transientem

Before the CEVO TF2 finals got underway last Monday evening, I popped in on the second last round of a UT3 broadcast on DM-Deck. That round isn’t available on demand as of post time, but check out the 12 minute mark of the final round for a priceless moment.

Having almost exclusively played just one 8-year old game on and off, and now its sequel, I’ve been out of touch with really fast-paced singles competition. So when I saw two players strafing madly back and forth, throwing copious amounts of Shock rifle and combos at each other, I had this peculiar thought:

Beam spam can be fun to watch. Maybe even weapons spam in general.

I don’t mean beam spam in the WMD sense, where a bunch of enemies get taken out Ion Cannon style (Thanks for standing still!), but the kind of tactic employed by two opposing forces of similar size, from the pitched battles of armies down to individual confrontations.

“These fights suck. It’s just a lot of beam spam.” It’s a valid complaint. Spam in general is the easy way out, having the benefit of consuming screen time as well as the screen. A common sentiment is that something so repetitive and lacking in imagination belongs firmly in the realm of the unskilled, gamers or otherwise. And watching a gaggle of hapless combatants fumble around is not entertainment, right?

I think that there has to be a line drawn between unskilled, and being lame. Turtling and playing for the draw is lame, but there’s some finesse involved in keeping the situation from turning into a loss. And while I don’t find it entertaining, hoards of rabid soccer fans do.

The fact is, no one gets respect for conserving ammunition/energy when it replenishes every ten seconds. The same goes for if your mobile suit has a fusion reactor on board, or if you are a magical character with a power level greater than 9000. These are all a license to be trigger happy. Lame as it may be, spam is made possible through the mechanics of the world.

Given enough instances, there is that tendency to zero in on spam and immediately put the entire segment into the spam folder. Most spam fests aren’t even all spam, though. Usually, spam is just the precursor to more intense combat. It may be shorter or longer than the spam phase, but every acceptable combat sequence should have one.

So spam doesn’t bother me, but some spam sequences make for a better watch than others. What constitutes an entertaining exchange of discs or rays, then? At minimum, it’s good to see some strategic intent. It’s one or two levels above accepting that spam is how people fight given effectively unlimited weaponry.

Spam is inherently suppressive in nature. A constant stream of fire tends to restrict mobility, even if a target’s location is only approximately known. This is partly why spam should open a battle, as it pins an enemy and can allow the other combatant to close the distance with less opposition. If the fire hits a little too close to home, it can dislodge an entrenched force.

One example of suppressive fire — artillery spam, really — is the week of bombardment leading up to the Canadian-led assault on Vimy Ridge. To open the assault proper, the artillery walked their fire up the battlefield with infantry following behind the curtain of shells.

Bonus is to be had when spam works. More often than not, spam doesn’t. Two players firing rail guns at each other across an open field can never box the other in. Missile spamming the VF-0, as pretty as it looks, is met with counter bullet spam. Anything that flies in anime seems too agile for spam, including missiles fired by the main cast. World mechanics at play.

The best spam moment I’ve ever seen, then, was from the second episode of MS Igloo (The Hidden One Year War), where a platoon of stolen Zaku’s laid down a web of rockets before surging forward, forcing a tank from its sniping position and making it reply with some counter-battery fire of its own.

What’s not fun to watch is spam for the sake of spam. In a typical fight, spam happens, and then spam ends. What shouldn’t happen is a second or third round of spam after the characters increase their power levels to over 9000 squared. In the end, it’s just a tool that is valuable only when used for grander designs. That’s more of a function of writing quality than spam itself.