The Story Beyond

“What a bunch of loveable meatheads.”

This is the thought and phrase I’ll typically use to define the protagonists of the Gears of War Series. Marcus Fenix, Dominic Santiago, August (Cole Train) Cole, and Damon Baird are the brick shithouse characters, bearing tree trunk sized arms and chainsaw guns, that roam the world of Sera, ridding it of the genocidist Locust who’ve emerged from the underworld to destroy the ground walkers. Perhaps playing this game for the first time you may have had the same thoughts I did. Sure it’s an intriguing story, and these dudes are the most bad ass gears for the job. But there isn’t any real character development or back story in the original Gears of War game so it’s really left at that. I know who Marcus Fenix is; he’s the guy that likes to say “aww shit” and curb stop the locust scum.

Great games like Gears of War have a tendency to leave me wanting much, much more. In fact, this is a crazy story telling fetish I’ve had since Halo Combat Evolved. I want to know more of the story, why is Marcus so emotionless, why was he left in prison to die on this yet unexplored planet? How did Marcus and Dom become such great friends? Do Marcus and Anya have a secret relationship that isn’t typically allowed in the military (officer dating enlisted)? What is Hoffman’s major beef with Marcus? What is thrashball and how did a famous “thrashball” player like Cole Train transition into the gears army. What did the Fenix mansion look like in the glory days? Why don’t the members of Delta wear headgear while all the other Gears do? Who the hell is this chick that momentarily narrates portions of the story and sounds like she wants the humans dead? If she is against the humans, why does she sound human? Who is Adam Fenix in relation to Marcus? Oh yeah, and why is Baird such a sarcastic prick? That’s a lot of questions huh? That’s only a fraction of questions stored away in a top secret safe hidden in my brain. It’s not even the only game story that I have questions for. I possess questions to other AAA titles such as Bioshock, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, Halo, Alan Wake, etc. How can I possibly get my fix on these stories outside of the game?

It’s simple really. You see, game developers and publishers came across a unique way to keep us nerds busy while the next installment in the series is (or isn’t) being made. They began expanding their games story by writing them into novels. Halo: The Fall of Reach was the first video game book adaptation that I came across one day whilst roaming through a Barnes & Noble. I adore this book and often compare other game adaptations to it. What was so special about it though? Well, one, it wasn’t about the game itself, two it contained amazing character development and back ground stories to my favorite protagonist, Master Chief. It also introduced dozens of other memorable characters and expanded this once tiny fragment of story into a universe full of mysteries and origin. There’s nothing I enjoy more than reading about the past life of a fictional character that comes across as an unstoppable and relentless hero.

Wow, I sure do take a long time to get to what I planned on talking about. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s my style I guess. Maybe it’s because I have an unquenchable need to spell out every single detail of whatever it is I’m talking about. Okay well anyway. I’ve gotten myself into reading a lot more than I normally use to because I feel it will help me find my style of writing. I’ve read that by reading a lot of fiction written by multiple different authors is a great way to see what I like and don’t like. It will help inspire me to adopt some of the style from this person and maybe mix it with a little bit of that person’s style. Could you imagine if I mixed Quentin Terantino with Stephen King? That’d be one fucked up nightmare. As of late I have 12 books on my shelf that I purchased ages ago and haven’t read yet (the number was higher). I’ve read many of my previously untouched books in order to explore a different person’s fantasy world and for the most part have like what I’ve read. I can tell you what I don’t like right off the bat, and since most of the books I own are game adaptations, I hate when the book retells the same story I already played in the game. Perhaps that’s what helps define a good game novel, substance that has yet to be explored outside of the original tale. Sure I know the main plot, but maybe I want to know how these characters came to be, or what will happen to them since the games stopped being developed.

About a month ago I finished reading the first Gears of War novel, “Gears of War: Aspho Fields.” I can honestly say that it was the first game story I’ve completely fell in love with since The Fall of Reach. On top of that I found respect for a new author I never knew existed. Karen Traviss. I had read a tiny biography on her when I skimmed over the “About the Author” section of the first Gears of War book and learned that she did a whole series based off the game “Star Wars: Republic Commando.” I’m not a huge Star Wars buff and I quite frankly found it a tad insulting that a dorky nerd like this would write a book about one of my favorite games. What could she possibly know about this when she’s spent a large portion of her writing career making Star Wars geeks happy? How petty of me to think such ignorant thoughts, not realizing that Star Wars in a much older version of what I love about the stories that make me nerdy. It started out as a movie (I think), but expanded into this enormous universe that is literally adored by millions of people. The same thing has happened with Halo, Gears of War, and other popular video games. These stories have evolved beyond the limitations of the game and allow for endless expansion. Karen Traviss is just one of many tools that etch these stories into existence and I’ve come to realize that she’s kind of a universe expanding whore. Playing her role in the Star Wars universe came first, and then came her Gears of War stories, and now I see that she’s working on expanding the Halo series. Wow, this chick loves science fiction as much as I do (minus Star Wars, that’s too nerdy for me).

Like I was saying, I read this first book and was in utter shock at how much I enjoyed it. Karen really taught me a lesson within the proverbial phrase, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” In this case I didn’t judge the cover of the book; instead I judged the cover of the author. Sure I bought the book because it expands the story one of my favorite games, but I never cared to sit down and open it. Here came the second book, then the third. Years later and I still didn’t read them and it took me wanting to become a better writer to finally open them. I shouldn’t have judged Traviss by the previous works she’s partook in, but instead, as a reader and writer, taken in her point of view regardless of the outcome.

Here is what Karen did so well in the Gears of War book that it has me contemplating on purchasing every work of fictions she’s ever done. The Gears of War and Halo books she puts out are easy shoe ins, but I do plan on buying her six part book series that I’m assuming is a complete set of work that originated from her own influence. Traviss took the undefined macho men and women from Gears of War, wrapped them in reality, and smacked me in the face with them. Playing through a game of Gears of War is an experience that can make the weakest, most self conscience people, feel totally bad ass. Rarely do we as gamers think of the human struggles that these protagonists are going through. Why should we? They’re not real and I’m not partaking in this fantasy battle royal to be drowned out by feelings and other such nonsense. Or so I thought. After playing with these characters through the first game you begin to care about them, and in my case, I began to ask questions (as stated earlier). In Aspho fields, Traviss does a fantastic job with her character build up and relationships with each other. Slowly she started to answer many of my questions as well as opening avenues for new ones. She tells two stories together, one in present time (of the story arc), and the other as a flashback. The way she did this made the book a prequel/sequel to the first Gears of War game. In the present portion of the story we follow Delta after their victorious (or was it?) adventures from the game through the points of view of Dominic Santiago, Hoffman, and Bernie (a new character that we have yet to see in game). In the flashback portion of the story, we witness the childhood of Dominic and Carlos Santiago and their newly found friend, Marcus Fenix. The events span throughout years that leads up to the battle of Aspho Fields. We witness the flashbacks through the eyes of Dom, Carlos, Bernie (sometimes), and Hoffman.

This back and forth method between the stories could possibly be frustrating and annoying to some readers, but not me. My favorite part was the back story and learning why Marcus was had such a tight lid on his emotions. Marcus is such a stoic character and his lack of emotion (other than what he says with his eyes) is much more riveting to read about than to watch. This dude shows no fear, guilt, sadness, happiness, love, or anything. Traviss does a great job of describing his tormented life at home with his famous, yet distant, parents. It describes loving brotherhood that is developed between Marcus, Carlos, and Dom throughout their younger years. Often, Traviss portrays their bonds to each other in such amazing detail that you might feel jealous of this kind of camaraderie. The Santiago family takes Marcus in as if he were the third brother they always wanted and treat him better than his own family.

I’d love to go into great detail about the story, but I’d rather have you read it for yourself and tell me what you thought of it. This is the only way you can get the full experience rather than me paraphrasing it to you. I can say though, that at one point of the story, I was literally on the verge of tears whilst charging my way through page after page of mystery, friendship, love, death, and war. This feeling of almost crying (I didn’t because I’m a man), made me stop and ponder how Traviss was able to bring physical emotion to me through characters who are as real as the tooth fairy. My conclusion has been that she developed the backgrounds of these characters very well, allowing the reader to see what kind of life they lived before all hell broke loose, and too see the struggles that burden them every day of their fictional lives as tragedy re-shapes them. Playing the game I see a bunch of meatheads battling for survival, but I’m not convinced that they comprehend reason, yet the novel reached out to me and told me that these people aren’t just the superhero muscle men I’ve come to know and love. They’re people with real emotions and heartache and they don’t just mindlessly kill the bad guys and feel nothing whatsoever. Instead they kill with purpose, typically revenge for their family and friends long lost, and for the planet that has been torn down along side humanity. Holy cow, talk about bringing them down to earth. Dom suffers greatly with the death of his kids and his missing wife whom he can’t find. Cole Train writes his mother a letter every day, even though she’ll never get to read them because she perished along with most of the planet. Baird’s typical asshole comments and sarcasm is revealed to be his coping mechanism, and Marcus, well let me just say that that I’m unsure what it is that really bothers him because the man keeps a tight lock on his emotions that even his closest of friends have a hard time reading him.

I highly recommend this book, but I just wanted to point out one more thing before I end this catastrophe of a blog. Don’t read reviews from regular Joe Schmoe, because you may find them to be rather disappointing. People dislike things over the smallest grains of annoyance. Each person is granted their opinion; I just typically think they’re stupid. This one person wrote why he hated this book so much and it really pissed me off because I felt like he didn’t have any valid reason other than he’s a massive tool who’s had all of his creative thinking striped from him and had it replaced with ignorant thoughts that keep him entertained. He disliked this book because:

“My biggest pet peeve with this book is the author. It is obvious the woman is British, and it pissed me off that she constantly used British slang as one of the character’s dialogue. They are on a different planet; I seriously doubt they have an England there too. Not to mention the fact that the person who always uses this slang is supposed to be modeled after a Samoan, not a Brit. The worst thing about this book is the way the author basically puts herself into the novel. Yeah, that’s right; there is an old middle aged women gear. And the way she writes the character, it is so obvious it is supposed to be her, and all girl power and that nonsense.”

