Saturday, May 07, 2005
Two recent Halo 2 sessions illustrate the beauty and the beast that is Bungie's masterpiece in multiplayer.
- SYSTEM LINK: One of my colleagues at work is a Halo freak. Totally nuts about the game. He has a cool dual-Xbox System Link setup (which is really kinda rare out here... well, I have three linked, but that's besides the point) and regularly hosts LAN games on it. My position on Halo multiplayer has always been that it's cool, but my friends hated it so I never had anyone to play with.
Anyway, I finally scored an invite to one of those fabled LAN parties and... I didn't suck. This was a massive, massive relief to me. I did pretty damned well too, around the second or third best player there, though behind the host who was indeed brilliant at Halo. And there were some real highlights, too (nothing beats hearing people constantly scream your name in frustration), like consistently killing one poor woman (honestly, I wasn't trying to...) and sticking people multiple times. And I also managed a couple of Kobe Bryant-esque performances in getting the most kills while trying to help my ailing but inferior teammates (though this is not a diss, it's that one of them was new to Halo but was an impressively quick learner; by the end he was genuinely good). And there were a couple of against-the-odds victories that really hinged on the opposition not copying our "GET IN THE GODDAMNED WARTHOG AND SHOOT" tactics.
Still, win or lose... it was fun. It was tons of fun. The social aspect helps, but there's still something more solid and entertaining about playing with your friends over System Link where you can't whine about lag. Hell, even in games where I got totally wasted I really enjoyed it.
- XBOX LIVE: Soon after the LAN party Bungie released their Halo updates. New maps are always exciting (really, with Halo sessions stretching to the hours you NEVER have enough maps) but I was really pumped for the 2v2 playlist. 4v4 was tons of fun but impractical; 2v2 would be cool, I thought. So I enlisted Mukund and we fired it up. The results:
Midship Multi-flag CTF: 0-3
Not a good start when you jump in, see your own flag, and think... "wait, what the hell do we do now?". Meanwhile, they grabbed the sword and we lost very quickly.
Warlock Teamball: 0:24 to 3:00
Right, that last one was a false start. Except when Warlock came up, we went "OOH NEW MAP!"... and forgot about the whole ball thing. They also ambushed us plenty of times by making the ball carrier bait while the other guy attacked from above. You'd think we'd figure it out by the tenth time they pulled it. The ball guy also killed us twice. Each.
Lockout 1-Flag CTF: 0-2
OK, this time we kinda knew what to do and what we were doing. The other guys were just better. Like, much better. They had us covered from every angle and had the counter for every weapon (got the sword? we'll snipe you. got the shottie? we've got the sword -- etc).
Midship Team Slayer: 6-30
By this point, we were pissed. We wanted revenge. We had to nail them. Good start: These guys sound like they're 10, and it's Slayer -- no dumb rules here. They still wasted us. After a while, I found my niche by sticking them repeatedly. This pissed them off, which I liked, even though they were still cruising to victory. Then they decided to start sticking ME. This I didn't like, because it turns out they're better than I am at it.
Ascension Rifle Slayer: 0-30
I had to beg Muk to stay for this game. I said we couldn't leave it at that low point. Even though this one was even worse... I was OK with it. Because this time, we weren't just beaten by superior foes, but by bad game design too. We were stuck on one side of Ascension pinned down by sniper fire. EVERY TIME we died we respawned in the same spot. There were no sniper rifles on our side and every time we tried to escape, BOOM. That sucked. That made it easy to quit.
It was awful. Universally awful. We were destroyed. And it was not fun. Though, in hindsight, it was really funny.
Posted at 5:22 AM
