Top Ten Interactive Features on Halo Multiplayer Maps

Playing Halo isn’t just about shooting your opponent in the face. It’s also about planting a sticky grenade on their ass. Beyond that though, the designers behind many of the multiplayer maps gave us numerous opportunities to interact with our environment. Many times utilizing these reciprocal features gives us a distinct advantage during gameplay. Other times they are merely good for shits and giggles. On the not so rare occasion they can even be the direct cause of our untimely death. They always keep us on our virtual toes though so in appreciation for these tasty little tidbits, I offer you what are, in my opinion, the top ten interactive features scoping the very full library of Halo maps.

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Top Ten Interactive Features on Halo Multiplayer Maps

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10. Snowbound's Automatic Turrets

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Snowbound is widely adored and equally despised. Regardless of where you fall on the love/hate spectrum, I guarantee you have, at some point during your online career, toyed with the automatic turrets that diligently guard the boundaries. Shooting anybody who ventures beyond the designated area, it’s fun deploying a bubble shield and watching them fruitlessly attempt to gun you down. It’s even more fun watching an enemy ghost flip out of control and get blown to smithereens. Assuming it’s not me.

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Top Ten Halo Multiplayer Maps

If you’ve been with the Halo trilogy since the beginning, selecting the best multiplayer maps is a lot like saying whom out of all your children is your absolute favorite. Or whom you would save between you and your spouse if only one of you could survive the impending zombie apocalypse. Or whom you would vote for if both Master Chief and the Arbiter were running for president. That’s right, it’s damn easy. Here are what I have deemed the all-time top ten multiplayer maps from the Halo series. Remember, this list represents a single opinion and a single opinion only. It just so happens that this opinion is right. Off we go!

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Top Ten Halo Multiplayer Maps

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10. Warlock

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Warlock, a remake of Halo: CE’s Wizard, is a dark, smaller arena that includes four bases, each with a corresponding teleporter. Super bouncers be damned, the action on this dungeon-esque map is often frenzied, frantic, and all sorts of shotgun in your face awesome.

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HPTBTSOOM: The Flagrantly Fallacious Teabagger

HPTBTSOOM (which stands for Halo Players That Bug The Shit Out Of Me) is a series about, you guessed it, Halo players that bug the shit out of me. Think I am talking about you? Chances are I probably am. Freakin’ jerk.

halo 3 screenshotYou are in the middle of a particularly intense game of Team Slayer on Construct. Finding yourself on the wrong end of the sniper rifle, you spend your forced ten second break taking a few deep breaths and silently reciting a quick self-affirmation. You respawn under gold, grab the nearest battle rifle, and head up the lift. Patiently waiting for you at the top are two members of the opposing team but thanks to a few well-placed grenades and a handful of spot-on br bursts, you successfully take them both down. Before your shields can fully recover, one of their teammates comes charging around the corner and finishes you off with some uncontrolled stray assault rifle bullets. Unable to do anything but watch the horror unfolding in front of your eyes, you realize you just had the misfortune of crossing paths with The Flagrantly Fallacious Teabagger.

The Flagrantly Fallacious Teabagger is not the person who deftly out br’ed you in a fair and square fight to the death admist the tight corridors of boxes on Foundry. That person is known as the I Just Fragged You And Now I’m Gonna Bag You Guy. The Flagrantly Fallacious Teabagger is also not the person who expertly flailed their long barrel within a ridiculously close range and took you out with just a single sniper round. That person has earned their nickname of the First Comes The No Scope Then Comes The Nut Poke Guy. The Flagrantly Fallacious Teabagger is the person that takes you out right after you singlehandedly kill multiple members of his team who then decides to assert his overinflated sense of superiority by dipping his testicles into your deceased and not so welcoming mouth.

Despite the fact that you just killed several of his buddies with nothing more than what you spawned with, despite the fact that you had little to no shields when he happened to come across your clinging to life body, and despite the fact that he was graced with the luckiest and timeliness spawn known to all of Spartankind, this particularly irksome player seems to think his basic janitorial skills are enough to justify repeatedly shoving his nads into someone’s oral cavity. You will finish the game with a glowingly positive kill to death ratio while he will have two kills and 20 deaths. You will beat him in every single one v. one encounter while he complains about lag, host, and his inability to secure a power weapon. Yet you will still be forced to watch his not all the way dropped balls bounce off your face simply because you were weak from a previous battle. Hey Mr. Flagrantly Fallacious Teabagger, why don’t you fucking earn your kills before teabagging your opponents? Oh wait, probably because you can’t, you inept I-always-have-to-go-fourth-because-the-only-thing-I-am-capable-of-doing-is-cleaning-up douchebag.

Guitar Hero Text Adventures

Interactive fiction, a type of computer adventure game with text-based input and output, always used to bug the shit out of me. Regardless of what I carefully entered at the awaiting prompt, it was never recognized. Then I would resort to ridiculing the artificial narrator before finally giving up. Despite my previous lack of success with this type of game, I thought I’d give this Guitar Hero-esque version a shot. The entire transcript is verbatim though a simple cut and paste with my text in red and the program text in italics. The ending makes reading the entire thing more than worth it. Bill Meltsner, I love you.

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Champion of Guitars
An Interactive Fiction by Bill Meltsner
Release 1 / Serial number 090126 / Inform 7 build 5J39 (I6/v6.31 lib 6/11N)

Cantina
The current management of this rather seedy venue doesn’t much care about appearances, apparently. Nonetheless, it’s become one of the hottest spots in the area, attracting surly alcoholics from all around. A variety of local acts, the vast majority unrelentingly terrible, play here every Tuesday night. Coincidentally, it’s Tuesday night.

A host of unsavory-looking people makes up your audience for the night. They’re all staring at you expectantly.

A fake plastic guitar lies on the ground in front of you.

Bolted to the wall is a television screen, dark and forboding.

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Seven Reasons Why You Should Not Buy Rumble Massage

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The XNA Community Games program (which gives participating members the opportunity to share, peer review, download, and play community-made games) sometimes surprises us with entertainingly clever creations. Other times it just wants to take our Xbox 360 controllers and turn them into vibrating massagers. The goal of one of their more recent offerings, appropriately titled Rumble Massage, is to “put a controller behind your neck and feel the soothing vibrations of the Xbox 360 controller.” The soothing vibrations are certainly going somewhere, but I don’t think it’s behind your neck. While thinking about this “game” has me positively quivering in excitement, here are seven reasons why you should not fork over $2.50 for this revolutionary title. And before you ask, the “I already have a vibrator” one is a given.

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