I’ll end his silly quote right there. This person showed us the epitome of what a stupid opinion is. So I’ve decided since there is no way for me to reply to his god awful post that contained a terrible mixture of past and present tense as well as a plethora of spelling errors (that I fixed up for him in), that I would post one here, just to get it off of my chest.

Dear moron,
I find the fact that your biggest pet peeve with this novel being that the British author portrays a British character in her book that may or may not be modeled after herself is a ridiculous pet peeve to have. Your argument is that it’s a different planet, is there supposed to be an England there too? Perhaps not, but this is the wonder of fiction. One, it’s not unnatural for an author to write themselves into their stories, I mean heck, why not? Is there one personality that we know and comprehend better than our own? Can we always look at someone else and determine what that person would do in this situation or that? Hasn’t Stephen King written parts of his own personality into his stories? How about J.K Rowling? Tom Clancy? David Wong? Your distaste for her possible inclusion of herself into her own novel is rather petty in my opinion.

On to the fact that you don’t like British people. Perhaps you didn’t say that, but your arrogance was certainly screaming it. I wonder if people who read any of the Halo novels hated them because Master Chief was written by an American author and totally made him sound American. Obviously he wasn’t born on Earth and instead on a different planet far away. I seriously doubt there is an America there too. Not once did I see you complain about how this fictional world portrayed other things the we see on a daily basis such as cars, phones, coffee shops, books, music, television, dogs, cats, and even human beings! OMG! How did earth wind up on that fictional planet? Perhaps it’s human nature to include the worldly things in our society into that of our fiction. Maybe Traviss isn’t imaginative enough (doubt it) to create things that are unreal. Who knows, but the fact that the way a character spoke in this book resembles that of the British person who created her annoys you, makes you look like the unfortunate stereotypical American idiot who has a very dense and all too literal view on things.

Phew, now that I got that out of the way. I’d like to encourage you guys to read more! It’s an unbelievable world out there and there is so much knowledge we can learn from reading as well as building up our own imagination. Take your eyes of that dreary television and let your mind do the talking. One book in particular that I’d like to recommend, Gears of War: Aspho Fields, especially if you’re a Gears fan.

Stay tuned, I plan on releasing Part III to This Gaming Life, sometime this week (hopefully). Until then, here is a neat Cole Train song to show you what Gears of War looks like in case you don't know.

Legendary Conflict

“Halo Reach is the hardest Halo campaign on the legendary difficulty.”
“Yeah sure, and Mel Gibson isn’t a racist Catholic.”

The challenge is to beat every single Halo game (minus Halo Wars) on the hardest difficulty setting, legendary. Compare them, tell me which one you think (I stress the word “think” because it’s just your stupid opinion) is the hardest to complete. I dislike opinions sometimes because I feel that a lot of people misuse them. Have we really forgotten that an opinion is our own personal view on things and that most of the time we don’t have substantial proof that it’s the correct one? Yet we’ll continue to argue that our opinion is correct and provide thoughtless reasons why we think it is.

“You didn’t like that movie? It had great acting and a compelling storyline; it was most definitely a good show.” Yet despite the reasoning you give, the other person will not agree because it didn’t appeal to him. Perhaps he thought the acting sucked and the storyline was lame, that’s his take on it. Does this make him wrong? Heck no.

Which one is better, the Xbox or the Playstation? Your opinion on the consoles will most likely be separate from each other based on which one you like more. It’s all too typical for a person who likes the Xbox to hate on the Playstation and vice versa, which proves to me that opinions shouldn’t be looked at as factual fronts rather than a person’s own deluded bias. Most people who share either one of these opinions most likely doesn’t own, nor has ever played, the competition. How can you possibly provide an opinion other than, “I like this console better because it’s what I’ve always played.” People who own both or have played both consoles will provide a more valid reason as to why they enjoy which console more, however , it’s still an opinion and that doesn’t make it a solid truth. When you really enjoy something it’s hard to see the positives in the competition, but in order to pass an opinion off as valid and trustworthy, it’s best to see what both arguments have to offer. I’ve found out that more people will respect that opinion regardless if they agree or disagree. To me, statistics don’t even mean much when it comes down to a person’s opinion. All statistics tell me is that more people are positively opinionated on this product rather than that product and within those opinions are multiple people who are neutral on the subject and bought all of the consoles. The only stats that would matter would be one console beating the other in a speed or graphics contest nine times out of ten. Then that would tell me what features it has that perform better than its competition. This explanation has gone on too long, but it’s fun to discuss these matters with people who have an opposite opinion because it opens the door for both parties to learn things they didn’t know, making their overall opinion a well rounded one.

Why the explanation? Well if you’ve read my previous posts you’d know by now that when I go into a tangent about something, it’s usually because it’s a part of what I’m going to say. Let’s get back to the main challenge, Halo, legendary, hardest. I’ve been hearing lately that a lot of people think Halo Reach is the hardest campaign to beat on the legendary difficulty setting out of all the Halo games. It is in my opinion that these comments might be coming from adolescent children or newcomers to Halo who have never played Halo CE or Halo 2. It’s pretty hard to play those old school games when they were released for the older, washed up, console huh? The only Halo games released on the Xbox 360 were Halo 3, Halo ODST, and Halo Reach. We’re not including Halo Wars into this conversation because it’s an RTS, a crappy one at that. Honestly that game should have been made for computers only. A PC allows for a heavy control scheme where games like Halo Wars belong. Being able to use a keyboard gives PC games more complex controls, yet at the same time making games seem easier, such as RTS games. By allowing RTS games to be made on a console it tends to produce crap, like Halo Wars, and it’s acceptable to ignorant people who don’t know any better. Well you didn’t fool me Microsoft. If we were to compare the three Halos that were released on the 360, then I feel that Halo Reach comes out on top as having the toughest campaign. Throw Halo CE and Halo 2 into the mix and you’ve got a different story. Let me break this down to you the same way as a few writers from IGN did.

I wanted to get a little more proof that the internet children were indeed talking smack, and after a whole ten seconds of searching I found an article published by some writer at IGN. In a proverbial dick measuring contest, these members at IGN measured how hard (get it?) the five Halo campaigns were. The crew made their judgments by playing both single player and cooperative play (on legendary of course). In the end they clearly stated that co-op made up a huge portion of their decision. Here is their list from easiest to hardest compared to mine.

IGN

Halo CE
Halo 3
Halo ODST
Halo 2
Halo Reach

Me

Halo ODST
Halo CE
Halo 3
Halo Reach
Halo 2

The authors of the article made some pretty true claims about the difficulty setting in Halo CE being much easier because we’ve had multiple Halos’ to play since its release. I differ in this area because ODST was so short that it almost won the role of Mini Me. On top of how short and insecure it is, legendary was way too simple. Any seasoned Halo veteran can probably run through the whole game in five hours or so, and that’s on the legendary difficulty. I know I did, but that was me, who knows how long it took these dudes to battle it out. Remember, a large portion of their ranking was based on cooperative play. I don’t think it’s a bad way to judge it, but I’ll consider all options as I run through mine.

Let’s jump right into first place. They stated Reach was the toughest campaign on Legendary and I stated that Halo 2 was the toughest. One of their main reasons for Halo Reach being tougher is the fact that the more people you add into the mix the harder and more plentiful the enemies. You can say that about any game though. If I’m playing Halo Reach with the godlike skill that I have and have a buddy, who sucks terribly, playing as my partner, of course it’s going to be a lot harder. Now instead of just killing my share of the extremely tough enemies, I must now help my comrade win his battles as well. This means I’m exhausting more effort and ammo into tougher enemies that a crappy Halo player can’t keep up with. Hell, if you’re going to base your opinion on that, then why don’t we just turn on all the skulls in Halo Reach for an even more difficult setting. Playing on legendary with all skulls on (LASO) would force me to agree with IGN’s decision as Halo Reach being the hardest. But that’s not fair to compare with now is it? Halo Reach has a standard play through setting that is no more or less than that of Halo 2 but has the capabilities of modifying it to make it easier or harder. Halo 2 doesn’t possess these same benefits and the games should be compared on a level playing field. I’ve played through Halo Reach on co-op legendary and can honestly say that was a piece of ice cream cake topped off with some cherries and fudge. My counterparts didn’t suck and we managed to work together as a team.

Unfortunately in Halo games, dating back to Halo CE, there’s a re-spawn system, meaning that if I die, my teammate just has to take cover to bring me back. I can remember my Uncle and I taking turns as the suicide guy who would go balls to the wall into the heat of battle, dying while taking out as many covie bastards as possible on our Halo CE play throughs. This for me makes Reach’s co-op much easier than say, oh I don’t know, Halo 2. Halo 2 doesn’t have that setting when you’re playing on legendary. No sir, no more rushing in one at a time and blasting the way for your teammate because if one of you dies, you both go back to the most recent check point. Wah wah wah. That makes the co-op ten times harder because you both have to rely on each other to stay alive and actually work together as a unit rather than have a one man wrecking crew whose teammate hides in the back in case you die. My uncle and I never got passed the first mission in Halo 2 and until this weekend, it was the ONLY Halo game that I didn’t beat on this difficulty setting. I did finally beat it though and got one hundred percent completion from the game achievement wise, in case you care.

Comparing a single player play through is much of the same. Do you want me to say that the Elites in Halo Reach are much scarier and harder to conquer? Then sure, they are the scariest bastards when considering whether or to confront them at close quarters or distance. The Elites were the only thing that ever really gave me a hard time on Reach, but I never really got caught up in one certain spot too long because it was too tough to overcome. Here is why I think Halo 2 is a much tougher game to conquer on the hardest difficulty.

