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| Forgive me its2am as I type this LONGpost sans fin | |
| Posted By: Magni Harvald <magni.harvald@gmail.com> | Date: 11/17/08 6:52 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! Hmm Halo, the game that made me want to make videogames for a living. Story's a long one. Back in 2001 I was in 5th grade in the Bellevue School District, which means two thirds of my friends' parents worked for Microsoft. Right after launch, even though I had never even heard of Xbox or Halo, all my friends were playing this "awesome game". The LANs soon started. Almost each birthday party over the next three years consisted of TVs, Xboxes, and controllers all over the house, with sixteen loud kids playing all night and those whose turn it was to sit out eating some pizza, drinking soda, and following the epic battles that played out. Blood Gulch, Battle Creek, Sidewinder, Rat Race, Damnation, Prisoner... so many good memories. I was one of the only kids not to have an Xbox, and hence it was often my turn to sit out, but despite my horrible skill I still fell in love with the game. That was increased furthermore when I launched a campaign by myself once everyone else had fallen asleep exhausted in the wee hours of the morning (being insomniac does have its advantages). The opening screen music I had heard a bit, but most of the time my friends didn't let it play long as they scrambled to get the games going. I let the three intro vids play before selecting the first mission. The opening cutscene.. I was hooked until I finally fell asleep during Truth & Reconciliation (it must have been the night setting). I didn't visit gaming sites on the Web much that time, and didn't have any gaming mags, my home setting being pretty anti-gaming at the time, so I knew close to nothing at the time. All I knew was that during our "week of mourning" after November 2nd in 2004, whatever was coming at the end would help or the four years to come. I couldn't wait to get my hands on Halo 2, but alas I wasn't allowed to do the midnight launch, and only got to play in one LAN before getting grounded from any further Halo over at my friends. That was my last Halo LAN for the next two years. At the end of the month, I moved (learned of it the very morning) to southern France, leaving everything behind. Among some of the things I left behind was the anti-videogame home setting. For Christmas that year, an Xbox with Halo 1 and 2. When school restarted in early January, my brother and I had played each campaign a dozen times, and I spent the next few months going through Halo on solo Legendary. I was finally understanding that there was a story to Halo, and I was loving it. Around that time I discovered HBO (IIRC it was after seeing the "how to tell if you're a noob" machinima, where the noob thinks HBO is "that TV channel your parents blocked"). As I didn't have Internet at home I didn't visit much, but everytime I was online this was the first site I visited. So I finally had an Xbox, Halo, and I was getting good at the game. But where were the LANs. I was stranded in deep Sonyland, southern, Latin Europe. Most people didn't play videogames, and the few that did played PES on their PS2. Hence became my "Americanisation" of the French. At the start of the new school year, my class began to understand what the American dream was. Every Friday at noon we went to Subway (the 22nd to open in all of France at the time!) and then went to my place across the street from school to split-screen until the first bell rung. Everyone came at least once, but some regulars were back everytime, loving the game more and more. In May, the announcement trailer. I could barely sit on my chair as the video was downloading. At the end of the year, I was moving once more, to the capital, Paris. Xbox 360 had launched by then, but it was totally unknown in France, and I was Microsoft for them to announce Halo 3 to buy one. Apart from Conker, Halo and Halo 2 were the only games I didn't sell after a few weeks of playing. Paris marked the start of a new life for me, I finally got regular Internet access, and to make up for the lost time, it was right under my bed. The problem was the lack of a TV (VGA doesn't work with PAL Xboxes). I bought Halo PC and played it extensively along with CS 1.6 and DoD. I didn't have much work yet, and was averaging 60 hours a week (over 80 during break when I stayed in Paris). I now knew every level by heart (stuck mostly to campaign due to Halo PC's poor netcode) and refreshed HBO and Bnet every hour. I soon started to visit the forum. Taking the train back south for break, I decided to buy the French OXM even if I hadn't upgraded to the 360 yet, and my Xbox had gathered dust for two months. It was the Halo 3 reveal, with dozens of screens and the announcement of a beta "sometime next spring" I already knew where my Xmas money was going.. Break consisted of some good old split-screen I had missed, day-in day-out. Back to the school/Halo PC/DoD routine for a couple more months and I was back in the south on Christmas Eve at GAME. Here was the console that I would get to play Halo 3 with! It came with Gears, and I bought a couple more games with my leftover money, so Halo didn't get much playtime. Back to Paris for school (basically Paris = school, Internet and Montpellier, southern France, = TV screen to play Xbox 1, => Halo), and in February my first LAN after close to thirty months of waiting. I now had two Xboxes (the original and the 360), and bought the LE edition of Halo 2 (Halo 1 was nowhere to be found, two years later I have yet to find it, and I visit a vg store at least once a month. Thank god for Xbox Originals!). A friend brought over a TV and we LANned non stop. Repeat every break until the end of Summer 07. In April my brother and I bought two small TV screens for Paris, here's to finally getting some H2 XBL action!. 