Many of the usual Bungie Humpday participants were busy working late last night, as we’re really starting to buckle down lately. Because of this, we couldn’t plan anything formal for the Humpday. Frankie and Staten said that they might show up around 7 o’clock for a custom game of some sort. Unfortunately, they were too busy sipping mocha chai lattes while discussing anapestic tetrameter, because that’s what writers do . So instead of having no Humpday at all, or making one up, I simply went into Rumble Pit sans those two jerks (writers also inexplicably substitute French for perfectly good English).
Bungie fields an army of one.
The internet fields a legion of jerks. Actually everyone I played was rather nice.
Game 1: Rumble Slayer
High Ground, normal weapons
Game Duration: 7:00
General Tone of Game: Jerkish
Instead of looking at my own saved films for this write-up, I only looked at the saved films of my opponents. It’s always interesting to see your play style from someone else’s vantage point. It’s also cool to see what other people are looking at and how they react to certain situations. Plus, I forgot to leave my box on to upload mine.
This game started off with one player jumping out to a 6-1 lead over the rest of us. It was due entirely to his reliance on the sword, as the film revealed. It shouldn’t be as easy to do that in H3, but this player still found a way to thrive by playing smart with it. He got the other two players in the game a few times each and even caught me being a spaz and charging a sword-carrier with anything but a shotgun.
After respawning I went right back to the area that he killed me in, peppered him with the AR and then charged in to melee him. Still not the best tactic, but infinitely more satisfying than the safer route. Humping ensued. At that point the game evened out and I used the shotty/assault rifle combo to get a couple of sprees.
Flying around and viewing other players and their styles, I noticed that there was one who spent about half of the game crouched. He was basically a stealth Spartan the whole match, he stopped a couple of sprees of mine as I walked by him and his sneaky shotgun. Unfortunately for him, the game doesn’t award you based on the amount of frustration your kills inflict upon opponents.
Bungie wins with 15.
Game 2: Rumble Slayer
Snowbound, shotties and snipers
Game Duration: 7:00
General Tone of Game: Uhoh
Sniping is going to take a bit of getting used to for folks transition from H2 to H3. I’ve been playing more H2 than H3 recently and it showed in this game. Right now, there’s less magnetism, so getting the reticle on the head is more difficult. This could change of course, but folks seem to like it right now. Relying more heavily on the shotgun than I would normally, I set about what turned into a 1v1 match. One guy quit, one was idle and the other went 2-11.
If you play smart with the shotgun in Halo 2 and wait until people get in close enough for a one-hit kill with the shotty, that could end up biting you in the ass with H3. A combination of factors makes it a very risky strategy.
The match was very slow, I stayed in the rocks behind high base for much of the match, watching the open areas of the map while letting the rocks protect me from being flanked. The only other player who wasn’t idle or sucky was doing a pretty good job of keeping out of sight and only popping out long enough to score a kill.
Ultimately, my aggressive style paid off, as I moved around enough to find more targets than he did.
Bungie wins with 17.
Game 3: Rumble Slayer
Snowbound, normal weapons
Game Duration: 6:17
General Tone of Game: Sticky
A publicity-shy Bungie employee stepped in for me on this one. Mostly because he/she/it is actually pretty damn good at the game. The employee also has a pretty similar skill set as mine, even though they go about it differently. Specifically, the tester is pretty awesome at sticking people... with spike grenades. That’s a skill most are yet to master. At this stage of development, the flight path and speed are slightly different from that of the plasma grenade, different enough so that if you’re good with stickies the skill will not be immediately transferable to spike grenades.
The anonymous employee came out of the gate strong and never looked back, scoring both highest kills and least deaths. When it comes to standard slayer games on Snowbound, a defining strategy is yet to emerge. Thus far, tooling around with the AR and perhaps a Carbine or Needler seems to work pretty well. I always jump atop the nearest base, grab the stickies and the Carbine, a habit which the tester shares. I wouldn’t classify scavenging as a strategy, per se, but it does work. Since Snowbound is a pretty small map, it’s easy to walk up to a skirmish and steal an easy kill, if not more.
What has emerged, however, is a bunch of questionable Snowbound strategies. Grabbing the sniper and then standing still, right on top of its spawn to do your sniping... not so bright. Getting in the Ghost and charging straight atop one of the bases can definitely work and often results in some spectacular kills, but most of the time it just ends in a pretty blue explosion and a sticky medal for somebody. Also, throwing a plasma grenade into one of the shield doors and then running through it doesn’t work quite as well it does with the spike grenade, namely the fact that a plasma grenade bounces off the shield door and sticks to you, instead of the door.
Bungie wins with 25.