I went to my hometown this past weekend to see a buddy of mine who was back home temporarily from his deployment, but unfortunately that fell through. No hard feelings, I understand how busy he must have been and family is one hundred times more important. But since I had all this free time, minus doing homework, I decided to play Halo 2 on the PC to get the last achievements that I needed. I’m an achievement whore which I’m sure I’ve noted before and I’ll most likely wind up talking about it in a special edition of “This Gaming Life.” The achievements were to beat the game on the heroic and legendary difficulties, a task that I’ve never done before in Halo 2. In order to get the both of them in one swift swoop, I needed to beat the game on legendary because the achievements stacked (by beating the hardest difficulty, all achievements for difficulty lower than that will automatically unlock). I was actually mildly apprehensive at the thought of going through the game on legendary because shortly after Halo 2 was first released in 2004, my Uncle and I tried that difficulty on co-op and got utterly frustrated with it. We were use to the old fashioned one man hide and the other man kill everything method as I’ve already explained. I never tried it again on that setting, but that could have been the result of the multiplayer, which Halo 2 did best in my opinion.

Cover System

I’ve found cover to be one of the most significant necessities whilst roaming through a Halo campaign, well actually any campaign. Fractions of a second stand between life and death during a legendary play through and that is true to every Halo game, but in Halo 2 I found myself using cover more as a crutch rather than a strategic method. In Reach I relied pretty heavily on hiding behind things and then taking pop shots just like I did in all the games. Halo 2 on the other hand made life extremely difficult to use that method because my sheilds seemed to drain much quicker than in Reach. I do find that rather odd though because if this were to fall in sync with the Halo cannon, Master Chief in Halo 2 would have an easier time against the covenant than the dinky Spartan III’s in Halo Reach, but I digress. Using cover was momentarily worthless in certain cases such as when the Brutes fired their brute shots in the general direction of my hiding spot, bounced off the walls and landed on my face. Same went with the crazy heat sinking needlers that majestically floated over rocks and around corners to sink into my armor before going boom.

I did my best to use guerilla warfare, popping out of a hiding spot and wasting as many enemies as I could in two seconds before fleeing from battle faster than a fat kid escaping fat camp. Rinse and repeat right? Sure, until my long range weapons and grenades expired. Then what? I felt like I had a better chance going against these guys using sticks and harsh language. Sheesh, I’d rather take my chances against Goliath with a sling shot and some rocks.

The game would get extremely complicated at times when the enemy would rush your hiding spot and put two quick shots into your chest plate and causing a restart. One level in particular really tested my patience, and that takes a lot from a guy who is too relentless to allow a game to conquer him. The Oracle was the level and it’s at the last part where the Arbiter is facing off against the Heretic. If you’ve played the game you’ll know what I’m talking about and exactly how challenging of a fight it can be. The Heretic releases two holograms that look exactly like him and if you don’t choose to shoot the right one, then you’re just wasting ammo. I played that part for an hour when it normally would’ve taken ten minutes tops on any other difficulty. My problem was the lack of decent places to hide to allow my shield to recharge. These holograms would spot me almost anywhere I went making life too difficult. I almost quit the game because of how hard it was. It felt impossible and I was not having fun, which is an important thing to have when you’re playing game. The night was wasting away as I attempted the impossible until I decided to quit for the night. I picked up the next day in the same spot I left off with, only now my mind was fresh and alert, all the distaste from the night before had been vanquished. The first thing I see is the Heretic (or one of his holograms) come into view. I tag his face with a sticky grenade and lunge at him with my sword, and to my luck, it was the right bastard.

I base that completely on luck, but the fact that I had to work out so many different strategies to defeat this one person is something I’ve never had to do in any Halo game and it was certainly the longest part I’ve ever been stuck at. The parts people told me would be the hardest in Halo Reach I found extremely easy because I was able to fool the AI controlling my enemies, a feat that is much harder to do in Halo 2. Remember this is in my opinion. Finally one other thing about using cover in Halo 2 compared to that of Reach. I literally killed almost all the enemies I came across in Reach whether or not I used my guerilla strategies. In Halo 2, especially playing as the Arbiter, I found myself using cover to get away from the enemies and just beat the level without even fighting. This was much easier to do as the Arbiter than it was Master Chief because the Arbiter had ad cloaking ability that allowed me to go invisible for three to five seconds. I do believe I skipped about 60 percent of the six levels you play as the Arbiter because of how difficult the missions were. They were a headache. They were life draining mechanisms put into this world by Bungie to ruin a man’s soul. I don’t skip parts. That’s not my style, but in all honestly it came down to the best thing to do in order to move on against impossible odds. I’d put my cloak on and run to the nearest hiding spot. Rinse and repeat that until I get to an area where I must fight in order to go on.

Jackal Snipers

If at any point in the game I wanted to shoot myself, it was when I came up against the sons of bitches. Jackals are enemies that were introduced in Halo CE as small thin reptilian creatures that wielded large round shields that protect their small fragile bodies. They’d fire at you through a hole in their shield that is wide enough for a gun. They maintain the same form in Halo 2 but they take on other roles as well, such as being a sniper. As the sniper they’re unable to wield a shield anymore, but I tell you what, these freaking things are ridiculous on legendary. In most games I’m used to the snipers hitting you once as a warning shot that allows you just enough time to take cover, but not these dudes. I’d step around a corner and have my clock cleaned with one swift headshot that always took me by surprise. The accuracy of the snipers is probably the most ridiculous part of it, they never miss. A jackal sniper could probably snipe the period at the end of this sentence from a mile away. Most of my frustration was a direct result of me meeting my demise to the purple blaze that is released from the death dealing weapon. The parts that were the worst was when I had just gotten done fighting for like ten minutes, only to see my face mask caved in and my body falling limply to the ground. I’d wind up spending minutes to hours fighting and refighting foes and then trying to take refuge where the sniper couldn’t see me. From there it was like a game of chess between a real life human and an alien that doesn’t exist. Typically the result would end in my demise, but after failing a few ten to twenty times I would get it down to a science and eventually come out on top.

The one part in the game that was almost as bad as fighting the Heretic came when I entered through a sniper valley. At first sight it looked as though I would be okay. I came through this waterfall at the top of the cliff and immediately spotted two of the snipers casually walking a beat. I sniped one down and ran back the way I came in the hopes of trigging a checkpoint. It worked and I slowly came out of hiding to snipe the other guy down. From there I spent a few minutes taking down helpless enemies before jumping down into the ravine below me. As soon as I touched down I was ambushed by an Elite and two Jackals. I managed to kill the Elite and ran up a small hill to hide behind a three. “Checkpoint Done” ran across the screen closely followed by a swarm of Drones. These guys where killer. Flying drones swarmed me in a giant flock and literally killed me within seconds. I managed to figure out a way to escape the ambush as soon as the checkpoint reloaded, killed all the drones, two more elites and plenty of Jackals, only to get sniped in the face from only God knows where. It took me nearly an hour of battling and re-battling the same foes again and again before I was able to spot where the tiny creature that blended in extremely well with its surrounding was. The game was made up of these guys and because of them it felt as if I was fighting checkpoint to checkpoint in a similar way I survived basic training by living meal to meal. The barrage of these snipers didn’t end and they were the cause of my delay in multiple sections of the game.

Bad Spawns

Halo 2 is notorious for its spawning system; mainly in the multiplayer portion where if the enemy team was good enough, they could spawn kill you until the game was finished. Twice during my legendary play through I experienced bad spawning. The first started at the beginning of the level “High Charity.” During the cut scene it shows the enemy council convened in a giant meeting area. The Master Chief is teleported right in the middle of the room, surrounded by a group of ugly bastards out on a religious mission to destroy humanity. What’s my starting weapon? A needler and my dirty mouth that couldn’t stop spewing the “F” word. I had to fight off wave after wave of brutes and grunts in a battle the drained all energy I had. Taking nearly as long as fighting the Heretic, I was able to overcome this tragedy of a spawn and crappy weapon selection.

The second came moments later when I was trying to rescue some fellow marines. I’m not entirely sure if the game just randomly saved the checkpoint there or what, but I landed from my elevator ride right behind two brutes, one of which saw me and melted my face in seconds with a nasty shot from his brute shot. That brute shot is extremely overpowered in this game and on top of that it’s a little round ball that explodes when it impacts something. Come to think of it, this guy kept exploding his balls in my face the second I touched down and the thought of it pissed me off enough. I guess I died too fast at that same spot in rapid succession that the game eventually reverted me back to the checkpoint prior to my elevator ride. The next time I went down, both brutes were unaware of my presence long enough for me to escape to safe fighting spot where I spent the next thirty minutes fighting for survival.

In the end I came out on top. I got the last two achievements I needed to get 100% from Halo 2, but I had a borderline miserable experience trying to accomplish it. Perhaps it’s in my own opinion that I think Halo 2 is the hardest legendary play through and all the critics are just hyping up the newest game. I don’t know for sure, all I can say is that for me it was the most time consuming, frustrating, energy wasting, campaign I have ever played and on top of that I feel cheated because I had to skip as much of it as I possibly could because I couldn’t get past many parts. I’d like to blame it on me sucking at Halo, but allow me to be egotistical, I’m damn good at Halo, the name says it all baby. It’s your turn. If you haven’t already, go play the five Halo campaigns on legendary and post in the comments section how you would rate them from easiest to hardest. You can explain your decision if you want, but I’ll tell you right now, I’m dead set on my opinion being the right one.

Et tu, Brute?

