Deer Park

Things I do out here.

My other Lucinda is an AH 1W Super Cobra attack helicopter. She looks like this

She’s not the fastest, most powerful, most heavily armed, and her armour is only average. We’ve fought many real-time wars against real Russian and Chinese kids in the world of on-line multi-player. One day we checked in and found ourselves on a Spanish server. In fact, the technical discussion forum is dominated by conversations that look like this

I can easily afford with in-game money (won through battle points), a more sophisticated helicopter. There are about 10 superior machines, like this AC99 Scorpion

And here’s my partner in the virtual world of C.H.A.O.S., maybe the top-selling helicopter on-line multi-player battle game. Hey, it’s my eldest daughter, back in Vancouver, and she’s an ace

Her weapon of choice is the pretty Denel AH-1 Rooivalk. It’s in the hanger, where you do maintenance, upgrades, that stuff. It’s a bit complicated

Like any sophisticated video game, it takes practice to be good with the control features which are a blend of on-screen controls and iPad movement.

As long as we can both find internet speed with a ping of less than 200 milliseconds we can fight bloodthirsty kids worldwide, side-by-side, from continents apart. When I have fast wi-fi I email her and we set it up.

We run Skype in the background on our laptops, so we can talk and strategize as we fight kids worldwide on our iPads. Is this cheating, acting in concert? No. We rarely gang up on the leader unless the clock is counting down and one of us is only one kill away from one of us winning. Generally we talk about who to look out for, who is good. We can select the same battleground of the various live arenas at any given time, enter one together, and fight kids for the game duration, between 3 and 10 minutes. Never more than 8 players in an arena.

They’re intense, bloody affairs.

Here’s how it looks. Here’s a shot of me and my daughter in an industrial war zone. She’s the one marked with the green arrow, matched to her name rmdg in the sidebar. Here, we’re about middle of the pack score wise, to the left, early on. The clock shows 5.23 remaining

But we very rarely stay middle of the pack. Why? Because we’re good. Here’s rmdg leading the battle score to the left, me right behind, both screen grabs taken earlier a couple of days ago. But unfortunately there’s an almost unbeatable helicopter out there called a Kestrel, and we lose to it unless we play dirty

And me leading the board, rmdg right behind. You can see I’m pretty shot up. The red number top left is my health indicator and it’s not good. Exactly 2.00 minutes remaining of extremely high-intensity warfare

At the end of the battle you get all kinds of statistics and points and money are credited to your account depending on performance.

So what’s the point of this? If you click the link, install the app, you know who we are and we’ll see you out there.

C.H.A.O.S. for iPad. click here

In the unlikely event you take a game off either of us feel free to post your kill in the comments section below.