So I’m invited paintballing for a friend’s birthday, and while I consider myself a pretty well reconstructed man – it’s ages since I last bled on a kebab shop floor – nothing fills me with joy like the prospect of inflicting epidermal trauma upon my mates. I think it’s probably delusions of proficiency induced by too many FPS games (like that paintball one James blogged about) that make me want to don a boiler suit and prostrate myself in a field, and once I’m there, something even stranger happens, and all other priorities fall second to expending the maximum of physical and fiscal effort in an effort to cover people I usually have nothing but affection for in paint, bruises and shame.
Knowing how easily enthusiasm turns to merciless bloodlust, I was somewhat perturbed to be told that my friend is planning to hire a [expletive deleted] tank. A paintball panzer, to be precise.
So in the best traditions of one-upmanship, I was hoping you could tell your friends about this blog, so we make some money, and I can buy one of these:
Or perhaps that you could all pray very hard to Robot Jesus and maybe he’ll get me one of these:
A chaingun and a Spartan APC should do the trick… On the other hand, the steampunk in me wants something I could wield in a darkened labyrinth – more along the lines of this basement built cannon:
3D Paradise Paintball is the latest development in gaming via SNS. It has been presented by the Chinese company Cmune who develop games and applications for social networks. 3D Paradise Paintball has been listed in the top 5 Apple Widgets and the company have been awarded ‘Start-up of the day’ by Microsoft.
The game itself is a first person shoot ‘em up. It surprised me in many ways as being much more advanced than I had expected. The 3D rendering, map sizes and designs rival those of early millenium top-end development releases of the same genre, which, in my opinion, is already a triumph for a free online based and hosted game.
I was also impressed by the loading time, I was expecting to have to download a series of random plug-ins and watch a progress bar for the next 30 minutes, but even this ‘hunk of junk’ desktop of mine was in-game within 3 minutes.
All this mechanical and technical effort is let down slightly be some actual game play issues. The rather strange avatars leave something to be desired and I found it difficult to differentiate between friendlies and enemies at a glance.
The absolute, most important aspect of an FPS, for me, is the hitbox activity, which unfortunately seemed almost non existent. I mean, every time I actually managed to hit another player, I would decrease their health by the same value where ever the shot landed (apart from maybe the head, its quite difficult to tell where you hit). On another occasion I wasted several shots trying to ‘pwn’ this ‘n00b’ that was running away from me, despite my cross-hair landing perfectly in the guy’s back for at least 10 shots, I failed every attempt. Years of gaming experience would suggest to try shooting slightly ahead of the character to account for ‘bullet time’ but this too was without success. Truth is, I just couldn’t work out (bearing in mind I only had the chance to play for a short while) where, how and what affects the hit-boxes. But hey, its not like its trying to be Call of Duty or CS:S is it.
Overall, 3D Paradise Paintball is years ahead of it’s ‘Flash’ game competition and will only improve on their next project. I have every confidence that the Cmune team will be big news in years to come. Good job guys.