Wow, what a week at E3 huh? E3 is the gaming world’s biggest expo and it’s filled with a cornucopia of fresh gaming news and new reveals. I’m always excited to see what game developers and publishers have planned for the future, and I can say that I was easily tossed off of my feet with this week’s news. Two items caught my interest more than the rest and I found that their reveal came with near impeccable timing. If you’ve read my most recent post, “This Gaming Life Part II: Halo is Good for the Soul”, then you’ll understand what I’m talking about. Monday it was revealed during the Microsoft Press Conference that there was a dawn of a new trilogy, beginning with HALO 4! Sitting in my lonely cubicle, sifting through records at an extremely boring pace, I was listening to and watching the conference on my phone when the trailer made its premier. Seeing Master Chief burst out of his cryo chamber to the frantic calls of Cortana trying to wake him was an extremely surreal experience. Watching the Chief float through the battered ship to the open space were the other half of the ship use to be, and getting the first full view of him as the camera panned away, gave me goose bumps and excited me the same way I was excited watching Halo 3’s reveal trailer. Finally, after two Halo games (ODST and Reach) that omitted the Chief as the main character, the series is headed back to the bread and butter, the character that any die hard Halo fan has fallen in love with over the years.



Excitement aside, this post isn’t going to be about that game, even though I’m extremely excited to see what it’s going to offer. This post is aimed at the other exciting announcement, Halo Anniversary (Halo one remake). This announcement and the other one combined together were almost enough to make me wet myself. I had heard rumors for months prior to E3 that Halo Combat Evolved (Halo one), the game I spent most of my efforts talking about in my last post, is now making an amazing return to the Xbox with better graphics, online co-op, and my favorite, achievements. I was a tad skeptical about the multiplayer aspect though because the trailer stated that there would only be seven returning maps rather than the thirteen that came with the original game. I decided to wait for more information before freaking out about this, but the fact that there would be Halo Combat Evolved online multiplayer was something I had desperately wanted for close to ten years now. Sure I got my taste of it with Halo PC, but I’m a console gamer and I’d much rather have this sort of functionality on a system I’m a lot more comfortable with. Halo one has given me the most memorable gaming moments I’ve ever had since becoming a gamer (which actually took off because of Halo CE). The idea of being able to relive these memories and enjoy the campaign online is amazing!



Tuesday comes and I finally get more information on the multiplayer aspect of the game. It was made perfectly clear that the campaign was completely untouched; it will be the exact same game I remember; only now it had updated graphics. I can’t say the same for the multiplayer though. I read articles on G4 and watched an interview with Frank O Conner, a man who previously worked with Bungie and now works with 343 Industries (a company dedicated to everything Halo), and my nostalgia began to subside considerably. It felt as if my heart was sinking into my stomach. Basically the information I gathered was that the Halo re-make will be exactly the same minus the multiplayer, which will be portrayed through the Halo Reach engine. I don’t like Halo Reach multiplayer, I feel like the core of what makes a Halo game, Halo, was stripped and replaced with whatever makes Reach, Reach. It’s a completely different game, but it’s okay to do that because it’s a separate game that ties into the Halo universe. Please explain to me why the classic Halo multiplayer is being replaced in the remake with this new age multiplayer Halo experience? Who seriously thought this was a good idea? Frank O Conner explains in an interview that they didn’t want to separate the fan base and that people are use to the current way Halo is played.



Hi Frank. My name is Cody, I’ve been a diehard Halo fan for nearly ten years now. I own every single Halo game, novel, strategy guide, and soundtrack. I continued to purchase and support this title despite the mediocre releases of ODST and the less dull Halo Reach. I’ve fought through my disappointments of Halo games that lacked the Master Chief, even though I didn’t think they were colossal failures. I enjoyed them to an extent, but change is hard for me and I like the way the original trilogy panned out. My first thoughts on a remake of the original Halo game, quite possibly my favorite in the entire franchise, was, “they better not mess this up.” To my dismay, you did half of that. I think it’s great that you left the campaign untouched minus the graphics, but I fail to understand why the same couldn’t be accomplished for the multiplayer. The only answer you’re able to give is that you didn’t want to separate the fan base and that people are too use to the way Halo is played now? Come on! Is it really that big of a deal for people who want to play Halo Reach, to put that game in, and the people who want to enjoy the classic Halo multiplayer, to pop that in? Do you really feel that the fan base would be split anymore than it already is? Do you not read the forums and see the hundreds of “Reach sucks and the original trilogy is better,” threads?

As a longtime faithful fan of the Halo franchise, I feel that I have been betrayed. I feel as if I’ve been slapped in the face and had my shoes urinated on at the same time. How dare you remake a classic title like this and make the conscience decision to wipe the old school multiplayer from it. Who are you trying to make happy? The twelve year old children who never laid their adolescent eyes on the first two Halo games because they were still crapping in diapers during the original Xbox life span? When 343 started I was under the impression that it was to be dedicated to all things Halo. In a video you recently released, your employees talk about how people think of Halo Combat Evolved as the quintessential of Halo. To me, it’s like you stated that it’s the purest and most perfect example of what a Halo game should be. You praise how great Halo one is and yet you defile it? If I wanted to play the overrated, washed up, multiplayer that is Halo Reach, I’d put my own, extremely dusty, copy of it in. Why would I want to relive this classic now that you’ve changed it?



So in my eyes I feel that you have done a disservice to the true fan base that has been engulfed in this ten year journey of Halo. It shouldn’t matter how the community is affected by keeping the ORIGINAL multiplayer intact. What should matter is that you kept true to Halo and honored it the way it should be, the way you almost did. Sure, you’re going to modify the matchmaking to try and give us a reminiscent feel of the old Halo, but no matter your efforts, it will fail. Simply because I will be playing Halo Reach on modified versions of what use to be amazing Halo one maps. Not Halo one itself. I hope that if you decide to honor Halo 2 in the same fashion that you hear my plea to keep it as is. Don’t ruin another classic multiplayer with what YOU think will benefit the community and on top of that, listen to the community that has supported your efforts over the years.

This Gaming Life Part II: Halo is Good for the Soul

Be sure to read Part I before continuing this epic journey.

The light illuminated from the ceiling and reflected off the walls making the room seem really bright. There we were, four of us (my two cousins, brother, and myself) patiently waiting as the game loaded. The glare from the bright light bounced off the television screen as unique letters formed the word, “Halo”. The camera shifted behind the title screen and menu options and began floating around a giant ring suspended in space just near a large brown planet. The menu options remained in place, but we sat there for a moment watching this ring world expose its green and blue beauty that made up the surface. Voices sprang out at us that sounded like chanting monks or something (see video), which really gave us the sense that this was definitely different than anything we’ve ever experienced in a game. I wasn’t too sure I was ready for a change, but as bored as I was, I would have played anything. Our first memorable experience in the evolution of gaming was about to begin, granted only two of us could dip our feet in the untouched waters of the future due to the lack of controllers. It was okay though, we didn’t mind taking turns.



Before we loaded up our first multiplayer game, we created our own unique characters. Compared to games I play now, this feature doesn’t seem that great. But at the time we thought it was the greatest thing because we could give our characters a name and a color of armor that we liked best (light red for the win). I plainly named my character “Cody” and colored him black as night. I thought this feature was very unique because it was almost as if a part of me was in the game itself, even though it was just a black robot. Ha, we learn much later that he’s not a robot, but a buff dude in armor. Our first game was on a small map called Battle Creek. It had identical bases located across from each other, one being marked red and the other one blue. A small creek separated the bases as it flowed through center of the map just below a large ark formation made of rock. Many other rocks littered the ground in front of both of the bases while certain paths led up to a cliff and rewarded us with access to a sniper rifle. Behind each base was a teleporter that if walked through, would transfer us behind the opposite base. This made life easy to sneak up behind the enemy, ready to wreak havoc. My brother and I struggled to get use to the duel joysticks on the controller, one allowed movement and the other allowed looking around. We chased each other throughout this rocky maze shooting all sorts of different weapons and grenades at each other until it came to an abrupt end with my last kill. Our first reaction left us stunned and the only words worthy of a response were, “holy shit”. We handed off the controllers to our cousins while the joyful experience caught up with us giving us an excitement we hadn’t felt for a game in years.

After spending a couple of hours with this first person mystery that we had previously thought was probably a crappy game (we were wrong), we immediately related it to Turok 2. In the years prior to moving to Cheyenne permanently, we would spend hours playing Turok 2’s multiplayer, which had the same run around and shoot people mentality that this new Halo game did. We loved Turok, but at that moment in my grandparent’s dark, unfinished basement, we found a replacement for a game we hadn’t thought about in ages. We had forgotten how much fun games could really be, and that day has been permanently etched in my memory. At first, multiplayer was all we would play, especially after we realized my Uncle enjoyed it as much as we did. Honestly, too much was never enough when it came to shooting the snot out of each other and we simply never got bored, not unless you were the only person in the game room staring at an empty map with nothing but rocks and walls to shoot. Surprise, surprise, multiplayer wasn’t any fun without other people there to share the experience, which soon made me realize that the multiplayer was only a presage of what was to come next.

I was sitting in my Uncle’s game room by myself during a weekday and it was a lackluster experience without anyone there to share it with. I remember it was dark and rainy outside and I could hear the muffled voices from my family members upstairs. My boredom was a raging appetite that couldn’t seem to be quenched. I thought about popping in some of the other games my Uncle had but the thought of it made my stomach ache a little bit. I knew they would bore me, probably more so than I already was. Eventually I made my way to the Xbox and put Halo in, regardless of the fact that there was no one there to compete with me, but instead I figured I’d explore the other avenues that were presented on Halo’s main page. Other than the settings option, campaign was the only open road that looked compatible for a single player. With my boredom itching at me, I had hoped that the campaign would scratch it. I could tell from the very get go that this story would be different than that of any other game I’ve ever played, and that’s not including how much the multiplayer has made me realize the potential this game had. It began with this massive cut scene that introduced the game to me and immediately showed off how amazing its graphics, dialogue, and characters were. It all seemed to pop out at me as if I were reading a book with pop up pictures. No, it wasn’t 3D, but everything did stand out very well, especially when I got to the part where it showed the dude sleeping in some tight nit chamber that would make a claustrophobic person like me cry for his mommy.

