Arrrghhh! No ammo!
But what they don’t show you in the films is just how long a belt fed machine gun takes to reload… which, when you’ve got a pissed off playtester after you, is a bloody age. And I’m pretty sure Sylvester Stallone never envisaged the end of First Blood having him running off screaming like a girl whilst trying to reload his weapon and take cover behind anything nearby as pullets stitched new seams in his trousers… Yep, 200 bullets and all I’d done was piss him off.So I flicked to my sidearm, a comparatively useless pistol, and by pure dumb luck, probably because he thought I was still running, he ran round the corner and in time for me to give him a near perfect double tap to the chest and head, knocking him out of the game. I’ll admit here that it was pure fluke and the only reason the second shot was in the head was because of the recoil from the pistol… but for those few seconds I was a god. But there was still one more bad guy to go and now I had no idea where to go or what to do.
Fortunately, my team mates were all in observer mode and, whilst my character was the centre of their view, they could pan and tilt around me, keeping an eye out. I decided to head to a choke point and lay a C4 trap. Trap laid, I hid in a stupidly exposed corner and sure enough, in came the remaining Blue Team player… and here is where it became clear that human players will always be far more of a challenge than even the best AI we’ll ever invent.
My trap was spotted and just a second too late I detonated the C4… the Blue ran around towards me in a crouch as I frantically jabbed at random buttons to switch back to any weapon from the detonator… Up came my massive machine gun and out spat the rounds as I drew a bead and started chuntering away… but less than a dozen shots in I was out of ammo! Mike is screaming at me to switch weapons, I’m stabbing buttons like a sewing machine, trying to get something, anything readied to fire again as the Blue player turns towards me.
And at that moment, I defined the difference between AI and human players. In my blind panic, I tried to hit the left stick to crouch and succeeded in running forwards, towards the enemy… and I perfectly entered their blind spot behind them. So, like a couple of dancers, we briefly pirouetted around each other, him looking for me, me holding a weapon with no bullets halfway through being reloaded… I spun around and, after what seemed like an age, my machine gun started firing again… at the ceiling, the walls, the boxes, the floor, the door… in fact, it seemed that the bloody gun would fire anywhere except at my sodding target!
I just held my finger down and tried to control the kick and waited for the smoke to clear and the inevitable death screen saying I had lost the match… but the haze lifted and up went a cheer from my guys as the body of the Blue baddie lay at my feet… Amazingly, me, the cack-handed arse with the bovine buttock/banjo blind spot, had managed to kill the last baddie and had won the map for the team! I was ecstatic, as were my teammates, and we all decided to overlook the fact that we’d been thoroughly owned by the playtesters for the entirety of the session and whooping and hollering we went off to load the next maps…