30 months after launch we finally got to play Live! My first game my connection cut in the pregame lobby =/, so my real first game of XBL was a Team Slayer game on Zanzibar and I won, netting a double kill! I went to bed pretty late that night. However I was not going to get much Halo 2 Live action. A few weeks later, the beta launched, and I got my first taste of Halo 3. Everyone was happy in the lobby, there was no screaming, jeering, racism, or whatever else currently plagues Halo 3 MM unfortunately. Everyone was glad to finally get to play the Beta. At the end of the first game, every one stayed in the lobby and sang the PS3 song =D I got my first Parisian LAN in during the beta, but apart from that I didn't play much Halo 2. Going back to it was tough, two months of Live-less summer help pass the pill. right before the start of summer, one of the regulars from the split screen sessions back in 05, and then the one who brought the TV to start the LANning bough a 360, and would go on to buy Halo 3 day 1. 360s sold: 1. I pre-ordered the Halo 3 Legendary and Halo 3 Collector editions before going south. Internet for most of summer meant I missed all the trailers and map info that came out. I caught up on everything the week before school started as I came back to Paris, also buying an Elite. Once Halo 3 came out, my brother and I wanted to be able to play it 24/7 (which is why we ordered two copies). Up till then, the 360 had switched from room to room each month. It was in my brother's for two thirds of the beta =( I didn't want to repeat that. School starts, new class. I was the only guy from the previous year who didn't take Latin, so I was the only one to change. The good news was there was another Halo player (first person in France I didn't introduce to Halo myself after three years!), and the other guys had played it a bit before. He didn't have Live or know that Halo was coming out before the end of the month. That was quickly corrected. September 25th was tough. Halo 3 was out for America, but Europe had to wait another day. The lobbies in Halo 2 MM were pretty gloomy. Nobody wanted to talk about it, everybody was waiting for the hours to pass until the following morning. As I had ordered the game, I didn't have to go to the store to get it. But UPS messed up, and I quickly learned that the shipment would arrive on Friday, two days later. After the three years of waiting to have an Xbox, the two more years to have Live, the first game on Live disconnecting before it had loaded, the Crackdown fiasco, I could not let this one pass up. So I went out to the nearest store (two subway stops!) and bought a third copy. The campaign was quickly torched on co-op, and Live began. Here's the earliest game Bnet gives me (where did my first page of games go?!). I was one of the only people to know where the Rockets spawned on High Ground back then.. Some LANning as usual, but Halo 3 this time, during break in the south. This time, one of the regulars brought some friends from his new high school with him. Bough played had played Halo 2 split screen, and one already had a 360, but none played Live. The 360-less one was the reason they were both here. "He's good" I was told, see for yourself. He didn't want to play on Live, believing he would be getting killed constantly by everyone else, and didn't want to dish out the cash for a 360. After a few hours of playing, it was done. When I got back to Paris, he had bought a 360 with Live. 360s sold - 2. Back to Paris. While I had gone LANning, the other 360 owner in my class followed my advice and played Halo 3 XBL non-stop those two weeks. It turns out that one of his close friends had a small apartment right next to our high school, much like I had in Montpellier two years earlier. He enjoyed the game, and we set up two Xboxes and two TVs in that 20 sd ft flat. Each school day until the end of the school year, we rushed to the bakery, got our lunch and rushed up the six flight of stairs to that minuscule flat where we would 3vs3 Lockout, Midship, and Sanctuary over and over again. We mixed in some Turf from time to time, and Elongation and Foundation SWAT, but every other game was 3vs3 MLG Slayer. These people were all casuals, but by not even telling them there were SMGs in the game I got them to play MLG like it was default Halo xD By Christmas, the owner of the flat and another friend bought 360s. So did my cousin, who partook in the LANs each break. 360s sold - 5. On Live I would play BTB with some other Frenchies I didn't know, most from another clan who my fellow gamer in Paris crossed during those two weeks he nolifed himself. Turns out their leader and a couple of their members were in the same high school as my friends from southern France. The LANning was gonna get big, and this time, everyone who came actually played the game on Live. With our 8-man party we would trounce the opposition. We would win games in under three minutes and yet I would still have the time to get a Killtrocity! I also convinced another friend to buy a 360 and Halo 3, total's now 6 ^^ The high school where they were all at is France's second biggest highschool, so they didn't all know each other. However it turned out that the guy I basically ordered to get on Live and buy a 360 after he played in front of me had dueled on Halo 3 every day for a week at the local game store one of the guys from that clan! Small world. We took the best elements from each clan and formed a Gamebattles squad next. There were six of us, two in Paris, two in Montpellier, and two in eastern France near Germany. Playing daily for a couple of months, goofing off in Customs and just chatting in the pregame lobby for hours, we got to know the two eastern guys quite well. That summer everybody moved around, the two southerners came up to Paris to meet everyone and go LANning clubbing, then the other Parisian came south with us LAN and party as well, and finally one of the easterners (the other one being underage, his parents were afraid we might be "pedophiles from the Internet" and didn't let him come south.. ) came south so we could LAN and go clubbing some more. I ended up spending my 17th birthday drunken on the beach at 3am, not with any non-Halo friends, who were all out of town, but with all these people I met through Halo. I now no longer competitively game with them, as my studies are taking too much time (it's 2am and I should get to work btw..) but I still stay in touch and no doubt we'll organize another reunion next summer. Well there, that's how I did my part spreading the Halo love. Thank you Bungie for such a great game, much of these past seven years couldn't have happened without your games, you guys rock! And congrats to those who read up to here lol. Paul
/wall of text
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