Video: Smooth Criminal - Stylized Gameply

This is a short video of gameplay done in Rumble Training. I tweaked some stuff in Windows Movie Maker, hence the "Stylized" in the title. It was recorded during a break from shooting footage for a montage my friend Matt and I want to put together.

Recap of Halo 2 Mischief for April 22nd

My Halo playing today, all in BTB Slayer, started off disappointing. Stupid teammates, evil spawning, and God's general disliking of me were all apparent in my early games. During the first 6 games, my team emerged victorious only once. Then everything turned around. My friend TJ joined me, and he's good, which meant one less stupid teammate. My team only lost once for the rest of the night. And I managed to rack up 3 Rampages and 14 double kills. One of those rampages was ended by a disgruntled teammate. Who knows how much farther I could have gone without dying? Probably not far, but still, he betrayed me! That bastard!

Player Summary:



Medals:



All screenshots in this post come from the excellent Halo 2 stats keeping program Query Spree.

Gulch Wars Rant

Whenever I'm online in Halo 2, I can usually be found in Team Hardcore or Big Team Battle. Specifically, I've been haunting BTB Slayer as of late. I love big encounters and since it's unranked I can have my roomates play with me. But there's one gametype in the playlist that I abhor. And that's Gulch Wars on Coagulation. Some fun can usually be had with it on Containment, but it's just plain broken on Coagulation. This is because this gametype happens to combine together several flaws in Halo 2 into one terrible time with a controller. Two major flaws in Halo 2 multiplayer, in my opinion, are the overpowered nature of the tanks, and a broken player spawning system.

The Scorpion Tank has been significantly overpowered in Halo 2. On the surface it appears that there are more checks on the power of the tank than there were in Halo 1. In the first game, you could kill a tank by rocket launcher, by grenades, or by sniping the driver. All of those checks are still in Halo 2, with the rocket launcher now being more formidable due to the lock on feature, as is a new one in vehicle jacking. But in Halo 2, the tank is more maneuverable and has a cover over the cockpit. And vehicle jacking is near useless for the tank on a wide open map like Coagulation. Any driver worth a damn will be able to kill an person or vehicle that gets anywhere close. This also rules out grenades, as the Chief's new Mjolnir Mark VI armor apparently weighs down his arm much more than the armor from Halo 1. In other words, the Chief now throws like a nancy boy. That leaves sniper and rocket fire. But due to that cover on the cockpit, you can't snipe the driver out until it's been blown off. And the tank must take a very large amount of damage before that happens. The tank basically has to have been on the brink of death at some point. And as I said before, any tank pilot worth his salt won't let that happen. That leaves the rockets. With their new lock-on, they are an even bigger threat before. They're now idiot proof (which I dislike, but that's a conversation for another time). The problem is in their spawn locations. The tanks have very easy access to all three of them on Coagulation. On Containment there are 4 rocket launchers, and 2 of them are in the back of the bases, protected from tank fire. You have to get lucky and catch the tank not looking to grab them on Coagulation. Now you may be thinking, "But Andrew, you ignorant slut, there are 2 tanks on the map! That keeps balance!." Au contraire, my little smarty pants friend. One tank is inevitably destroyed by the other within the first minute of the game. The surviving tank pilot, if he's anywhere near competent, then keeps an eye on the other tank spawn and destroys is as soon as it reappears. Speaking of spawning...

The other flaw that makes this hell on-an-S-controller is the player spawn system. Instead of spawning each team at their respective bases, like it should, it randomly spreads everyone out. This sometimes means one team controls both tanks from the outset. If both teams spawned at their bases, then each team would have control of a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher and would therefore be essentially equal. But that doesn't happen. One team almost always ends up with an overabundance of power weapons, which throws the entire games out of whack. The game is essentially over before a single shot has been fired. A final sore point of mine regarding spawning is respawning when one or both tanks are owned by one team and are patrolling the bases. Sometimes in the this situation, which, to be truthful, is quite rare, Halo 2 decides that the players from the other team should all be spawned at one base, right in front of the tank. This makes for an easy multi kill for all but the most inept tank drivers.

Video: Regret Legendary Coop Speedrun

My friend TJ and I are decent at Halo 2. We can hold our own online and we can do Cairo Station on Legendary without any problems. But I'll be damned if the level Regret didn't own us somethin fierce. The last room is just unfair. Lucky for us, no one else has submitted a run of this level. So technically we have the world record shortest time. Hooray for us, I think. Anyway, if you're interested, here's the run:

http://files.filefront.com/regret_leg_coop_56_50_OozJavi/;7199979;/fileinfo.html

It's a streaming video with a link to download it. But's a biiiiiiig file. Cause it took a long time.

Video: "Sneak Peek" at An Upcoming Project

This is a sneak peek at a video that is now over a year in the making. And that is from shear laziness. This is a clip from it. I can't tell you what the project is, but I can tell you that it is not all Halo Mario.

Video: Drunken Driving with ExquisiteMidget

This video has a lot of history for us. The test subject and the man behind the project (Will) started the intoxication process unbeknownst to TJ and I. He ended up being too enthusiastic for the project and was much to drunk to actually play the game. So we tried again at a later date. The various warnings in the video are more an inside joke than actual warnings. But we did get a funny story and a moderately funny video out of it.

Video: Up Close And Personal With ExquisiteMidget

We decided to tap a tried and true Halo video staple for our second video. The montage. But we weren't good enough to make a bad@$$ one, at least in the time frame we wanted (i.e. not forever). Besides, there are a lot of those. So we decided to try something different. We decided to go into several games and not use any weapons other that our hands and our grenades. We didn't use our guns at all. And we didn't lose for a period of 9 games. Including a CTF game on Relic. How we managed that, I'll never know. This montage was the result.

Video: Introducing ExquisiteMidget

This is a video my friends TJ, Will, and I made just to test out our ability to actually make a Halo video. We learned that TJ has the attention span of an adolescent gnat and that we didn't know what the hell we were doing. This took us at least twice as long as it should have. Still, it didn't come out too shabby. It could have been a lot worse as a first effort. Enjoy!

ExquisiteMidget: Intro and Such

This is a blog I'm going to keep to chronicle my (and my friends') exploits in the Halo video games. We play to have fun, not to be uber l33t bad@$$es with mad high ranks yo. None of us are Halo 2 converts. We've all been playing since Halo 1. As a matter of fact Halo 1 on a dorm LAN is how I met my current roomates and Halo co-conspirators. I have a video capture card that I use to record our Halo games sometimes. I'll be posting some of the videos we've made. We also plan on making more. Hopefully some from the Halo 3 beta as well. I was lucky enough to have my name pulled from the hat for Phase One. No extra Halo playing, nor any money sunk into Crackdown for me. The name of the blog is from the name of our Halo 2 clan. Which has kind of gone to hell. It's currently me, 2 guys I've never met before, and my friend TJ's mysteriously still active account. The one he canceled months ago. Hopefully we'll be reforming for Halo 3, though I'm the only one with a 360 right now, which could put a kink in that. If I can remember to, I'll be putting the picture of the battle rifle up there next to every post where I'm ranting and not posting a video. You know, like this one. I think I've blabbered enough, so I'll end on this: It doesn't matter if you win or lose, as long as you yell the last racial slur.