Nukes are bad, mmkay? So don't launch nukes, 'cause nukes are bad. Mmkay?

Moving on from the worst Mr. Mackey impression ever, I supposed I'd better explain that, eh?

The last mission in 'Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction'(spoiler alert!) involves you as your mercenary of choice attempting to stop a mad dictator from launching a bunch of nukes at a bunch of people who really don't deserve it. This is understandably a rather powerful motivation for going through with this, but besides that, there is also a $100,000,000(count them zeroes) reward on said dictator, for those avariciously motivated.

There's a computer toward the back of the dictator's base you have to access to input the abort codes for the nukes, which he has launched by the time you get there. This computer is important, so it's a very bad idea to launch a rocket-propelled grenade at it, savvy?

Please tell that to the dictator's soldiers.

Three times. I had to do that entire mission THREE FREAKING TIMES on my last playthrough because the enemy soldiers are very liberal with their explosives. The first time, an enemy soldier I missed blew up the computer with an RPG. Since I was standing right next to it, this resulted in predictable and irritating death. I was in a hurry, since there's a time limit before the nuclear missiles go off, but I should have taken the extra two minutes to hunt for the Bazooka-Happy Soldier, since I had plenty of time left.

The second time, it was a guy with a regular grenade, which he threw at me, but missed, and blew up the Essential Computer You Must Use In Order For Lots Of People To Not Die. I was quite irate with this polygonal zealot, and he quite predictably did not survive the next five seconds. Neither did millions of virtual people, and I was pretty mad about that, too. You can still win the game if you catch the dictator, but what's the point after that, really?

On my third try, I used up all but about thirty seconds on the clock making sure I wouldn't get any more nasty surprises involving explosions or bullets. I stopped the nukes, captured the dictator, and took great pleasure in reducing the entire base to satisfying rubble with all the explosives I could find before I called in the extraction helicopter and collected my enormous reward.

The moral of this little story? If you are a computer-generated soldier, keep your grenades, rocket-propelled or otherwise, to yourself when I am around, or feel my virtual wrath. Also, don't launch nukes at people, whether they're made of polygons or actual organic matter. That tends to make me just a little mad.



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And, so I can claim some useful information is in this edition of my journal, I am nearly ready to post some new chapters of my stories finally. 'Secret War' will be updating soon, and the first oneshot in 'Tales From the Empire' will follow a few days later.