Here at SSG we tend to do things as a democracy, so we decided to get everyone to suggest names that we would then vote on. And so the suggestions came in, there were some great names but there were also some really poor ones. I have compiled a list, from top to bottom, greatest to poorest.

The List of Names For SSG Battlefield 3 team battalion playing together first person shooter game.
I had a team name, then I took an arrow to the knee
Kat Kop
Lizard Kop
Prawns
Kreef Kop
Cornered Badgers (I didn’t even see this one)
GMAC
Umshiniwam
Amandla
The Untouchables (especially on their studio)
Cheese Cake
Invictus
Addonexus
Triairii
Ventus

Based on this Ham told us our name is Umshiniwam and Voov’s said the other team will be Packet Loss. I do recall there was some voting that took place, but some ballots may or may not have been counted. We will never know.

Amazingly we were able to sort out our team names and we even managed to enter our full contingent of 24 players on dogaming for the upcoming BF league. This is in no small part to Vovo’s contributions to the Clan and especially the Packet Loss team. Let’s play some games.

The other influence on the gameplay is something out of Team Fortress 2, where your team utilises various classes to accomplish the goals set to them. There are 4 classes to choose from; Medic, Engineer, Soldier, and Operative. The Soldier resupplies teammates and uses explosives to destroy important targets. The Engineer buffs his teammates’ weapons and builds stationary turrets. The Medic heals fallen teammates and buffs their teammates’ health. The Operative interrogates fallen opponents to get intel on enemy locations, performs acts of sabotage, and disguises himself as the enemy. The class you choose doesn’t change the appearance of the character it only determines the abilities available to him.

There are skills for each class as well as a set of overall skills that apply to your character in general.

Customization… there is a boat load of it. you can pick and choose pants, shirts, jackets, tattoos, facial hear, hats, masks for your character to don in battle. These items are unlocked as you progress in the game gaining experience points, and also for completing challenges. This is the same for the weapons available in the game.

As you can see there is a wide variety of weapons to choose from and on top of that, you can customise each of your weapons.
This varies slightly between the pistols, sub machine guns (SMG) and Light Machine guns (LMG), grenade launchers, etc.

In-game basics:

The top left of your screen will display which class you are playing, in this case medic, and your health bar.

The bottom right hand corner of the screen shows you your primary and secondary weapon, as well as a small minimap.

The bottom left of your screen shows you your supply meter and skills available to you. Your supply meter dictates all the actions available to you, once the meter has run out you will not be able to give people health/ammo/buffs. The supply meter regenerates slowly.
In game objectives:

This is brought up at a command station or by pressing the middle mouse button. You can select any of the objectives and will be rewarded with experience upon completion. The primary objectives are in yellow, the secondary are in blue. Ocassionally you might be expected to change class to be able to attempt an objective.

Another source of inspiration from FPS’s like Battlefield is the ‘downed character screen’. Once you have been shot down, you can choose to either wait for a medic to come and give you a revive syringe or you can select to respawn in your base.

You can also be totally destroyed by taking damage while being downed, this will send you straight back to respawning at your base.

Single Player:
The missions that can be done in the single player campaign are also available as co-op are multiplayer missions. The major downside to brink rears its ugly head in the single player. The AI system at times is horrendous, resulting in situations where 3 bots can be standing right alongside each other not reacting to outside stimuli at all. This is pretty funny as you run in and gloriously gun them down, and horribly painful when it happens to be the bots on your side. This basically results in you having to do the brunt of all the work in the single player. Teamwork doesn’t exist there.

Multiplayer:
Online play is where the fun is at. While there are only a handful of dedicated servers available locally your choices are somewhat limited. We can only hope that this will change soon. I believe that IS, SGS, and Mweb will be hosting servers.

More good news is that the DLC to be released will be FREE as can be seen in the article on Bethesdas official blog here.

If you’ll excuse me now, I’m going to play some more brink. I’ve only experienced a small portion of the game so far, but what I have seen (minus the few shortfalls) is fun to play.

The day for all South Africans to go out and vote for the party they think will sort this mess of a country out.

Its been about 17 years or so since democracy in SA, when the National Party were thrown out, the TRC was created and the ANC took power. Its taken about 17 years to completely bring this country to its knees. Over 70 municipalities are in hot water over failed service delivery, corrupt officials, tenderpreneurs and vastly diminishing community funds, destined for the people, but finds its way into money grabbing self enriching politicians pockets.

Newspapers and online articles are abundant when it comes to ANC failures through corrupt activities. All you need to do is a brief search on Google and you will be flooded with info from the Travel Gate saga, to the Arms deal, various illegal tenders being awarded, and just the pure lack of service and complete degradation of municipalities to a point where National Government needs to step in to fix the problems caused by the very same people they put in position to deal with these issues. Instead of dealing with the problems though, they would rather furnish their own homes, and buy expensive trips oversees to visit incarcerated lovers. Did I mention the Minister of State Securities wife was just arrested and sentenced to 12 years behind bars because of drugs smuggling? How can the Minister of Security actually do his job and protect the country, when his wife is smuggling drugs under his nose? Hes either incredibly naive and blind to have missed this, in which case hes not fit to do his job, or hes an accomplice to her crimes, in which case he needs to be locked up as well. Regardless the ANC have done nothing to address that issue. His wife is still apparently doing her job as Minister of Health – yet shes smuggling drugs. Everywhere you look, there is hypocracy, lies, false promises and criminal activity. If you take into account that only about 7% of the South African populous actually pays tax, the rest goes to social grants for the unemployed, pockets of politicians and who knows what else. We definitely arent seeing this money in infrastructure, road repairs and general technology in the country. So where is it all going?