As soon as the scene was over, I assumed the role of the man sleeping in that chamber (Master Chief is what they called him). He was wearing green armor and a helmet that had a reflective gold tinted visor. I did find it odd that he slept in full body armor, almost as if he knew the ship would be under attack when they woke him up. It was a jaw dropping moment for me to have watched this cut scene as it introduced this guy, and the next moment I am controlling him, sitting upright in the same chamber I just saw in the scene. The dudes that let me out of the chamber began to take me through a series of diagnostic tests that looked like it was making sure the character’s armor was okay, but the tests were really meant for the gamer sitting just outside of the fictional world. I ran through the tests and calibrated the settings that worked best for me, wow that was an awesome way to do that and keep me in the plot at the same time. For the first time ever, the story made me feel like I was the character because even though they were talking to the Chief, it was really me they were focused on. Shortly after the testing was completed I was forced to leave the area without a weapon because the Captain needed me on the bridge ASAP. I followed the chappy fellow dressed in a Star Trek looking jumpsuit out of the cryo bay and down a corridor towards a door that exploded and killed him. With my chaperone moving onto a better place, I was forced to find an alternate route, a route that aimed to teach me the controls of the game. I jumped over a barrier, I crouched beneath door that didn’t lift all the way, and I ran into a dark hallway that forced me to use my flashlight. I neared the end of the hallway as the double doors slid sideways out of sight, only to be introduced to my first enemy. He was standing inches from my face belting out a loud roar. Since I didn’t possess a weapon yet, I just waited for him to rip my defenseless face off. Fortunately to my rescue, two marines started shooting the large blue humanoid thing (I found out later it’s called an Elite), which allowed me to escape past him and on towards the bridge where Captain Keyes waited patiently for me alongside the AI Cortana. As soon as I got there and saw the Captain looking as some schematics or something, the game smoothly rotated into a cut scene. Only this wasn’t a normal action cut scene, but a brief on my mission and the introduction to Cortana, the Halo games comic relief and best ally.

The first fifteen minutes of that game left me dumbfounded and speechless as I peeled my eyes away from the television screen to go find someone to share this with. Never in my life had played a game that literally sucked me into the virtual world as if I were Master Chief himself. The way the game introduced me to its control scheme in the first person view as I was struggling to get to the bridge was amazing, and the way the game cut in and out of cut scenes effortlessly allowed me to feel as if I was the protagonist himself. The whole experience was utterly astonishing to me. I wasn’t the only one who thought that, because my Uncle had gotten to see that too and on top of it he introduced me to my new favorite game type, cooperative pay. We had fallen in love with this co-op element and swiftly moved our way through this amazing story together. That was the best part, playing the game by myself gave me some sort of fear, just knowing that I was literally by myself, but co-op allowed me to have someone there to back me up. We thought the game couldn’t get any better or more interesting, until we reached the climax of the story. It was this one part of the game that really solidified how legendary it really was. Up to this point we’d been fighting the Covenant (a religious alien enemy made up of multiple different species) and were on a mission to find Captain Keyes. We get to the area where he was last located and try to find out where in that area he was. The Chief was now by himself, making his way beneath the earth in search for the fearless Captain. We finally reach our destination, deep beneath the ring world and slip into an epic cut scene. The Chief makes his way through a locked door, witnessing the death and destruction that already took place on the other side. Chief, in a very military like manner, makes his way over to an abandoned helmet and pulls a data card from it. Being the super human bad ass that he is, he was able to view the video within his own helmet. What we witnessed then was nothing short of the most epic and story altering footage I’ve ever seen, even to this day. The film footage that Chief was watching was the first hand experience of Pvt Jenkins, a marine assigned to Captain Keyes’s group. The footage was taken by a camera attached to his helmet that closely resembled that of the marines in the movie Aliens. Actually, the whole scene gave me the same suspense and fear of that in Aliens when they first encounter the hostile E.T. Perhaps not to the same degree as the movie, but I’d say pretty close. Instead of going into great detail about this particular scene, I’ll post a video so you can see it for yourself.



After viewing this for the first time you may not have the same reaction my Uncle and I did, which was, “HOLY SHIT!” Of course we’d invested time into playing and living this story which was so enthralling that we had gotten emotionally attached to Captain Keyes and the other characters in the game, the same way one would viewing a film. Eventually we finished the game and were left wanting much more after the ending hinted that there could possibly be more. We didn’t necessarily mean a sequel, but by more we went through the campaign again on co-op on the hardest difficulty, and again, and again, and again. I think we completed the game at least fifteen to twenty times. I eventually got tired of having to go hangout with my Uncle in order to play Halo, so I used the ancient option that Wal-Mart use to have to reserve my own Xbox and a copy of Halo. That option was Lay-A-Way, you remember that? Yeah it doesn’t exist anymore, but it was easy for me to have them set aside my product while it took me about three months to pay it off. It felt like I was saving money forever, but it was well worth the wait. The first time I played Halo on my tiny television was as surreal for me as it could get. To this day, I’ve never played a campaign as much as Halo one and the game itself was an epiphany to what I really enjoy in a good game. The story really sucked me in from the get go, making me feel as if I were the character himself, fighting a losing battle against an enemy that is ruthless and merciless in its conquest to destroy the human race. Sure we’ve seen the story told before, but this was different in the aspect that the characters were loveable and memorable people (or AI) that you cared about and wanted to see overcome the impossible.

It was almost as if Microsoft and Bungie (Halo’s developer) planted me as a seed to spread the news of how awesome they are. I have gotten many people hooked to playing Halo and I like to think my friend Bryan is one of them. I’m pretty sure I introduced the game to him, but in time he was hooked and wound up purchasing his own console. My cousins bought their own console as well; the world was being overrun by the Xbox craze. After some time my Uncle introduced an absolutely new way to enjoy Halo. He called it a LAN party, this is where we would all get together (typically at my grandparent’s house), and network our Xboxes together so that we could all play in the same multiplayer game, yet on different screens. Multiplayer on Halo became had become our vice again, and it was utterly addicting. I shouldn’t say vice, but it’s the only word I can really think of because it was like a drug to us, or at least for me anyway. We were able to fit more than four people into one game, how sweet was that? During the school year we could only have a LAN party on the weekends, but we would do so with freaking style. Pizza? Check. Soda? Check. Four televisions? Check. Plenty of Xboxes? Check. Owning the shit out of each other for hours? On the way. Occasionally, when all the family happens to be in town, we’ll still throw a random LAN party here and there. It’s never the same though because nothing can really match that original awesomeness when something new has been discovered.

I’m going to side track here for a second to talk about one of my favorite moments with the Halo one LAN parties we had. I can’t remember what day of the week it was, but I’m pretty sure it was a weekend. We kept the basement rather dark (the basement being finished now at my Grandpa’s house) so that we could see our own screens much better. There were about eight of us there playing, all family except my buddy Bryan and my other Playstation loving friend Riccardo. Riccardo was funny as hell because he would always choose the random name option and for some reason he always got the name, “Cupid”. If he decided to get an Xbox, I’d beg him to make that his gamertag, but I doubt he’ll ever get one because he prefers a crappy system. So we start up a game of capture the flag (CTF) on Sidewinder, one of our favorite maps of all time. It was a large map covered in snow and ice and like most maps that came with the game, it had identical bases. There were vehicles on this map because of how large it was and teleporters that helped ease the process of running on foot. It was the section in the middle where we would always get into a nice little firefight ending in one or both of the efforts having to restart from the base. The thing that was so unique about this particular battle was that it lasted for freaking three or more hours. Capture the flag is a gametype that is played out exactly as the name states. Each team has to steal the other team’s flag and return it to their own base, but that’s not an easy task when the teams seem to be evenly matched. After a couple of hours of playing, the match got extremely intense because the score was tied 2-2, and the first one to three would be the winner. I cannot remember exactly who won the match (but I’m pretty sure my team pulled the victory home), but I will never forget this. Riccardo (Cupid) stole the flag, hopped into a ghost (an alien hovercraft) and started his journey home to win the game. Typically, if the other team made it into a vehicle with your flag, then it was gone forever, but I wasn’t going to put up with that. Luckily I was running on foot in the area I would consider to being the bottom middle of the map (long way around) when I see Cupid flying his purple machine around the corner. He was far enough away that he didn’t see me, but not far enough for my sniper to be out of range. I aimed in as quickly as I could and with one swift shot to his pink face (he did wear pink armor to accompany his cute name), the flag was set free. Moments later I returned it to my base and let the match carry on. That game lasted so long because, other than not setting a time limit, the defense was amazing on both sides. I’d say my team worked harder on defense though because the other team only needed one person to put us to sleep the second he saw our faces. That’s right, Uncle Eric stood in the same damn spot the entire match, wielding a giant rocket launcher that obliterated us before we knew what was going on. Did we learn from this the first thirty times he killed us like that? Nope, like ignorant morons we kept running into the same trap and continued to meet the same fate. Didn’t I post in part one the definition of insanity? Yeah. I honestly wish all the matches I’ve played in Halo were as fun and suspenseful as this particular game was.

After so much enjoyment with the campaign and multiplayer, I couldn’t seem to get enough of the Halo universe and its story. I happened to come across another way to expand my ever growing dorkyness that carried the Halo story much further. It was in a different format than a game though; I think people call it reading. I was browsing through the books at the local Barnes N Noble one day when I came across a Halo Novel. It was titled, “The Fall of Reach”. Not really sure what that meant, but the cover stated that it was the official prequel to the Halo game. With a little more research I found a second Halo Novel that was written about the game. I bought them both without question, read them, loved them and wanted more of them. I can remember going camping with my family and my buddy Bryan one time, and Bryan and I would be arguing over who gets to read the next chapter. We were addicted to the story, even more so than before, and instead of just talking about the game, we wound up talking about the story in general and what could have happened here, or why Spartans are like this or that. Two jocks that love football sitting around discussing something most people would fit into the Star Wars and Star Trek geekyness category wasn’t a normal sight. Why should we care though, we loved it, still do love it.

