Uni High Gargoyle Staff Blog

This year for Agora Days, I was really looking forward to the class “Halo Basics.”

I enter the room, ready to learn and hone my Halo skills past the stage of being able to look around and get stuck in corners. It takes a while for the teachers to come and even more time to set up controllers, but finally we are ready to begin. There are one or two students that already have extensive Halo experience, but not too many, so it shouldn’t be too bad. But suddenly, a whole horde of upperclassmen come into the North Attic with their own controllers and game systems.

That’s all right, I think. I have no idea that they were going to be connecting all of the games together and have one giant melee.

We begin the game and I have little trouble making a profile. R for firing, A for jumping, X to pick up a weapon and reload, and Y to switch weapons. Easy enough right? Wrong. I can hardly get myself to move in the direction I want as I attempt to coordinate my view stick and my running stick.

Eventually, I’m able to travel in a semi-straight line and I find myself running through the terrain. Bam! “You were killed by _.” I’m sent back to the spawn point and brought back to life. Run run run. Bam! “You were assassinated by __.” Run run stuck hide run. Bam! “You were beat down by __.”

What?! How in the world am I supposed to learn how to do anything if I’m getting killed every 15 seconds by these really experienced players who aren’t in the class in the first place? I don’t have that much against them for doing so, but it is getting a little annoying.

By the end of the first class, I can move around more easily than I could before, but I still can’t aim, shoot, or do anything remotely interesting to help my team with. I’m still getting killed almost immediately after I come back to life.

I have enough of mindless slaughter for one week and had died enough to last me a couple days. Halo just wasn’t for me, at least, until I can rack up my experience points some more. I’m back to playing my Gamecube’s Harvest Moon when I get home.

No more Halo Basics for me. I’m sticking with something I’m good at this third period: Cooking.

Linda Song