Recon: Recon is the class I most love to hate. While Recons can be just as effective in combat as everyone else and they have tools to do the job, I  often find player chose not to actively involve themselves in combat. You’ll often find every single last Recon sitting on a hill somewhere trying for long range head shots. Yes the Recon has sniper rifles and yes the Recon also has a Mortar strike ability but that does not mean your entire purpose is to sit back and kill some random enemy every 5 minutes. Get out there and help the team. Despite what you may think you can and should use your sniper rifle in close range combat. Take a shot and if you miss the head shot finish the enemy off with your pistol.

Motion Mines or mo-balls as I like to call them are a Recon’s best scouting tool. When you throw a Motion Mine which behaves similar to a Frag Grenade it shows enemy units within it’s range on the mini map. It’s like spotting people but without the 3D indicator. These can be immensely helpful on the front line  even more so if a Recon decides to move up and gets regularly resupplied. If you are sitting on a hill somewhere learn how to throw these things long distance. Remember Walk, throw and jump.

Engineer: Now you might expect me to rage at Carl Gustav use but no. My only issue with Carl G usage is when a person could have easily used their silenced weapon to take someone out and remain hidden, but instead they use an incredibly loud rocket launcher to get one kill and then die seconds later. The only thing I want to whine about regarding Engineer usage is engineering.

The repair tool. Use the damn thing, you see a damaged heavy armoured vehicle? Get your arse over there and heal the thing. If no one is gunning or there’s a spare slot hop in and stay with the vehicle. Hop out to do spot repairs and hop back in. If the driver/gunner are somewhat decent you’ll get assist points like crazy and if you’re the gunner even better. Stay with a vehicle and try to keep it alive to the best of your abilities. As an Engineer your life revolves around vehicles. Repair them , watch out for them by killing that dude planting C4 and pilot one whenever you can. Just keep in mind if you are driving a vehicle a friendly engineer might be trying to help you out. Watch your health indicator when you’re damaged and don’t drive off with a damaged vehicle to almost certain doom.

Tickets for Reloaded VI are on sale for those interested. You can view the seating map here. As per usual we shall be seeking the bottom left corner of the hall. If you are thinking on attending let me know. Basic details follow;

Date: Friday, July 9th, 6pm – Sunday, July 11th, 8am
Location: Adelaide, St Clair Recreation centre, Woodville Rd, Woodville
Entry: $25 Standard BYO, $10 Ladies, $10 General

Ticket information available here.

In this series of posts I will be detailing some of the common things I continually see every time I play Battlefield Bad Company 2. What do I mean by that? I mean the continuous amounts of failure that simply boggles my mind. This isn’t your regular Battlefield game it’s been simplified for the console crowd, it is after all the sequel to Bad Company 1 which is only available on PS3/Xbox.

There is an awful lot of things I could complain about but first I’ll start with each individual class and it’s roles.

Assault: This class is for killing things and it does that rather well, but what most players fail to realise is the Assault class also carries ammunition boxes. You see that friendly player running after you shouting a lot? He probably wants some ammo so be kind and drop some for him would you? Drop ammo where you defend, drop it at the front line when attacking, drop it when a friendly engineer/recon need to replenish their supply of rockets or motion mines and just drop the stuff when nothing is going on.

Attachments can be deadly or incredibly useful to your team. As it stands only the 40mm grenade launcher or smoke grenades are actually useful after the recent shotgun nerf. The 40mm GL is simply enough to use just point at what you want to die and generally it will even if the grenade doesn’t arm in time. The other obvious use is to destroy cover and buildings. Why go through the door when you can make your own door? Smoke is the lesser used attachment but can be absolutely essential for pushing forward. Smoke can do one of two useful things, it can be used to blind the enemy allowing you to move up or it can be used to knock tracer darts off friendly vehicles. Removing a tracer dart has it’s obvious advantages and I’d love to see more people do it but without a point incentive very few will.

Medic: The medic is not strictly a support class as many have come to figure out, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore your support abilities. A medics primary weapon is his light machine gun. LMGs are deadly at all ranges with a bit of practice and with 100/200 round ammo capacity you rarely need to reload unless you picked the MG3. In close quarters you can just hold the trigger if need be but it’s far more effective if you stick to the long range firing tactic of either bursting or tapping your fire button.

The medical kit is one way a medic supports his team and it operates in much the same was as the assaults ammo box. The only thing I advise you do differently with the medical kit is to keep it close to yourself at all times. In a fire fight a medical kit in the field can be the difference between life and death. Also armed with a defibrillator the medic has the ability to revive fallen soldiers, this should be done when possible but not abused. Revives are more useful as attackers than defenders. A revive on defence isn’t important unless an mcom is in danger as the soldier is simply going to re-spawn in a few seconds with full ammo anyway. On attack a revive does two things. Firstly a revive will return the ticket the dying player lost and secondly it helps keep the teams push forward from losing momentum.

Learn when to revive, there is absolutely nothing I hate worse than receiving a revive to find myself facing up against a squad of enemies. Make sure the coast is clear before you revive and if someone has died in front of you make sure the killer is dead first. If Bad Company used the old revive mechanic there’d be no need for worry but every time you revive someone for him to instantly die he gets frustrated as you add to his death count. Let the poor guy re-spawn it only takes a few seconds. During the revive animation the revived person is invulnerable for a short time until the animation is complete or he performs an action. You might think being invulnerable is a good thing right? Well it only helps some of the time, after a person is revived he has seconds to either shoot the enemy or leg it and legging it usually isn’t an option. I hope Dice removes this invulnerability.

Next post I’ll cover the recon and engineer classes.

Duck Duck Go

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Update: I have the name and location of the restaurant at last. Get in touch via MSN or Astra for those details.

Our desired seating area has been taken over by the admins of the event. Alternative desired seating areas are running out. The quicker you can get me your details the sooner I can arrange for seating. Anyone on the fence about attending should make their decisions now and do the above. Thank you.

Update: Seating has been done. See the map linked above.

Update: I haven’t yet gotten around to playing the new Anno 1404 expansion but I may get around to it eventually. Instead of any content I’ve added another comic by H.C. Staff. Enjoy.

The source.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Chaser’s Julian Morrow delivers his take on press freedom, censorship and media ownership at the annual Andrew Olle lecture.

A particularly memorable instance of this was when we found ourselves in the unique position of having a publishing deadline for a comedy newspaper on September 11, 2001. We watched the planes hitting the World Trade Centre just a few hours before the print deadline for the next edition. It was a strange night, but one that typified the way we’ve taken the old adage “tragedy plus time equals comedy” and turned it into a less universal dictum – “tragedy minus time equals Chaser”. “Centrepoint jumps two in world’s tallest building” still stands out as an all-time favourite headline of mine. But it, like many jokes I’ve been associated with, offended and appalled many.

You can read Julian’s entire speech here or watch the event on iView here (6 Days remaining as of 16/11/2009).

If all else fails assume the worst about the person you are responding to. It seems to work for these Gizmodo readers so why not everyone else? Foxtel cannot possibly hope to provide what cable companies in America offer and based on that I have absolutely zero interest in the service.