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| Re: Halo - a look back over seven years | |
| Posted By: helloblueroses <three_chord_me@msn.com> | Date: 11/15/08 11:25 p.m. |
In Response To: Halo - a look back over seven years (Louis Wu) : http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=24503 : Give us what you got! what i've got, eh? Here goes. At one point in my life back then, Halo was the only thing i felt i had in common with the people i considered friends. I was headed nowhere, had little left, had just gone through the deaths of 6 different people very close to me in the span of 4 months, including my best friend....and yet, two or three nights a week, i could drive over to Brandon's house, grab a controller, and spend a few hours with my quadrant of a 52-inch TV, running around Hang 'em High and holding my own with the pistol. At the time, i was working in a grocery store to get through college, and they set my profile up as "Produce Boy." When i was fired from that job several months later (not my fault!), i found that they had changed my profile name to "unemployed boy." During what was the darkest time in my entire life (to date), a simple change like that made in Halo's multiplayer menu made me laugh when I didn't think it was possible. I lost more sleep, turned in more late papers, and drank more coffee during those two years than at any other time. We would get started around ten at night, break for a two dozen taco run around 1, and then head back until the last of us fell asleep--our Spartans running directly against a wall, a sure sign that someone had passed out with their thumb firmly against the analog stick. A night that still lives in infamy among us involves the greatest game of CTF on Sidewinder in the history of mankind (and if you beg to differ--you weren't there. Sorry. We own the title). We had discovered the wonder of System Link, and divided into our teams. (I still remember the awesome, and slightly chilling, feeling of watching the trail of a sniper round SILENTLY pass inches from your head--a sound we had previously heard coming due to the split-screen play.) The game was only to three points, sure--but it took just over 6 and a half hours to get those three points. Sure, I've accomplished a lot more in the past six years than that, but I still feel an inappropriate sense of pride for having been on the winning side. The real shame is that it wasn't possible to have a saved film of that match--considering how close we came to losing, being saved only by the miraculous crash-landing of a Warthog inside the base, sideswiping the flag carrier and creating just enough distraction to sneak our man through to score the winning point back home. We played one game that night, I hadn't slept in 36 hours, and as i drove the twenty blocks back home, I lamented the lack of rear-wheel steering in my GMC as I decided to cut across someone's lawn in order to get better traction (not that I'm some property-damaging hooligan; it was icy and I wound up there on accident. but found that the grassy earth gave much better traction than an ice-covered asphalt incline). Definitely wasn't the only time during our Halo: CE stretch that I had to remind myself, in the wee hours, that my truck wasn't a Warthog. I realize this post is full of tangents, but just thinking of those early couple of years, playing Slayer on the old maps, brings me back to the things that defined those days, and how, mixed with the good and the bad, Halo was there to give me some relief from it all. The worst day possible could at the very least be softened by a few hours of Slayer on Hang 'em High, some CTF or King of the Hill on Sidewinder and Blood Gulch, Rockets on Prisoner, or seeing how many times i could jump to my death during a match on Boarding Action (a map i still to this day have a deep, dark loathing for). And if you put every system, and every game in front of me....sure, there are highlights on Halo 2, and i'm looking forward to the Mythic map pack, but if i had to choose, i'd get those three friends back and pop in Halo: CE. It just can't be topped.
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