“Allies Off”

This past weekend, I headed outta the protest crazed Capitol to spend the weekend with my two brothers in central Wisconsin.  This is the second time we’ve gotten together to specifically just hang out with us, no parental units.  There are many great things about having a family with all boys, there are many horrifying things too, I am sure.  But for our family, it meant that we all really enjoyed the same activities, so second to our passion for fishing, it the passion for video games.  My parents have pictures of us with bed head in our footie pajamas sitting in front of the TV in the kitchen holding Atari controllers playing what looked to be “SeaQuest“.  It was a passion we all shared and there were many a fight and bargain over play time.  There was even a schedule once where we had to switch off every 20 minutes when playing SimCity 2000.

So from our humble roots with some cat and mouse game on some Texas Instruments machine to our current complex model games like Civilization 5 or whatever and the rise of internet gaming we’ve come quite a long way.  We definitely all grew up with video games and enjoy them.  Somewhere when I was in high school my older brother went off to college, and got a Mac.  He got a better one two years later and so during the summers we’d have two PCs at home for gaming.  And thus began the LAN parties.  Our game of choice (maybe the only one?) was Warcraft 2.  We’d ally up and try to crush the horde–and just as the horde was about to be defeated, you’d see those words which you had secretly been preparing for all game:  “Allies Off”.  These words basically signaled to you that your ally basically had cancelled their end of the deal and now it was war.  We had so many awesome times playing that game that soon “Allies Off” was used in casual conversation between us to mean, “Look bro, we’re not friends anymore, be prepared for some punches.”  Ah, memories.

In February 2010, when we got together for video game weekend, we got my older brother some Warcraft 3.  Yes, I know it’s terribly out-dated, but he didn’t really play anymore Warcraft after 2.  So it was new to him.  We loaded up and away we went.  It’s really funny seeing how we all picked factions, and how we played. 

My older brother is REALLY defensive when he plays–using farms to make walls (Warcraft 3 doesn’t have walls like Warcraft 2 did – he misses them) and lots of towers and basically plays hanging out near his resource gathering.  And he plays as humans because then the units have names he can recognize.

My younger brother plays VERY aggressively.  He always picks the Night Elves and is always telling us we are behind, where are our troops, we are slow.  His heroes also die the most because he “goes for it” where the other two of us play more conservatively when entering battle.  My younger brother tries to solo everything–for glory maybe, mostly we just call him a noob.

I play far more supportive and am a hybrid of the two, striking when I know I can take advantage of a situation but also cooperating with my brothers.  I started playing the orcs to compliment my brothers choices.  If my older brother makes priests to heal, I’ll make shaman to cast bloodlust.  It works out nicely. 

So we end up quite balanced because we have an offense, a defense, and a support squad.  This let’s up be successful and cooperate well.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get many games in on Sunday our day of intended Warcraft 3 dedication because we had to leave early due to poor weather.  So instead last night we connected via Battle.net.  That was pretty fun and again we were successful.  My older brother being more defensive and slower is hesitant to take on Computer (Insane) and when my younger brother set up the game with two of them he called him Gafrage (Delusional). 

Though my older brother never got into WoW, my younger brother did, joining a hardcore raiding guild in BC but stopped shortly after LK claiming rogues were broken.  But it was funny how even then the personality differences were there.  My older brother tried WoW a bit, playing a paladin because he thought he’d be able to survive longer, my younger brother a rogue because he could kick-ass, and I primarily played my priest to support, though any class I rolled has usually had the support spec instead of the highest DPS spec. 

Anyways, we kicked butt at our Warcraft 3 games effectively working very cooperatively, which is not the same as when we played 3-player Super Mario Brothers Wii–which usually ended up with people either being bounced into or thrown into pits.  Ahh, brotherly love.  They are total dorks, but I wouldn’t trade them for the world.