Rush, Boom, Turtle: "I'm the bad guy?"

4/2/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 4

"We sed no rush 30 min," the blue player fumed as I killed a few of his villagers.

"I never agreed to that," I typed. "Sorry." Just because you're rushing someone doesn't mean you can't be polite.

"I hope u _ing die in a gasoline fire," the blue player typed. That's the one I remember most because it was so specific. He was angry enough to specify an accelerant.

At that point, the other guy on my team weighed in. He said, "I didn't have anything to do with this."

"Orange, thank you for being honorable," one of them typed to my teammate.

My Aztec rush was working beautifully. I was translating my economy into a steady stream of Aztecs and spraying them onto his base as if from a high-pressure fire hose. I was having a grand old time knocking down his buildings and killing his villagers as they retreated into his town center. Since he didn't have an army to manage yet, he had plenty of time to type more filtered profanity at me.

"Learn to play the game, noob," I typed back at him. Oh, snap. That's right. I said "noob." While I was in his base, pwning his dudes. Then his teammate started in on me with more filtered profanity, but nothing quite as creative as the thing about the gasoline fire.

"Maybe when you ladies figure out the game, you won't cry so much," I typed shortly thereafter. I called them "ladies." Ooh, burn. Ha ha. "Ladies." Score one for me. I had impugned not only their skillz, but their manhood. How's that for word econ?

I was typing stuff like that because I'd been sucked into the jerkitude of the Internet. They had sucked me into it by setting arbitrary limitation on the gameplay without my consent, or without even telling me beforehand, and then cussing me out for not abiding by this limitation. I was there to test my Aztec rush, but before I'd even arrived, these guys had apparently made some agreement among themselves to hang back and boom for a half-hour.

They eventually wised up and interrupted their booms to build armies. I'd devastated the blue player, but his teammate began interrupting my flow of Aztec reinforcements. Then they started hitting me back. My forward deer-harvesting villagers were in danger. I pulled them back and had to build a farm, which slowed the food I needed for reinforcements.

It was time to turn to my teammate. "A little help?," I typed in team chat. "I can hold out against one of them, but I can't take them both out."

My teammate typed, "Good luck with that."

"Good luck with that?" What kind of way is that to treat your partner? Et tu, Orange?

"You're not going to help?"

"We put NR30 in the game title," he typed. "That's how I'm going to play."

In the movie "Falling Down," Michael Douglas goes on what he believes to be a righteous rampage through Los Angeles. He takes a baseball bat to gang bangers, and brandishes firearms at incompetent fast food workers. He fires a rocket launcher at an idle road construction crew. He terrorizes golfers. At the end of the movie, when Robert Duvall's policeman character corners him on the Santa Monica pier, Douglas asks, "I'm the bad guy? How did that happen?"