If you’re at the point where you think that this part of my epic blog should be about finished, well you’re wrong. I’ve only tapped into Halo one and it’s far from complete. Early 2004, which happened to be my senior year, Halo one was re-released on the PC. Meh, whatever. My original thought was, “why buy it on PC? I already own it for Xbox.” The answer came in the form of two simple words. Online multiplayer. Um, yes please. My Uncle had purchased the game and I would frequent his place, playing it online. But Bryan purchased this as well and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t at his house all the time taking turns with him playing the snot out of it. On the weekends we’d be up until like three in the morning just playing non-stop Halo like a couple of crack addicted retards. Before you get the wrong impression about how this story is going, we did do tons of other stuff besides play games. Hell we were involved with football, jobs, girlfriends, friends. Heck I remember one night after a football game we’d lost, Bryan and I got stupid drunk on vodka only to wake up late for practice on Saturday morning. Generally we’d only watch some film and lift weights, but the coach was a little mad about our loss the night before. We ran forever without a water break and spent another eternity pushing the lineman sled around the entire practice field. On top of all that, Bryan and I got extra laps to run because we were late. Bryan decided to go all out on our last lap and sprinted the whole way before I could even get to the second turn. Needless to say he threw up everything he’d consumed in the previous week, hell from where I saw, it looked like a year’s worth of vomit. The boy probably didn’t need to shit for a week after that. We all had a talk about coming off the sauce from the coach because we most likely wreaked of the nasty alcohol we made ourselves stupid with night before, and I’m sure the field smelled like it after Bryan painted it with previously consumed alcohol. Fortunately McDonalds dropped off like three boxes full of big macs. I think I ate like three of them, but it wasn’t enough to keep me out of bed all day. I actually don’t drink that much because of that whole situation, ug, my tummy feels sick just thinking about it.

So anyway, we would play the snot out to Halo PC at Bryan’s house, so much so that I had to wind up buying my own copy just so I didn’t have to take turns. I got pretty decent online but I quickly had come to the realization that even though I was rarely beat by my family and friends, people online were much better than I could hope to be. I didn’t fair too bad though, just not as godlike as I had originally thought. One day my Uncle had told me that there was a Halo tournament coming up for the PC version and that we should go to it. I’m not sure what the prize for winning it would've been, but I was ready to go test my skills out against the noobs that were dumb enough to test me. One problem though, he said I needed an alias, a gamertag, a different name to be called by. I wasn’t really sure what to choose and pondered over what I should call myself. Haloman? Halogod? Halodude? CodyHalo? All gay, but I give thanks to my Uncle for simply blurting it out, “How about Halotitan?” After my feeble brain needed explanation on what a Titan was, I decided that I loved it. That’s how my nickname originated a whopping seven years ago. Most people just call me Titan unless they know me in real life, then they just call me by the human name given to me after I was captured. We didn’t go to the tourney, so I’ll never know how famous I could’ve become.

Three years of Halo had passed us by, three years of gaming non-stop, reading the books, watching the machinima (online parodies made using games, most notably Red Vs Blue, see video for sample), and playing online. Finally, a bombshell was dropped on us; Halo 2 was in development and was due to come out in November. As a kid, did you get that excited feeling in your stomach the night before Christmas in anticipation of what Santa was going to leave under the tree? If so, that’s the feeling I got when I saw the E3 game play trailer (see video) that Bungie released. Could this be happening? We can finally have more of a game that we played non-stop almost since the day it was released? In the months that followed we kept a close eye on the progress of the game as Bungie creatively leaked small portions of info that would keep us intrigued and ancy as we waited the pending release. Finally the day had come for Halo 2 to hit shelves across America and along with so many people, we stood in line for a midnight release. First we stopped at CB&Potts to enjoy some tasty chicken wings and pool, and as the hour neared and the line grew, we ran across the way to take our spots. So many nerds and geeks like myself, Bryan, Cousin Brandon, and my Uncle, chanted Halo 2! Halo 2! One gamer joyfuly rang out, “GTA San Andreas is old news! Bring on Halo!” It was an exciting time that seemed to last forever. We made our way to the front as the people before us came out of the store showing off their copy of the game, no doubt heading to their house to partake in the continuation of Master Chief’s epic journey. Alongside the game I also bought a dorky Halo 2 t-shirt, one that I still wear today. Bryan came to my house after my copy was in our possession and the first thing we did was play the online multiplayer. Console gaming online was a pretty new feature to us and exciting none the less. I played the first few games as two in the morning inched closer to us. Bryan took over as I lay down on my bed to watch, but I knew little of how tired I actually was and woke up six hours later to Bryan still playing the game! I thought it was a tad silly that he didn’t buy the game himself, but we made a short trip to circuit city (RIP) so he could get a copy for himself before he went home to catch some Z's.




Halo 2’s greatest feature was in its multiplayer, a feature that I feel Bungie spent more time on. The story was good, but I suppose, and this goes for all things, that the sequel will never live up to the original. Part of the reason the campaign wasn’t as good is because of some of the glichy errors that weren’t fixed prior to the game releasing. This annoyed my Uncle so bad that he didn’t even care to play it (but we did, and on co-op our first time as well). Another reason the campaign didn’t live up to our expectations is because it was relatively short and it ended with the worst cliffhanger ever. I don’t think the ending was terrible because the story sucked, and in fact, whenever I see it, I still get goose bumps. It sucked because the story was great and suspenseful and it just ended abruptly making us want much, much more. Halo 2 was a great game, probably my favorite in the entire series, but I think it’s my favorite because of how amazing the multiplayer was (RIP). I spent more hours playing against people online than I ever did playing Halo one, period. It was because of the online play that our LAN parties began to die down considerably. We would rarely come together to own each other because it lacked the competition that the online portion gave us. When we did get together, we would still experience the same old natural fun, and we would often refer back to Halo one for some old school game play. One memorable moment in a Halo 2 LAN came when we played a community created custom game called Zombies. One person would start out as the zombie and was only allowed to use the sword, while everyone else could use their guns. If the zombie killed someone, the honor system came into check and the person would switch to the zombies team. We would have epic confrontations on an awesome map called Headlong and all survivors would stick together to wipe out any approaching bad guys. Cupid and my brother eventually dubbed this gametype “La Résistance”, a name that we still use to call it, even though it was dubbed "Infection" by Bungie.



Halo 2 kept us occupied for another three years as we waiting for the long overdue conclusion to the trilogy. I had joined the military since (as well as Bryan), and would only be able to receive updates on Halo 3 when my uncle mailed me articles about it. My TI called me a fat nerd when he saw what was being sent to me, but I didn’t care, he was a total douche bag anyway. In September of 2007, Halo 3 was finally released. I was now married with a kid on the way and lived in Mississippi, far away from the family that helped keep this game so fresh to me after all those years. Luckily for us, online co-op was an added feature. I again waited in line with one of my new friends from the dirty south and when I got home, I played the campaign online with Bryan and my Uncle until the game was beat. We stayed up all night “finishing the fight” and it's one of my favorite Halo memories. If it wasn’t for the online co-op, I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it as much. The story was much better than that of Halo 2, and close in comparison to Halo one’s story. Months after this game released I noticed a pattern, I started growing up a little bit (although my wife would disagree), and played much less Halo 3 than the other two. It was going out of style for me, and that’s hard because I’m so connected to the game. Two years later they released Halo 3 ODST, which was a sign that the series was devolving that much more. That game sucked so bad that I wasn’t sure I would buy another Halo game. I'm a nut for Halo though so I did buy the next game. It was a year later that Halo Reach came out. The game was changed completely. So much so that it didn’t feel like Halo anymore. I don’t even want to talk about it to be honest. The game was pretty good, but it was too big of a change to make me drool anymore.

Now what does Halo mean to me in my eyes of how games evolved? It’s simple; it’s the game series that opened my eyes to how well stories can be told in a way that makes me, the gamer, feel like I’m a part of the fictional world that was created. It’s the game that started me on a path to being a gamer because I feel a special connection with it. It opened my eyes to a different way to tell a story and get involved with its universe. I’ve had so many experiences with this game and it’s story, shared them with so many people, that it has become more than just a game, it’s become a time honored tradition, and no matter how many crappy Halo games they plan on releasing in the future, this Halo nut will continue to fork out money from his tiny paycheck to play them. Oh, and did I mention that I own and read all the other six books that were released over the years? Yeah, they rock man.

Hey, stay tuned for Part III, I’ll be talking about the games that I played alongside Halo that kept me intrigued with the different types of game play and unique story telling. I may also be talking about another Epic (clue) game that has further evolved the gaming industry and was the inspiration for this entire blog series. Thanks for hanging in there, see you next time.

This Gaming Life Part I: The start of something new.

This is the fourth time I’ve sat down to write my next blog entry and hopefully it will present itself with more luck than the previous three. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, but I hate everything I write lately. I think it may be because I’m trying way too hard to find something witty and meaningful to talk about when all I really need to do is speak from the heart about whatever happens to be on my mind (which I’ve done, this may be the lengthiest blog post I’ve orchestrated). Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the evolution that video games have experienced and how in depth they’ve become over the years. The thing that sticks out like a ginger at a rap concert for me is the story that a game is capable of telling. The evolution of gaming isn’t just noticeable through the story, but the game play, graphics, and ways to experience them as a social network as well. The story, however, is the icing on the cake for me because it satisfies my insatiable love for a good adventure. It’s not hard for me to tell if a game has a crappy story because I’ve come to consider myself to be a decent critic when it comes to the art of storytelling. I love a good story no matter what format it’s being told in, whether it’s movies, books, or games. The most popular of the three seems to be games, for me anyway. It’s easy to sit down and view an entire story via movies, or spend a few days (or years in my case), reading the story, but games have the most unique ways of telling a one. Unlike books and movies, I actually get to live and play through the story rather than watching or imagining it. It’s amazing to be able to explore an imaginary world and experience firsthand how the mystery unfolds before my eyes, almost as if I were protagonist himself (or herself).


