Reach Rage

Halo Reach has me raging again.

As you may have gathered from my previous thoughts on the game, I’m a total whore for the Halo credits. For me, there’s nothing better than watching that little bar at the bottom of the screen edge ever closer to the right with every single credit I acquire. Finally ranking up and being able to afford a piece of armour you’ve been lusting after for ages is possibly the most blissful feeling on earth.

But getting these credits is an arduous task, one requiring a huge degree of hard work and dedication. You gain space cash after every game you finish, with the average amount being around 1000 creds per game. With levelling up requiring tens, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of credits, that equates to playing a lot of Halo.

One way of supplementing your electronic pay is the challenges that Bungie switch around on both a daily and weekly basis. The former are usually quite easy, only requiring you to kill 100 enemies in any game mode or gain 12 headshots in one game or something (although I’ll scream if I see any involving Firefight mode in the near future), while the latter ones tend to be much more difficult. Enduring 75 rounds of Firefight, dispatching 1000 human opponents in the space of seven days or completing a certain campaign level with every skull modifier turned on: they’re definitely not for the weak of heart.

These challenges are oft the most bountiful, however, offering a good number of credits upon completion, so are usually worth at least attempting. Some aren’t too bad, such as this week’s: complete nine campaign levels on Heroic difficulty. It’s doable by yourself if you’re patient and careful. Unfortunately, I am neither patient or careful: the stupid amount of times I charge in and die begin to infuriate before long and I prematurely give up on my solo endeavours.

The ability to respawn when playing with other people makes things much easier, though, so I was happy to complete said missions with a motley crew of Spartans. However, since all of my friends are currently enamoured with a much lesser shooter, I had no-one to party up with.

‘No worries’, I thought, ‘I’ll just hop into Matchmaking and play with some randoms.’

And that’s where the problems began.

The first leveI I attempted loaded up with the four of us about to clamber into a couple of air support vehicles, upon which two of my teammates immediately quit the game. Irked at their sudden and abrupt disappearance, I brushed it off as the level was still doable with my remaining teammate. I hopped into the cockpit and manoeuvred the Falcon so my partner could hop into the gunner seat, where he started taking pot shots at my head through the windscreen.

Confused, I raised the vehicle off the ground with my ‘ally’ shooting me all the while. I let off a warning shot near his feet, my intent being to stop him shooting, but accidentally dispatched him with one burst. My screen immediately went black and I was taken back to the menu screen to be greeted by a message saying ‘you have been booted from the game for betraying a team mate’.

What the fuck? I was the only person in the game that wanted to play properly and I got booted? I didn’t bitch-quit because I wasn’t doing the level I wanted, didn’t try to kill my teammates and I got kicked?

Greatly annoyed, I attempted another game, this one being the level with the Target Locator. For those not in the know, it’s basically the Halo equivalent of the Hammer of Dawn: simply highlight your target and they’ll be destroyed by hot, tasty death from above within seconds. My new associates and I powered through the beginning of the level, picking up a good momentum. I hopped into the driving seat of a Warthog while two of my buddies jumped into the other positions while the other picked up the Target Locator…

And immediately pointed it at us.

No matter how furiously I tried to escape, that red circle of death stayed on us until, after a few seconds, we were all completely obliterated by a huge salvo of missiles. The offending player was immediately booted and my two remaining teammates left the game. I was naïve to believe that this level could actually be finished after my anonymous teammates and I had started it off so well.

Overcome with animosity and disdain for my fellow Halo players, I decided to try my luck a third time, where fortunately I was teamed with a few people that played properly and, as the number on the challenge counter got higher and higher, I could feel my annoyance dissipate and gradually dissolve…

But it wasn’t long before my rage returned with the wrath and ire of a thousand raging suns.

After all my competent colleagues left, I went back into matchmaking by myself, where I was quickly teamed with another bunch of people. The level loaded up and the first thing we saw was the Scorpion tank. Naturally, we all made a mad dash for it, but unfortunately I didn’t make it in time, with the three others in my team occupying all the available spaces. I spotted a Ghost not far ahead from us, so I thought I’d take that instead.

As I was sprinting towards it, however, the driver of the Scorpion fired a shell at it and blew it up in front of my nose. This wasn’t unintentional: he ripped it to pieces, almost killing me in the process. ‘What the fuck?’, I thought once again as I fired a warning shot at the tank, only to have another shell blasted into my face, killing me instantly.

Of course I took the opportunity to boot the offending player when the option came up and once again it was just me and one other person to finish the level. He took the driver’s seat of the Scorpion and I jumped into the gunner’s seat, happy in the knowledge that we might be able to go on to actually finish the level.

But no: instead, he maneuvered the tank up to a cliff face, aimed the barrel at the wall and fired, utterly destroying it and killing us both.

Enraged, I booted this moron from the game as well, leaving me once again to complete the level solely. Fuck that: I quit the game, got up and shut my Xbox off.

This happened to me time and time again: out of the twelve or so levels I attempted, I only managed to complete maybe three or four. A challenge that should have taken a couple of hours to complete at most turned out to take most of the week instead.

I was stunned at this momentous display of utter fuckwittery by the people I was teamed with: I know the internet was practically created for trolls and griefers, but I was only used to seeing them pop up now and again, not in every single game I played. What is about Halo that attracts such scumbags?

Luckily the entire endeavour wasn’t a complete waste of time: the only other person on my friends list that will still play Halo with me very kindly helped me reach the magic number and allowed me to shower in a glorious 10k of space creds. Thanks.

So this is a message to the majority of random Matchmaking players in Halo Reach: you’re all a bunch of pathetic, immature dicks. How difficult is it to play like a normal person for ten minutes and not bitch-quit because you’re not playing your favourite stage or refrain from constantly team-killing each other and failing to leave the first area of a level? Your complete and utter fuckwaddery makes Halo a chore to play instead of the joy it should be.

Seriously, go to hell.

Thank you.