Thoughts of a Random Gamer

This post has been festering inside me like a microwavable burrito. It was bound to burst out of one of my orifices sooner or later. Let me first qualify my capability to write it. I played Halo, I traded half my Xbox games for Halo 2, I bought Crackdown for the beta, and waited in line for three hours and took a day off work for Halo 3.

The gaming community. I play very few games online. The game I play online the most is Halo 3. It can be a fun alcohol fueled experience. The biggest thing to note about my previous statement is the word "can." I don't remember the last time I had fun the entire time I played online.

If it's not a racist douche, it's a 12 year old screeching with their cracking pubescent voice about how they just got a double kill. I love mothers, do I ever, and I don't mind people snapping off momma jokes, but none of them are original anymore. I love good insults but the vast majority of the people who play this game should be castrated to save the world from the horror of their offspring.

My final complaint about the online community is when it comes to women. Not women playing the game but the majority male reaction to finding a woman playing online. It's like dropping a Cheetos in a room full of hungry rats. They all cling to her, whether it's to belittle or hit on and in the end it's just very pitiful.

Fanboys. A steaming pile of horse shit has at least one person who will look at it and see nothing but gold. They can look past the fact it's shit and see... I don't know, something other than fecal matter. Such is the case with Halo. Who in their right mind would look at the games and concept and see no faults? If you guessed fanboys you'd be correct. The same people who dream of being sodomized by Master Chief, or want to be Spartans when they grow up.

Clearly I like the games otherwise I wouldn't continue to play them, but I am by no means one of its fanboys. I can see so many of the games' faults. Example: if a man can survive falling 500+ miles from space to the earth's surface, I imagine a bullet has to feel like a rain drop. Bungie took a page out of Captain America's book and made Master Chief some kind of super soldier. How is it that he can jump the regulation height of a basketball hoop, but he runs like he's in the Special Olympics?

The campaign. The major draw of Halo is the online play. The campaign lasts 15 hours at most and if not for achievements, isn't worth playing through more than once. It's seems like an unnecessary addition to the game. Specifically in Halo 3, I got so pissed at the constant interruptions from Gravemind and Cortana that I was ready to throw the controller through the TV. In Halo 2 the ending comes out of nowhere and gives the player campaign blue balls. Have you ever heard of a penguin blow job? It's just like each installment in the Halo story. It pulls your pants down to your ankles and starts rubbing you down. Just when you think you're going to get the mouth and some real satisfaction, it steals your billfold and runs away while you're stuck waddling after. Finally, in Halo: Combat Evolved the level designs, though good, were used over and over. I understand you have to battle your way into a complex, but sure as shit you had to run through each one backwards in a salty attempt to lengthen gameplay.

MMORPG like online fervor. Since the meat of the games are multiplayer, I can understand how that is the main draw. What I don't understand is how people can play multiplayer constantly with the only reward being a higher online rank. Are they playing to get the highest rank possible and maybe, as in a snowball's chance in hell maybe, get an MLG contract? I have no idea but, much like with so many other people and things, I don't understand it and therefore do not like it. It doesn't have an RPG element to make the monotonous grind seem like anything more than a waste of time.

Multiplayer map packs, themes, gamer pictures. It has been "perfected" by other games and though technically started on PCs, the microtransaction has thrived on the console since the release of the Halo 2 map packs. I'm not against significant game expansion packs. What I am against is charging for something that adds no real value to a game. Let me elaborate, lets say a new map pack is released for $10 or whatever. In order to play on the new map you have to go to a specific variant. This variant only includes maps from the map packs and not everybody has them, so you're limited by how you can play them and who you're playing them with. On top of that most map packs include a "reimagining" of previous maps that adds little to the overall design other than updated graphics.

Cheaters. I had a crack like addiction to Halo 2 for a time and that ended very abruptly when every other match I played was against a cheater. I'm sure everybody knows what I mean when I say "standby." You're running around the map and all of a sudden you're stuck in the blue screen and shortly after you return, you realize the bomb is planted, flag scored, or all your teammates are dead. No more than a minute later, the exact same thing happens again, and again until the match is over. Who remembers the modded Xboxs? You'd go into a match with a modder and all of a sudden you see somebody jump the height of the map, sprint past you at lightening speed, or fire a BR like its an AK-47.

The modded Xbox problem is mostly taken care of with the 360 but there is still the problem with standby. It's seems Walmart is selling internet connections these days. When you go into a match with someone who has a Walmart brand connection, everybody has to suffer by magically moving 10 feet without touching the controller, or being in a fight to have the opponent disappear and reappear behind you. The worst part of crappy connections in Halo 3 is when you go into the standby screen, you bet your ass you're going to be respawned well away from where you were and will die as a result.