We have politicians driving the fanciest of cars, living in the fanciest of houses, the same politicians who claimed they worked for the people, but instead of enriching the townships with services and funding, they enrich their personal lives first. The typical example of previous have nots moving into a position of wealth and power which wasnt earned, but rather given. The lure of luxary living is too good for many these types of people.

Now all of this said – how can we have a well run country looking good going into the future when all we see is corruption and lack of service.

The only way out of this mess is to stand up and make your vote count.

I have spoken to a few people of late, questioning whether they will vote or not tomorrow, and many have blankly said, No. They either arent interested, or they claim there isnt a party they would rather support, or some silly excuse to rather spend the public holiday given to us purely so we could vote, in a chair sipping bear, smiling at the thought of running water, electricity and a safe neighbourhood. On the other side of the coin, the ANC has lost many supporters through lack of delivery. These supports are too proud to vote for the DA and will instead rather not vote. This in my opinion is key to a stronger opposition. The more support the ANC loses, the bigger majority the DA gets, regardless if those people vote or not. But its not these people Im concerned about, its the people aforementioned sipping bear smiling at the thought of having working services.

All it takes is for enough of these people to sit back and do nothing, to let the ANC roll in, claim majority and run that municipality into the ground as well. Then these non-voters will want to stand up and actually do something about it, but by then it very well may be too late.

The DA has proven itself to be the most effective party in this country, making sure the Western Cape which they control, is in top shape, in any aspect of service delivery.

So stand up and go VOTE!!! If you think your vote wont count, you are very mistaken, its is extremely important. If you do not vote, please keep all opinions about the state of this country to yourselves, you actually do not have a say or opinion on the matter as you refused to get involved to help make a difference.

Ill leave you with this quote which is quite accurate:

“South Africa is the only country in the world where affirmative action is in the favor of the MAJORITY, who has complete political control.

The fact that the political majority requires affirmative action to protect them against a 9% minority group is testament to a complete failure on their part to build their own wealth making structures

Therefore their only solution is to take it from others.”

GO VOTE!!!!

Team lineup was as follows:

|Hunt3r|

Vitblitz

DJ1NN

zapdez

vip3rx

Viper24034

Delta

TheVovo

Hellbilly (sub)

Only given three days within to complete the match, organisation got underway. In the two day period leading up to the match there was quite a bit of smack talk. Grrr squad are quite well known, and loved for their animated banter. If you’ve ever read any of their match write-ups you would know exactly what I’m talking about.



On to the match. After their last performance on Arica Harbour, which was against =DAC= could have been described as hapless or bumbling, there was an air of trepidation in the AdHoc team. We had previously practised against grrr and had beaten them convincingly enough for that early stage together as a team. There was hope. We could beat them, if we only stuck to our task and didn’t chase kills. One, if not the biggest, challenge of having a mix team is to get everybody working out of the same playbook.



After a quick rundown of the plans, we got the game going. It was all out action from the start. The battle for the middle flag, B, was key. We did struggle a bit in the first round, capturing flags and then allowing grrr to bully us off them again. It went like that much for the first half. It was give and take right to the end. The 61-0 score probably doesn’t indicate how tough a fight the first round was.



Everything that we learnt from the first half was fully utilised in the secound round. We weren’t going to be bullied off flags. For much of the second round we held the majority of the flags, forcing the grrr team to using the flanks of the map. While they were effectively doing that, it did mean that they were applying less pressure to the flags. Which left us in the driving seat. It was a fight to the end of course, grrr aren’t a team to give up. The AdHoc team took the round convincingly with a score of 182-0



At the end of the game we tried to get some pictures of the group, which was interupted by a mortar strike and contuing machete madness ensued. Thanks for the game guys.

Game was played on Arica harbour, the same lineup was used as the match against [Epic-SA] and it was played on the same map too. This match however was totally different in terms of a contest between the two sides. The map choice probably played into the hands of sG, although playing a well organised team that has played together for a long time is always difficult. And what makes it even more difficult is the fact that we, +AdHoc+, are only starting now to form a team. The mish-mash of influences was this time caught short.

The round scores, I guess, give you a proper indication of how things went. A plucky first round performance gave some hope to the +AdHoc+ team, which was quickly quashed in the second round by a well drilled sG team. Round 1: 220 – 0

Round 2: 301 – 0

We came out all guns blazing at the start of the game, and on several occassions held the majority of the flags in the first half. It was always a case of being slightly outgunned though. We would get into good positions and would not be able to defend properly or would be attacking a point only to have our assault quashed.

The second round was pretty much one sided. Our first round performance convinced them to step things up a notch and they really delivered. Our frustration and somewhat deflated spirits were not going to help us here. Good effort by the +AdHoc+ guys! We’ll get them next time…

Although on the bright side, its a good time to get this slap in the face. Get us re-focused and ready for the elimination phase of the competition. Follow our progress here

Team lineup was as follows:
|Hunt3r|
Vitblitz
DJ1NN
zapdez
vip3rx
Viper24034
Delta
TheVovo
MaverickZA (sub)

Unfortunately one of the opposition was having a problem with his computer blue screening repeatedly. After waiting for about 20 minutes, hopeful that he would be able to resolve the problem, we were told that they would have to play without him.

Due to the fact that we are a new group there was a deal of time spent before the game trying to organise the squads and also the strategy that would be implemented in the game. The squad layout seems more or less stable as we become more familiar with the roles that we need to fulfill within the squad, and also within the team. As we grow as a team we improve our performances.

There were some slight problems experienced during the game, but by the end of the 2 rounds I think we know what is expected of us. We look ahead to our next game. Its gonna be a tough one.