I made the mistake of mentioning at one point to Conor (in the REU program) how badly I miss playing Halo. He said he and his friends were actually going to play that evening, and I was welcome to join them! Terribly excited was I, for it has been a sad, lonely month since Master Chief, the Arbiter, and myself laid down some hurt on a whole manner of evil.

What I didn’t realize is there is a delicate balance between being good at the campaign mode (Ethan and I are currently somewhere in the Legendary campaign) and online play. In even the worst campaign battles, through clever use of teamwork, you can beat the system, and your enemies. I was thinking online play would be kinda fun; I remember when Hank had the old XBox Live, for the old XBox and the old Halo, and how we’d get on and I’d work the controls, just running around like a lunatic, and Hank would talk smack to evoke entertaining responses from all the 14-year-olds that inhabited the online-Halo-scape.

It’s a whole different ballgame now, folks.
These people are crazy.

Now, I know I accuse insanity in a lot of different subsets of human culture… and I suppose this really isn’t any different… I was just amazed/appalled how intense online Halo is. Maybe I feel like I need to make excuses (EG: these guys are too intense and have no life!) to compensate for my own gross shortcomings in online Halo play (EG: getting routinely wiped across the floor by people with ‘leet’ screen names). In fact, I know that’s what it is. Nonetheless, the intensity of those players surprised me. I think I might have to drop some coinage on a few months of Xbox Live just to hone my skills; I don’t like sucking that bad. A man would like to be able to hold his head up high when he gallivants around a digital landscape, assuming the guise of a fictitious super-soldier.

I’m bemoaning my lack of XBox during the summer months in which I have large amounts of unassigned time, but the XBox would certainly spell doom for my reading list, so in the end it’s probably a good thing.

Posted by Tom on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 9:00 AM. [RSS]
Categorized under Life, Nerd.