With the unconditional help of technology, consoles have far surpassed the gaming capacity of its predecessors. With bigger and better consoles on the market, games have been able to evolve from three hours of simplistic button mashing in a game that lacks a story, to games that require more hand eye coordination and a story with complex plots. I’m not saying that old school games are dumb, they just don’t necessarily require a whole lot of skill and there’s no emotional connection to them. The evolution of games has gotten me thinking about how popular it has become over the years, and how the culture of gaming has changed through my own personal experience. I’ve played hundreds of games and I’ve enjoyed most of them, but it took me awhile to realize what I liked about the games I was playing. At first it was mindless fun being able to control something on the television. Then I stumbled across and fell in love with the multiplayer aspect of games because being able to own (also known as pwn) your family and friends in a virtual world really fueled my competitive spirit for a long time. Heck, I still enjoy multiplayer games even if that’s all the game has to offer. But it wasn’t until my second year in high school that I realized what has always kept me hooked to gaming. It’s a recipe of mindless fun, multiplayer, and the most important ingredient, the story. This epiphany came to me when I was introduced to a special game that will forever be a favorite in my eyes as long as I breathe the stale and polluted air on this earth.

Thinking back on the old school games I use to play, I’ve come to the conclusion on how I think they were most likely developed. The idea to create something fun to play was put into action and the story was built around that. This stuff was revolutionary back then, I mean look at Mario for example. Mario was fun because of its simplicity and quirky game play which allowed the gamer to control an Italian plumber wearing a pair of hideous, yet legendary red overalls, throughout his own two dimensional world. The player needed to maneuver Mario through a series of obstacles that were made up of enemies, sink holes, and random blocks just levitating in the middle of nowhere. Mario was also able to interact with his environment, such as jumping on the heads of his enemies or using his fist of steel to punch coins, flowers, mushrooms, and stars out of the levitating blocks. As random as they are, they all granted some sort of reward. Earn enough coins and you’ll be rewarded an extra life. Run into the moving mushrooms so mini Mario can become a man. Jump on the flower so it can change the color of Mario’s overalls to white and provide him with flaming boogies used to off baddies (looks like he’s picking his nose to me). Oh, and my favorite was the star because it was like the Grim Reaper harvested his death touch into it, which allowed whoever possessed it momentary badassery upon whoever he made contact with. Sometimes I wish I had that in real life. In all, this game was colorful, the bad guys weren’t scary (unless you find walking mushrooms and turtles scary), and best of all, it was very approachable. Looking back on it now I think to myself, hey that game was fun, heck it probably still is, but did I really care about the story? Was the story a suspenseful, on the edge of my seat, nail biter? No, I’m maneuvering my way through a series of interactive puzzles so I can defeat King Koopa (or is it Bowser), to save Princess Peach. And all that ungrateful stuck up bitch offers as a reward for risking your fictional life is, “thank you”, followed by a sign that says your quest is complete. She could have at least kissed the poor guy before running out and getting kidnapped again in the sequel. I’ve just gotten too use to games having compelling stories that make me feel like I’m a part of something making it so I could never go back and have the same kind of enjoyment with those old games. Actually that’s wrong, I think Mario is probably just as much a blast as I remembered it because it was surrounded by the mindless fun games use to revolve around.

I probably would have played more games as a child, but instead we had this other crazy fun thing to do called playing outside. I suppose eighteen years ago it was okay for people to let their kids roam the neighborhood without worrying about which one of their twenty registered sex offender neighbors might invite their kids in for ice cream and sex. Sadly that’s the truth. I’ll let my daughter outside, but she’ll never be allowed to leave the yard where I couldn’t see her. One Christmas my parents bought us a Super Nintendo, which made me realize that playing outside was indeed a requirement. I mean, it was nice to have a console around the house because I could play a game whenever I wanted, but that turned into whenever Mom and Dad allowed me in the house. Seriously, I think they would kick us out and lock the door until the street lights came on. If I was thirsty I had to drink from the hose because there was most likely no way I was getting inside. Perhaps part of that is a fabrication generated by my forgetful memory, but back then it didn’t matter because that’s typically what kids did in the days where technology was as adolescent as we were. I have some pretty vivid memories with that console though, like this one time my Dad let me stay home from school because I was “sick” only to send me in an hour later because I wouldn’t get off of Street Fighter II. I could have played that off a lot better now that I think about it, but I didn’t know how to play my parents at the retarded age of 10. Either I was really dumb then or my brain was intellectually celibate, or maybe I was just a normal ignorant kid who wouldn’t know how to play hookie until he was older. Street Fighter II was easily my most played game on the Super Nintendo and it was one of the mindless fun games that let me punch my brother in a virtual world without getting in trouble. It was one of those games that tried to force a story down your throat when it really wasn’t needed. Each character had their own unique ending, but they were pretty bad because some endings would clash together, which made them contradict whatever the heck was going on. So Chun Li did kill that guy? Because in his ending Guile spends an eternity flying around the galaxy for fun, picking up hot alien babes at every planet. Sure I’m making that up, but it’s not too farfetched from the typical ending in any fighting game I’ve ever played. Mortal Kombat is my favorite in the genre, but I do have to say that every time I viewed a characters ending, it felt like I was on some sort of roller coaster ride through soap operaville. I never really knew who was dead, good, alive, pregnant, whatever. Developers of fighting games don’t realize that we’re attracted to the flashy characters and their amazing moves. That’s all we needed to keep us entertained. You spend two minutes on a single match and then rinse and repeat, that’s what the game is, so why force a story in? That would be like a football game adding an irrelevant campaign story to help water down its mediocre game play. Oh wait, that did happened and it sucked (Blitz the League).

After years of playing games that were just stupid fun, I reached a point where I fell in love with what games could give back to me. Perhaps I was always too young and ignorant to ever pay attention to the stories that any game attempted to share with me. The summer of 2001, my parents moved us to Cheyenne so we could be closer to my Mom’s side of the family. At first I suffered the typical trials and tribulations of moving from one High School to the next, but I found my place and made it nice and cozy for a long stay. Football season had come and gone too fast and I had made quite a few friends from it. But since I wasn’t really that active in the winter months, I’d become bored. I had started working at this store called “Mail Boxes Etc.”, which you may now know as, “UPS Store”, and with the bite size fragment of money that I made from there, I was able to purchase my own console. Sadly it was the original Playstation (I wanted the Playstaion 2), and the only game I owned was NFL Blitz. Believe it or not, smashing your foes into the ground and causing a fumble on almost every play actually does get boring after awhile. I suppose you could say anything gets boring after paying it too much attention. For example, Keanu Reeves got old after fifteen minutes into the Matrix. BAM! Take that you overpaid Barbie. Seriously, if that talentless, handsome bastard can act, then so can I, right? Anyway, the Playstation really started getting dull playing the same game, so I went out and bought Tony Hawk. That game got old faster than last months Ipod. Honestly, I just wasn’t interested enough to play the same boring thing over and over again. I don’t know how many times I can do aerials, grinds, and kick flips on the same map and still never have enough points to move onto the next hopeless skating wasteland. My time would have been better spent watching “Murder She Wrote,” than playing Tony Hawk, stuck on the same map for hours doing the same flips and tricks over and over and always expecting a better outcome. Didn’t Albert Einstein define insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,”? Correct me if I’m wrong about who quoted that, but my wife never fails to remind me of it whenever she see me playing a game where I’m doing the same exact thing over and over as I try to unlock whatever insane achievement I’m going for.

So during the holiday season, I’m at my Grandparent’s house chilling down stairs with my Uncle as he unravels the mystery that is his new console. “An Xbox?” He explained to me that it was a new console released by Microsoft and that he purchased a bundle that included the console, two controllers, and three games. Those games were Test Drive: Off Road, Amped, and Halo. I contemplated which game we should try first and decided that Amped would be a good choice. I only chose it because it looked like a Tony Hawk game on a snowboard. Even with my distaste for Tony Hawk and its redundant lameness, I still wanted to play a different game that resembled it. Surprisingly it was an enormous amount of fun. I felt like the king of the world boarding down this unique mountain and performing impossible tricks on its pimped out trail. With giant hills, half pipes, and things to grind on so easily accessible, it made Tony Hawk look as appealing as Barbie’s Horse Adventures. Amped was a lot more generic and straight forward, which entertained me the most because in a skateboarding game I had to go around finding things to do tricks on rather than having a plethora of items to choose from on my run down the hill. Sure, it still had crazy objects like Tony Hawk did, but it also had smack talking snowmen that were begging to be found and wiped out. Despite being a lot more fun than Tony Hawk will ever be, I still grew bored of it. We all had to take turns because there really wasn’t a decent multiplayer packaged with the game, so we moved onto the next best thing.

Test Drive: Off Road looked to me like the typical racing game until James Hetfield melted my face as he screamed, “Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire.” The soundtrack to this game alone was inspirational and we couldn’t wait to jump in. The game was pretty good for awhile, but there’s only so much you can do in racing games that it becomes mind numbing over time. I think it may have been Christmas break when my brother and two cousins were hanging down stairs at my Grandparents house in the tiny bedroom my Uncle utilized as his game room. There really wasn’t much space in there, but we did manage to all fit in. We were tired of the same old games when we decided that we’d give the third game in my Uncle’s Xbox collection a try. I looked at the cover and immediately thought that this game was made for the same dorky people who worship Star Trek. Pointing his weapon at whomever happened to be looking at it, was a man wearing a suite of green armor, whilst in the background some dudes in jeep were shooting at the aircraft that was chasing them. Seriously, the cover was the reason we hadn’t tried the game earlier since we thought it looked gay, but out of boredom of the other games, we popped it in anyway.

Stay tuned for part II of the most amazing blog post ever.

Music Memories

Sometimes getting through the day can be pretty tough for me because I have unnecessary stress thrown my way at work by people whom I find to be incompetent with their time management and leadership skills, which I suppose I don’t really need to talk about, but it does cause me to have ridiculous headaches and fatigue that I wouldn’t normally possess. Exercise, sex, smoking, drinking, and bad eating habits are some things that people use to relieve stress, but the one thing that I do to relieve my stress is to get lost in my music. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine going one day without my tunes because I think it would drive me utterly insane.

