with instant fire on right click if let go.

Hilarity then happens as my allies, who were expecting support, get splattered all over the room instead the instant I run out of ammo.

Bah, allies are overrated anyway, right?  I can take them all on myself with my rocket launcher randomly shooting around.  Besides, if I swap to something else, I'll just more then likely blow up my legs again.

I'm debating if I need a proper mouse to play this game.  See, on the one hand, it's very obvious I can't play this well in it's current state.

On the other hand, it's utterly hilarious to fail this much at such an easy to control game in an online environment where everyone is counting on me actually being decent enough to keep my own head on my body.

And entertaining for me to hear the wonderful Text to Speech (which is terrible) try to pronounce all the swear words and uses of stuff I won't repeat here that are tossed my way when I blew up 3 teammates along with myself using the rocket launcher while no more enemies were even in my view at the time.

The ultimate point of the game is to be entertaining, isn't it?  So I guess, logically, that the game is doing it's job with or without the proper mouse to play it with.

Somehow I don't think I'm getting let into any UT leagues anytime soon though.  For some reason, everyone seems to hate me now.

The game itself is awesome, moddable and customizable to hell and back, and makes for many long hours of LAN or internet play with random bot personalities to fill in empty slots for play.  In other words, lots of features many of the modern games forget to put in that make it awesome even if you are playing by yourself.  It's also only $10 for the Editors Choice Edition off GOG, which is about 20 cheaper then what UT3 will cost you on a good day.  (For your info, UT3 is shiny but last I tried it during a free steam weekend, it was missing a LOT of options and modifications that UT2004 had.  It really needs at least 1 good expansion pack before it's got enough content to warrant it's steep price.).  Not that I'd shamelessly plug anything on here.

*makes a note to swap to a proper mouse next time he plays.*