This week saw the addition of Big Team Slayer to the beta, and suddenly my k/d is plummeting. I'm a fine hand at any sort of objective-based game, but once it comes down to team murder, I just stink. And that hurts. Check my Bungie profile if you don't believe me. At this point, I'm still trying to cowboy up and improve my skills rather than just vulture invisibly around the fringes (Scooter), but I doubt I'm going to hit the heights that Gabe has managed in the last few weeks. That jerk.
There's No Where To Go But Up
One of the things I'm most tired of, though, is people complaining about the Spartan Laser. People are actually complaining that it should charge for a shot faster. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you proof that we live in a lost and forlorn age: people think the Spartan Laser isn't powerful enough. You know what isn't powerful enough? The Brute Shot. It apparently now fires some sort of delicious caramel, not lethal explosives. It could be argued that my shooting isn't exceptionally accurate, but my fallen enemies are exceptionally delicious when coated by that thing.
I'm hoping to see some substantial additions in the final nine days of Halo 3's beta, since we saw a nice change up to available game modes. Mostly, though, I'd like to see some more control over parties, as well as more game modes that support larger party sizes. Ah well, with nine more days to go, I'm sure I can get my Mozambique drill down.
Gabe Graziani, Associate Console Editor, 0.8828: Admittedly, I think Patrick's (and my) desire for better party control comes from being unable to set up all-GameSpy teams in 'Spy-Hunter. Still, I haven't had the audacity to participate in these so-called "custom" games that a few of our readers have had the polite grace to invite me to. It's not that I don't want to get booted for cheating or exploiting, I just would prefer to play the parts Bungie has deemed ready enough for the beta. It reminds me of when I participated in the World of Warcraft beta and eventually stopped playing in favor of waiting until it was done so as not to spoil my play experience.
That said, I certainly have not been one to shy away from the addition of the Banshee to the Valhalla map. Simply put, that awesome aerial death-dealer is the only reason that my kill/death ratio remains largely intact. Once you're in the sky with that bad boy, no one can touch you and you're free to dispense dismemberment to your heart's content (and believe me, my heart is not contented easily).
Maybe I'm being a little too generous with the invulnerability of the Banshee, though, because I was grounded on a couple of occasions by two distinctly different things: the Missile Pod and Sky-jacking. Surprisingly enough, sky-jacking is a lot easier than it sounds, considering your Earth-bound Spartan lacks any way to actually get up into the air -- Bungie seems to have solved this by giving the Banshee a penchant for getting close to the ground pretty frequently.
