Today’s game is some more Halo. Big surprise, i know. I’m building up a ton of hours in this game to the point it’s about to offset TF2 (which i was actually addicted too in Highschool, sometimes playing for entire 12 Hour sessions(Minus hygiene breaks of course)).

Tech Stuff

I got some network issues sorted out which made it far more accessible to play Halo. I made the mistake of buying a Realktek Card for my PC, which from what i understand isn’t the greatest on Linux, and especially Arch based systems. I tried all the fixes like Power Management, alternative drivers, and even a rollback. Nothing. I ended up using an ancient ass Mac Mini and sharing it’s stable wifi connection over LAN. I don’t have superfast WiFi so i’m not losing much with how old it is.

We played some Capture the Flag which was fun. We’ve avoided Team Based modes in the past due to our group being super unbalanced. For context, Me and 1 other player have done all campaigns on Legendary and are working on LASO, another Player has done Legendary for all but Halo 2, which he stopped on Gravemind, and the other 3 have only played on Normal Solo. This isn’t to say they’re bad players or they’re killing the vibe, but it can sometimes make Teamwork based modes a little more difficult. Mostly though i don’t want to kill their fun with a matching that ends up feeling unfair.

I ended up setting something up though to just Shuffle everyone in to teams. I wish it was a native MCC feature, but for now this will work. Being able to hit Shuffle is a lot more fair feeling then trying to divide things out into what we feel would be Balanced. That way, sure, we end up getting our shit kicked in some times, but other times there will be balancing that feels a lot better.

As for the actual gameplay (and i’m sure the part people actually care about), i ended up swiping the enemy flag for the entire game. They managed to score the 3 points needed to win, but i’d swoop in and play the most annoying game of keep away just to make them work for it. My strategy was too sneak up to the cliff until they couldn’t see me, then sneak and hide in the teleporter room. Then, since i had a shotgun, i’d hide their until someone found me and then cycle up to the roof of my building. If someone found me there i’d loop back to the teleporter room. Somehow I managed to score 2 points doing this, and one of my friends told me i was “Annoyingly good and hiding with the flag”, which i’m choosing to take as a compliment.

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There also was our Halo 3 match, which was far more evenly matched it felt. Despite what i was saying earlier about wanting things to be a bit more balanced feeling for my friends (or to at least avoid my team placement being clouded by bias), they are all catching up to my skill pretty fast. One of them has to play with Keyboard and Mouse, and i think if he actually managed to get his controller working he’d be a natural.

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We ended off with a game of firefight, which lasted for a total of 20 minutes. It only ended when we got bored and started trying to kill eachother (but sneakily). It was down to the last two of us, and we got into a warthog and i drove us off a cliff. I think my friend was planning to hop out and sticky me, so ultimately i think i won with that play, even if we both died.