courtesy of ign
Naughty Dog's Jak X features online combat racing. And so, when Sony asked if we wanted to meet one of their representatives and a few of ND's finest on Jak's digital field of battle, we all agreed with sex-a-licious bravado that it was high time to dish out some patented IGN justice and serve SCEA a taste of its own ass. Clearly, IGN justice has nothing to do with actual justice and much to do with, "Woo! Eat my bullets like that, suckers!"
Anyway, the plan didn't workout too well. But we did at least manage to offend every single non-editorial IGN employee of decent upbringing with an excessive amount of extremely loud profanity. And by golly, that's got to count for something!
Honestly though, we should have anticipated the horrible outcome. The match even started late...because of us.
As usual, we neglected to setup the in-office PlayStations prior to our scheduled online rout. After we followed the basic PS2 network establishment steps and / or matched our configured memory cards to specific PS2s, we jumped into the game, created a profile, created a separate online account, protected it with a password, downloaded four seconds worth of functionality patch, and then got to the racing and shooting. Had Naughty Dog elected to create the typically messed up PS2 online experience other games have become infamous for, it would have been a lot worse.
After we connected, Sony advised that we should join its newly generated clan before we could race and explode in peace. The clan allowed our Naughty Dog hosts to limit players by name. Basically, they invited us -- Jeremy "Makaze" Dunham, Ed "Eded" Lewis and Ivan "IBeTheDestro" Sulic -- into a clan by our online personas, which forbade anyone else from joining and guaranteed that we could play together in private.
The clan lobby was where we chilled before the start of each match. In addition to allowing us to berate one another over our filthy USB headsets, the lobby gave us an opportunity to configure our cars and players and also gave our hosts a chance to configure their game types, maps and race specific (laps, time limits, kill counts, etcetera).
Shortly after the headset-less Makaze assured Sony that we IGN folk were good to go by screaming across the room and hopefully into IBeTheDestro's microphone, the first round began.
"HEY, THIS IS JEREMY! DO IT NOW BECAUSE WE'RE READY AND IVAN'S GETTING HUNGRY AND I WANT TO PUNCH THINGS!"
Welcome to the Forbidden Forest. Deadly water, lots of dirt, tight corners, sloping banks, long jumps and vast interior temples make for one exhilarating race. Our own pathetically barefoot Eded took second place while, "Dem cheatin' sons o' bitches" finished at various other ranks around second, including first and maybe some kind of ultra first.
Second place... Yes, second place. We friggin' lost. But we were only denied our glorious victory due to tele-electronic-inter-communal-witchcraft. More simply, Naughty Dog and Sony knew how to use the defensive weapons, offensive weapons and boost power-ups within the context of the level and we did not. Since all items are respectively color-coded to red, yellow and blue, our defeat felt even more absurd. In a nutshell, we were apparently incapable of differentiating between red and blue and could not, in turn, manage the application of those two primary colors in situations that also required us to turn left and right.
It's like we're monkeys!
Makaze kicked off the next match by once again shouting into IBeTheDestro's microphone from across the room. "LET'S MIX UP THE TEAMS BECAUSE ED SUCKS AND I DON'T WANT TO PLAY WITH ED BECAUSE HE SUCKS AND HATE HIM AND OTHER THINGS! I ALSO THINK I SMELL BURRITOS COMING FROM OUT OF THE KITCHEN! GET IT ON!"
Sony obliged by splitting IBeTheDestro and Eded onto a team with NDI-Christophe (Naughty Dog programming wizard, Christophe Balestra). On the opposite side were Makaze, NDI-Evan (el Naughty Doggo co-presidente, Evan Wells) and Jenic (Sony super relations specialist, Tina Casalino).
The fools! By putting IGN members on both teams, we were guaranteed to win! And yet we still lost. Go figure.
Our humiliation wasn't 100% complete, though. This round of team deathmatch within a hazy brown Dirt Arena that sort of resembled a junkyard and totally resembled our own local Brisbane working environment allowed one of us, Makaze, to score a single kill. That's one... Out of 20.
The various "Cheatin' sons o' bitches" padded out the rest of the leader board slots. Makaze nicely summed up the match from across the room. He thought it was, "TOTALLY UNFAIR BECAUSE ED STILL SUCKS AND EVEN THOUGH HE'S ON YOUR TEAM NOW I CAN STILL SEE HIM HERE AND THIS IS WAY NOT COOL BECAUSE THOSE ACTUALLY WERE NOT BURRITOS IN THE KITCHEN-- IVAN CHECKED AFTER YOU KILLED HIM 15 TIMES!"
Next on the to-do list was the artifact run. In this manliest of manly modes, two teams are charged with hitting randomly generated checkpoints, or artifacts, as quickly as possible. The team that reaches the arbitrarily set win condition first is proclaimed the undisputed greatest Jak X team of all time. The artifact run combines both open-ended racing and combat. The serene valley in which we played was also riddled with treacherous jumps, perilous foothills and dangerous rock obstructions. The map was, in a word, unhealthy.
Since the artifact run required the application of so much genuine skill to master, we obviously annihilated our opposition because we're the greatest gamers the universe has ever conceived and skill is what we are all about.
The many uses of the word "we" in that last sentence reference the team of Eded, IBeTheDestro and NDI-Christophe. But "we'd" just as soon attach the word to Team Loser, had Makaze's own mad skills managed to carry the rest of his team a bit further. The point is, some kind of friggin' IGN won the round and it was real good because all of IGN performed extremely well.
After that bit of happiness we all jumped back into a race across Jak 2 and 3's Haven city. Suffice to say we nobly got back to perishing. Afterward it was on to another round of "Let's all dance on IGN's grave."
Toward the end, our only consolation came during a second run through the Forbidden Forest. That's when Sony's Jenic failed to appear on the top six leader board for a good minute and a half after the number five spot had completed his final lap. She had apparently stopped to eat a sandwich and take a nap at some point between lap 3 and 4. That'll teach you to underestimate us, Jenic! It ain't sandwich time yet, last place!
http://media.ps2.ign.com/media/737/737571/vids_1.html
and
http://ps2.ign.com/articles/634/634641p2.html
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