SOCOM is gay.
The first time I saw SOCOM on-screen was at my friend Adam's house. He was playing either SOCOM 1 or 2. That was a while ago.
The next time I saw SOCOM on-screen was summer 2006 at my friend Adam's house. This time it was SOCOM 3. I played it a few times and got my ass kicked. It seemed like a fun game though, and I basically lived at Adam's house that summer, so I got to playing the game a lot. After a few weeks, I was hooked. I had XBOX at the time and was currently on my 500th or so hour of ES3: Morrowind (best fucking video game ever). I had almost beaten all of the game at that point, so I quickly finished it off so I could sell all my XBOX stuff at Gamestop for store credit and get a PS2 for cheap. I actually bought SOCOM 3 and a Memory Card (8 MB) (for Playstation® 2) before I bought the PS2. So I've made the switch to PS2 and SOCOM. Nice transition, jackass.
I played SOCOM 3 a lot.
Summer ended and I was a fucking ninja on SOCOM. I moved back to San Diego, and was disappointed to find that I couldn't get SOCOM online to work on the cable connection. I didn't play SOCOM online for about a month. Then it worked somehow. That's SOCOM for you. With only 12 units in school and no job, SOCOM became my purpose. I leveled up from fucking ninja to fucking badass ninja mother fucker upper.
On November 8, 2006, my SOCOM life began to deteriorate. On that day, SOCOM: Combined Assault was placed on the shelves. This new SOCOM was basically an expansion from 3. I started playing online with CA right away, and it was fun as usual. Zipper, SOCOM's developer, made some improvements as far as the online portion is concerned. Then I looked at the offline part. Basically, there is an unlockable .44 revolver that can be used "for Combined Assault classic multiplayer maps" (there's also an unlockable stand-alone grenade launcher, but it's impossible to get, so it's irrelevant). The description of the .44 says it is capable of taking down big game, so I figured it's got to be a pretty badass sidearm and worth taking time to unlock. This, of course, was predicated on the assumption that it would be available for online use. Long story short, I spent about a month trying to unlock this damn revolver, sacrificing two perfectly good PS2 controllers along the way and my own sanity at times.
If SOCOM online took two steps forward with Combined Assault, SOCOM offline took two-hundred steps backward. It is mind-boggling that such poor programming can be allowed to pass in the signature PS2 shooter franchise. Some of the obscenities I was witness to in the month or so that I spent on CA's offline game include
Enemies spawning right in front of me and killing me as I run toward a bomb to defuse it Scoping in on the target area and sniping enemies one by one as they spawn one by one right in my sights Completing the final objective of a mission and getting killed from behind in the ten seconds that it takes to transition to the mission recap screen Ordering a teammate to shoot a rocket at a helicopter from 50 feet away and hearing from him, "How am I supposed to do that, sir?" Ordering a teammate equipped with the most advanced body armor and weaponry in the world to fire at will, only to see him get owned by some paramilitary scrub wearing a wool-lined jean jacket and firing a black market AK-47 Shooting an emeny in the chest with an entire clip of bullets as he charges at me with his SMG and kills me but leaves unscathed and proceeds to kill my three dumbass teammates Shooting an enemy in the chest with a .50 caliber sniper rifle as he charges at me with his SMG and kills me but leaves unscathed and proceeds to kill my three dumbass teammates Getting killed from across the map by an enemy with a belt-fed machine gun IN THE PITCH BLACK NIGHT and not even being able to see the flash of his gunfire Using non-lethal weapons more often than lethal weapons because they neutralize enemies more easily Telling a teammate to hold position and hearing from him, "I'll chill here, sir." What? You'll chill? You're a Navy fucking SEAL. You don't chill. You kill. And when you're not killing, you're finding someone to kill. Shut up. Telling a teammate to fire at will and hearing from him, "Ready to start blazin'!" Telling a teammate to move somewhere and hearing from him, "No need for a cab, I'll walk!"
And as if all that bullshit wasn't enough, when I finally do unlock the .44 revolver, I go online to reap the fruits of my labor, AND IT'S NOT EVEN AVAILABLE FOR ONLINE USE. At that moment, I realize that the last month of my life was utterly wasted.
Needless to say, the revolver was a big disappointment, but that's SOCOM offline. I can still rely on SOCOM online, right?
I bought some badass ninja gloves because it's cold as hell up in Sac, and I decided to play SOCOM online with them on my hands. I tore shit up. SOCOM was back. The same day, I started playing online again, this time without gloves, and I suffered my biggest ass kicking since I started playing the game. What the hell? How can a fucking badass ninja mother fucker upper like me do so well with gloves on my hands, then on the same day do so poorly without gloves on my hands? Oh, that's right. Because SOCOM is bullshit. There are no ups and downs because of what the player does, only because SOCOM's aiming system is so fucked up and shoddy. Granted, had I not wasted the last month of my life on the gay-ass game, I wouldn't have been so pissed about my online woes, but I did, so I was. Fuck SOCOM. Counter-Strike wins. At least you can actually IMPROVE in that game and do well based on skill, not on whether the game lets you or not.
SOCOM is gay.
In the spirit of saying fuck SOCOM, I've included unlockable content with this story, only you don't have to waste a month of your life trying to unlock it... unless it took you a month to read up to this point, in which case you'd be extremely illiterate or just a weirdo who likes to savor what you read.
Now that I think about it, I didn't break the first controller while playing CA offline. It was actually S3 online. Anyway, I was packing an SMG with a 20-round mag and I got behind this guy who was just sitting there in front of a wall, guarding the opposite direction. This SMG unloads its mag in an instant, and I did this sqaure into this guy's back, which alone should have been enough to kill four people. It didn't seem to phase this guy though; he turned around and started shooting at me with his SMG. He sucked though, and I had time to reload and shoot another 10 rounds into his chest, at which point he shot me in the face and killed me. I don't know in what universe 30 rounds to the abdomen is not enough to kill a man, but apparently SOCOM is in it.
Basically what I had to do to unlock the useless revolver was beat Combined Assault offline 10 times. At this point, having unlocked the revolver, I've logged 35 offline hours. That doesn't include the probably 5 hours I spent on failed missions. Not to mention all the time it takes for loading, picking weapons, and turning the game on; just getting to the point where you can play the damn game takes like 3 minutes.
Anyway, I was doing an Instant Action mission, which is just deploying into an area and completing one objective. On this particular mission, you start out basically surrounded by enemies. You can't hardly move ten steps without getting fucked up. I was probably on my tenth attempt at this mission, and I was on the verge of insanity. I sniped the first guy in his little sniper tower. Oh, and all you can do offline is snipe because if you run and gun you'll die and you can't rely on your teammates to kill guys because their AI is so poorly scripted. So basically you have to headshot every single guy yourself, which gets tedious and annoying. So I move over slowly to get a view of the next guy, who is obscured by a piece of vegetation. Suddenly, he just shoots me in the face out of nowhere. I know exactly where he is, only I can't see him, and he's already blowing my head off. By then, I had the controller slam technique pretty well mastered. I fucking destroyed it. It's hardly recognizable as a PS2 controller now. This happened in good timing though, because final exams were right around the bend and I didn't need some shitty game distracting me from my studies.
© 2006 Pflanzenfaser