I spend a lot of time thinking about music and how great and diverse it really is and how it’s one thing that I have that no one can take away from me. I can run to music for anything, especially since I’m irascible and I can use calming music to work its majestic melodies to calm me down. Over time I’ve realized how music not only helps me set the mood for whatever setting I happen to be in, but it also triggers memories hidden beneath the endless maze and madness that is my mind. Wow, that’s funny that I mention that it triggers memories because for me it not only triggers a memory, but it gives me some sort of out of body experience thinking back on that memory as if I were standing at a distance watching the memory replay with such vivid detail that’s it’s almost scary. I have heard people say that it’s the sense of smell that can trigger a memory better than anything else, and although I agree, I’d say sound takes that number one spot in my book. I suppose I can list one memory that I always go back to when I hear the song Digital bath by the Deftones (great group to listen to).

It was nearing summer of my ninth grade year; I want to say it was 2000; my buddy Tyler and I use to obsess over music and what each other liked. Every day it was something new, if it wasn’t us bobbing our heads to Nelly, it was taking turns singing as Fred Durst and Jonathan Davis in the “All in the Family” song. We also spent a lot of time getting each other to listen to this new group we found and it became somewhat of an addiction. Maybe music was our addiction, but it beats having us do drugs right? Heck we could have been some weirdo kids that walked to the gas station in the rain with a paper bag on our heads so we didn’t get our perfect hair wet on an evening that just so happened to be prom night and the high school kids all drove by laughing at us. Okay so that did happen, only it was just me and Tyler was so irate walking next to a moron wearing a paper sack on his head like he was headed to a Detroit Lions game. He messed up my hair pretty good as a direct result of his distaste.

Crazy hair phases aside, I can remember always having something to listen to when I was with Tyler that would make us both just get lost in the endless rhythms and lyrics of whatever it was we were listening to. I remember this one time, and this story is off topic, that I had crashed at Tyler’s house on a Saturday night, meaning that we’d be woken up early to go to church. We were idiots who thought it would be cool to obliterate a twelve pack of Mountain Dew in one night, needless to say, we didn’t get much sleep. Church was a destination that we despised going to because it hindered us from getting the extra hours of sleep that we were hoping to accumulate. Around eight in the morning Tyler’s dad bursts through the door to see that Tyler and had fallen asleep in the same bed to which he utters one of his cliché lines.

“Wake up faggots, it’s time for church.”

Naturally, instead of waking right up, we just ignored the call of duty and fell back asleep. Not even ten minutes later his dad comes back down with the radio, plugs it in and blasts the only Native American radio station I’ve ever heard. The repeated “thud thud thud” of the drum accompanied by the intangible chants of the vocalists was one of the most vexing things to have roaring through your ears with only four hours of sleep in the bank. It’s actually pretty funny because this music, annoying as it is, would remind me of when I was in elementary school and we’d attend an assembly that would feature members of a local tribe who would come out all dressed up in their brown deer skin robes with colored feathers in their hair to perform the song and dance live. They were pretty neat to watch because this person’s heritage and history was being performed through music as they danced around in a circle as if they were performing some rain calling ritual.

Anyway, back to my original memory. One day I was hanging out with Tyler after he had purchased the new Deftones album that had the song, “Changes” on it. Like usual, we listened to the album the whole time I was there, especially that one song which got stuck in my head. My new obsession with this new band and their crazy sound made it so I wound up purchasing the album myself. Summer had finally come and it was always a joyous time because being a young noob with no responsibilities whatsoever, I got to sleep in every day. Around eight or so in the morning, the sun would start shining through my wooden blinds and wake me up long enough to hit the play button on my stereo, roll over, scratch my ass, and fall back asleep. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I always seemed to wake up to the soft cadence of the drums in the song “Digital Bath”, and I would lie there, face down in my pillow, vibing to the soft music as it flowed through my veins until it was over. From there, sleep would pull me back into my subliminal teenage dream world.

I tend to reminisce everyday when I hear a song that was powerful enough to trigger a certain memory. Heck the song doesn’t need to be powerful enough to trigger a memory; it just had to occur at a memorable moment in my life. Perhaps one of my favorite memories is triggered by the song “Smells like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. Oh boy, brace yourself for another story.

I’m not too certain of the facts, but Nirvana made it huge with their greatest hit, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991. It wasn’t until my junior year of high school when I really became a fan of them, well considering it was the first time I heard of them. Actually, it’s kind of funny, I thought that it was the first time I heard of them but after watching the music video for Smells like Teen Spirit, I realized that I had seen it before when I was much younger. I had seen the video on MTV, that was when they still played music videos. I don’t think I could have ever forgotten the way that weird janitor was hanging onto his mop, rocking back and forth like he was having some sort of weird seizure in slow motion. Heck I can still remember the news when Kurt Cobain died, of course I don’t remember understanding what was going on because I had no idea who he was at that time.



Anyway, it was football season of my junior year and I had purchased the album, “Nevermind”, which had “Smells like Teen Spirit” on it. This song quickly became my favorite because I just loved the way the guitar sounded and how it blended so well with Kurt Cobain’s raspy yet soothing voice. Typically, before a game started and during the road trips to get to the football game, I would listen to the song over and over. No seriously, I played that song on one of those old CD player contraptions that had an option to repeat the same song. I literally pressed repeat and listened to that same song time after time after time and not once, not even to this day, have I gotten tired of the song. Holy cow, does anyone here remember CD players? How about tape players? I remember my old walkman, that thing went with me everywhere. It was a bulky yellow hunk of garbage that wouldn’t fit into any of my jeans pockets without making it look like I stuffed a sock in my underwear. It was also pretty annoying because if you came across a song you didn’t feel like listening to, you would have fast forward the tape and hope to land on the right spot. The rewind button was there in case you went too far and more often than not you’d catch the ending of the song prior to the one you want. If you didn’t have your cassette tape memorized, you sucked at life. Could you imagine doing that to listen to the same song multiple times in a row? Oh and how about my favorite, when your batteries began to die on your tape player, the songs would get all slow motion sounding like some crazy action movie where the actor screams, “Nooooooooo,” as he jumps on the active grenade. Is there a movie out there where that happens? Eh, who cares? It’s a great memory for music right there, but it makes me want to talk about CD players and how crappy those were too. I had the largest carrier to transport thirty plus CDs with me wherever I went and I couldn’t fit all of my music in there. On top of that, the CD player itself was so bulky that it was such a burden to carry around, and lord forbid you’re on the road and you hit a bump that pops the CD out of place causing it to get scratched so bad it was no longer able to be used. Fortunately technology is in our side and MP3 players have saved the day.

So I know I got way off track there, but I’m back now. Try to imagine what I was doing by listening to this song on repeat, close your eyes and picture this. Just kidding, keep reading. I’m sitting on an overcrowded cheese box (yellow school bus), that smelled like teenage funk, next to my buddy Bryan. It’s not too comfortable to sit in this beat up hunk of metal for five hours one way (we went both ways in one day) and trying to find a decent position to sleep. It was hard enough due to my claustrophobia yet alone listening to all the laughter and chattering from the rest of the team making piss and fart jokes, and the stench of people actually farting. I would, however, manage to fall asleep while lying in a position that only a pretzel would find cozy and I used “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to drown out all the ambient noise on the bus. Oddly enough, this was the best sleep I’ve ever had.

Now that I’m talking about this one particular bus ride that happened to be taking us to Riverton which is across the state, I do have a story about our ride home. Now typically on our bus rides people would bring their own snacks to munch on while we sat in boredom for what seemed like an eternity. I liked bringing beef jerky and Gatorade while my buddy Harry would bring that and much more. On this trip Harry decided to bring parmesan Cheez-itz, a tasty treat that we snacked on the entire trip there. After we finished the game (we won), the coaches ordered us a bunch of disgusting sandwiches from Arby’s. I honestly can’t stand that place but I had to eat it because I was pretty hungry and five hours on an empty stomach while being smooshed onto our tiny bus would have made The English Patient a bearable movie to watch in comparison, and that flick was torture. Shorty after the bus took off on its way home one of the seniors went flying from his seat to the trash can like a monkey from tree to tree, and threw up all that he had consumed that day causing a mild chain reaction of people hurling. Ironically, someone must have had some of Harry’s parmesan Cheez-itz because that’s all we could smell for the entire five hour trip home, only they smelled like someone threw them up. Gross. I stay far away from that flavor of cheese its now because of how terrible that stench was. When we got home well after one AM, I ran to my car to find that someone smashed my driver’s side window out and stole my history book. What kind of person breaks into someone’s car to steal their history book when I had a nice stereo and hundreds of CDs sitting in plain view? That’s a mystery that has gone unanswered but I’m betting it was the seizure janitor.

In all honesty there is nothing like music, nothing that can even compare to its power to set the mood for people. Listen to hard rock when you’re mad or working out, romantic music when you’re trying to get your girly friend into the mood, alternative rock when you want to mellow out, and even grunge when you want to hear art turned music. I don’t just love music because it brings back memories or because the way it can match my mood, but I love the lyricism as well. I see music as being poetry in motion for the most part and it really takes every component to make it so. Powerful lyrics pouring out the lead singer’s mouth accompanied by the talented guitar and bass players and drum beats is still something I can’t get enough of. Listening to Pink Floyd, Breaking Benjamin, The Eagles, and many more (I could go on forever), is my favorite thing to do because I don’t just hear it, I feel it (that’s what she said).

I hope you made it to the end. I’m so tired tonight and I could write so much more. I suppose I’ll have to save it for another post. I want you to stay tuned because I’m currently writing a short story that I think you may like. I’ll be posting it chapter by chapter so please read it and tell me what you think. Crap, now I have to edit this so it doesn’t look like some eight year old wrote it.