Jesus, there's another one? 

Fuck it, I'm not joining that one too.

Actually there was also B.net elitists.

Kinda wanted to take one last look at my first profile before the nuke, but I never got around to it. Too bad.

You're just the master of procrastination aren't you. Memory's dim on that one, but how the hell'd you get into Halo in the first place? Or did you just stumble onto the bungie forums and just make a home there?

Quote from: E on March 05, 2021, 11:01:37 PM

Quote from: Verbatim on February 13, 2021, 03:03:07 AM

Kinda wanted to take one last look at my first profile before the nuke, but I never got around to it. Too bad.

You're just the master of procrastination aren't you. Memory's dim on that one, but how the hell'd you get into Halo in the first place? Or did you just stumble onto the bungie forums and just make a home there?

More of the latter, yeah. Never cared for Halo, but I had a few friends who did. One of them told me all about B.net—how cool the community was, despite being a Halo forum, and how the Flood was the most popular board anyway, so if I were to join, I would never actually have to talk about Halo.

Much like a hipster atheist choosing to wear a cross necklace "because it's ironic," I signed up because the idea of posting on a website centered around something that I don't like was incredibly amusing to me—and as my friend indicated, the off-topic board was where most of the activity was anyway, so I spent most of my time there (until I found private groups).

My one regret—just kidding, I have a lot—but a smaller one that I've never really disclosed before, is that I never really had a turnaround on Halo. It'll never not be that one stupid shooter series that my dumb friends forced me to play with them as a kid, after they "grew out of" playing Nintendo games (even though they were still only 12).

I've since played through Halo: CE's campaign on my own in the interest of having a more adult perspective on it, and I wasn't terribly impressed. The music was good, and it felt great to play and shoot stuff, but the guns themselves were hella boring, and the combat was repetitive and monotonous—I also didn't find myself particularly invested in the story, either. It's just one of those games that doesn't really do a whole lot for me, which is a shame, given how special and resonant the series was to pretty much everybody here.

Then again, even if I did turn around on it, it would be difficult to dissociate it from those bad childhood memories. That built up a lot of resentment within me, not only for Halo, but for the FPS genre itself—though at the very least, that sweeping hatred has pretty much fallen by the wayside at this point. I've had a lot of time to try out a lot of different shooters since then, and while it's still not my favorite genre, I'm at least capable of naming a decent number of shooters that I've enjoyed quite thoroughly, such as Half-Life and Borderlands.

That said, I guess I would have to concede that Halo probably opened the floodgates in terms of how modern shooters are designed (for better or for worse), so I guess you could say that I have an appreciation for it on that angle.

Been thinking on that for a bit because it's an interesting insight and it's not one really talked about. I noticed something a couple years ago. There's a buddy I vaguely keep in touch with out here. I probably see him once a year round christmas time when he comes back into the area to visit family. Knew him as a kid. He's got aspergers.

So he and I sit down and play a few rounds of whatever he's hauled along with him. He loves the hell out of anything nintendo. And in a way I honestly kind of envy him a bit. Aspergers keeps his mind locked into a sort of state of semi-innocence and naiveness. To him most of the stuff he played as a kid is stuff he can still play today with sort of the same enthusiasm, whereas I cannot.

This is going to be a longer post because your thoughts touch on a tangent I've had rolling around in my mind for a while, and it's scattered and incohesive to put together. This little realization about my friend also branched out to other things gaming related. Sometimes I listen to community discussions about stuff too, and I often see people talking about newer Halo games and talking about what they'd like to see from the old games make a comeback.

And I really can't help but ask, do these people not see the disconnect in how their mind's changed from when they were younger up to now?

I loved the hell out of Halo when I was a kid, but that was also because it was really the first video game I ever picked up. Being the very first one that I got into, of course it just pulled me right in because everything was so fucking amazing to me. And as the years went along and the campaigns lost some of the magic touch they had, where I could no longer reply them on repeat and just dick around, what replaced that particular magic was multiplayer and the community. The friends made through those connections. Over the years that magic is of course gone as well.

So in the light of that enthusiasm being gone, I often wander back through older games and experiences of mine and ask myself if it was just a combo of my youth, inexperience, and the fact that I wasn't a dead husk yet, or if it was the game itself that was genuinely decent.

What baffles me Verb, is how I see so many communities continue to hold on to this kind of enthusiasm and sense of wonder about their favorites, and not just Halo in particular. In the same way my buddy with aspergers hasn't lost that particular love of the very same old games he and I used to play together.

I guess what part of that tangent touches on is your initial view of Halo as a child. It certainly wasn't likely your first game, so it didn't have the pull with you like it had with so many others, probably primarily because it wasn't a first experience for you.

But that's enough of facing up to emptiness for me today. Catcha round Verb.

I got around to taking a couple screenshots of my old stats page before the wipe. Seeing the recent games section and remembering the group of friends I was playing with back when I was 14-15 got the nostalgia flowing a little. We couldn't quite get the steaktacular medal against bungie in that bungie vs. the world event. I dunno how rare an achievement this was but in Reach I got 2 unfrig medals in campaign, on Pillar of Autumn. I've heard of people doing it on other levels but at the time I was convinced I was the only person in the world who had done it on that map.