Art of Griefing 101 – Explosives Are Hilarious!

Welcome back children! This week before we go into our next griefing subject, I would like to address people’s complaints as to is griefing an art. See, the joys of online game play can be ruined if you do take a game a bit too seriously but keep in mind: it’s only a game. Anyone can be an asshole on the Internet but if someone takes something in a game and uses it in ways never before thought, shouldn’t this be seen as an art form? There is a saying: An artist is always misunderstood.

This takes us to this weeks subject. Explosives.

Most people I’ve spoken to about using explosives for fun and griefing usually bring up the sticky grenade from the Halo series. While it is funny to watch someone freak out about ‘a glowing spider attached to their helmet’, there is a lot more to explosives that can cause chaos.

In Battlefield 2 (a First Person Shooter) Sticky C-4 is an amazing tool. One way to not only piss off your own team with suicides but ruin the other teams tanks can be seen in this video here. The key is to attach C-4 to your vehicle and suicide ram into the other team’s vehicles. When you think about it, it is pretty funny to imagine a jeep flying at a tank full speed, exploding on impact out of nowhere. Too tame? Try attaching C-4 on a helicopter your team is trying to pilot:

C-4 doesn’t always need to be used to TK (team kill) though. The beautiful art of griefing can also allow for some hilarious hi-jinks including launching your tank or jeep across a map into an enemy territories base.

Imagine spawning in your camp, getting ready to go out and kick some ass when out of the sky falls a jeep from across the map filled with the other team’s guys giggling and blowing all your base to hell. Pretty fucking funny if you ask me.

One final example of using explosives is the mortar from Battlefield Vietnam. Not exactly using an explosion, but using a gun that causes explosions. This excerpt is taken from a griefer named Tres:

In Battlefield Vietnam there are transport helicopters that you can jump into and walk around in. As in all Battlefield games there’s a certain subset of gamers that love using the helicopters and believe that they are more skilled than any other player in the history of mankind.

Helicopter meet mortar.

See, Battlefield Vietnam also includes deployable mortars which are actually small vehicles. The mortar has one interesting physics property – it wants to make contact with level ground any way that it can.

Now, Dice were kind of smart when they implemented the mortar, they made it so you couldn’t deploy the mortar on top of vehicles. Unfortunately it’s extremely easy to work around this and the results are hilarious.

So just before a freshly spawned helicopter takes off you jump into the back of it and deploy your mortar inside, before hopping out and watching from a distance. As the helicopter takes off it seems like nothing is happening at first, then eventually whoever is flying will try and bank a bit to turn. This means that the mortar – with its physics property of wanting to reach the ground – will move towards one of the walls of the helicopter, making that side of the helicopter also want to come into contact with the ground and increasing the helicopters bank. Eventually the bank will increase so much that the mortar will move onto the ceiling of the helicopter making the ceiling want to make contact with the ground.

Essentially the helicopter goes up, flips, hits the ground upside down and explodes.

Of course the person flying knows that something was wrong with the helicopter, but try telling that to 4 or 5 angry team mates that have just died. Normally one person in particular will be spectacularly butt hurt about this, claiming that the pilot is a “nub” and insisting that they fly next.

That’s when you do it again. The inevitable explosion on chat is hilarious.

Next week: User Created Content Part 1 or How I learned to Love Spiders.