I believe I promised everyone a story about Red9. I can’t exactly remember why, but I’ll do it anyway, as it’s hilarious 😛

So, I’m sure many of you have heard of DayZ, the massively multiplayer zombie apocalypse survival simulation. Well, back in the early days, before it became Deathmatch on Chernarus, me, Red9, and a mate of ours, Rob, used to play DayZ quite regularly. I may even have documented some of the stories in this very blog.

Fate had taken an unfortunate turn, and Red9 had to respawn. Now, Rob and I were fairly nearby, and had holed up in the ruins of an old castle. We didn’t particularly want to vacate our position, as we were pretty secure and weren’t keen on making ourselves targets. So we directed Red9 over teamspeak.

For about an hour.

See, the rather unfortunate thing is that Red9, a fantastically intelligent and reliable chap, just did not understand the Cyrillic alphabet. He gave it the full college try, I will say that! But for about an hour we had him marching up to village signposts, just to try and work out where he was. And getting back what sounded like him valiantly shredding his mouth in an attempt to pronounce the villages’ names.

Eventually, we resorted to using landmarks on our map to help guide him. This seemed to be going well, and I was confident that soon, in the ditant forest below us, we would see Red9 jubilantly racing up to meet us.

This confidence waned as he began to describe terrain completely alien to our surroundings.

We had him march up to another roadsign and give us his best attempt at a reading.

He was back where he had started.

So, after an hour-long round trip, I took a breather to let my brain recover from the rage-induced bluescreen I was experiencing, while Rob and Red9 pissed themselves laughing. Upon my return, we were able to use landmarks to swiftly guide him to our position.

In about 15 minutes.

So, glad to have him back with the pack, we set about preparing for departure. Rob and I kept watch at the keep’s entrance for any interlopers, while Red9 scavenged for more supplies in the upper floors of the tower. I discussed various and sundry with Rob, the relative benefits and risks of going to high-traffic areas. We had not yet reached our conclusion, when:

“Oops.”

A sickening crunch could be heard behind me. The depressing sound of another player expiring issued forth. Rob, who had been looking INTO the keep as I watched out of it, burst out laughing. Slowly, I turned my character around.

To see the freshly-crushed corpse of Red9. Who I had spent over an hour guiding.

I did not only explode with hilarious rage and disbelief, ladies and gentlemen – I sobbed like a schoolchild. I really must see if I can find the video for it, because what follows is essentially a good five solid minutes of me breaking down, as Red9 apologises profusely for falling from the top of the keep 😛

… Man, I’ve got a hankering to play DayZ again. Because moments like that make games worth playing 😀

M.