Morning Vent, 16 May 2010

Unfortunately, there's no Bren gun in WaW... or Halo.

 

    Had another stab at Halo: Reach yesterday. I had to ragequit after only four or five matches after my outraged screaming reached ear-shattering decibelage. I was sucking insanely bad, and I wound up majorly negative in every single match. Lining up shots was impossible for me, while my opponents were getting headshot after headshot after headshot. (Hey, Bungie, know what? Probably not a good idea to make SWAT part of a grab-bag rotation on a beta, 'kay? Just sayin'.) I hated not being able to select my own weapon loadout like I do in every other shooter. The assault rifle is like shooting vitamins at the enemy, just sprucing them up so they can give me a melee finish to my noggin. In defense of the beta, I think they've largely perfected the mechanics of the Melee strike, which Bungie so infamously screwed up in Halo 3 by "fixing" the oh-so-obviously unbroken melee mechanic of Halo 2.
    It was enough that I decided not to buy Halo: Reach, period. Not even for the co-op campaign. The last, sorry gasp of the Halo franchise is just not for me. Yeah, I know, it's still insanely popular. It's an apples and oranges thing. Halo isn't worse than other shooters; it's different. But one thing it also isn't: It just isn't for me anymore. If I wanted to invest the time in the massive learning curve it would require to unlearn the mechanics of the military shooters I currently play (which would, of course, diminish my already embarrassingly minimal competence on those), plus spend untold hours tweaking my XIM360 config so that my aim with the feeble Halo weaponry isn't that of an epileptic chimp with Coke bottle bottom glasses, then, maybe I might play Halo: Reach. But probably not. More power to those who will, but it's just not for me.
    After my Halo: Reach humiliation, Matt64 was nice enough to indulge me with Treyarch's Call of Duty: World at War co-op. I had a tremendous time. We played competitive co-op, and it was just incredibly fun to play. Tho my aim was horrid after the beer and pizza break, there were some hilarious moments along the way: On some of the Pacific Theater missions, there were some hilarious enemy death animations, including a Pete Rose-worthy face-first slide o'death in the mud that cracked Matt64 and me up. Best of all, in the co-op mission Heart of the Reich, we were storming the steps of the Reichstag, almost at the end of the level... and the huge pillar from the front steps fell over and squashed Reibo like a bug. I wish I had been recording that... It was a Keystone Cops moment that would have made an awesome YouTube clip. Ah, well. Maybe next time.