Without any further "blabla I didn't do x because of y" I'll start by talking about something that does have a huge impact on my life:
I have been a Halo player ever since I bought H1 in 2004 (guess those 6 years should be 7 by now) and I played every single game of the series to death. In this post I'll explain why I did make the switch to Starcraft and what will happen with me and Halo in the future.
Part 1 aka Halo ftw:
As I said I picked up H1 in 2004, and because I fucking can I'll lay down my history with halo:
In 04 I was one of these guys who would play tons of Singleplayer games and fall in love with said games story, the only shooter I played before Halo was Star Wars Republic Commando (one of the best games I played to day), to give you an Idea of what I was playing: Basically anything with Star Wars in the title and a lot of need for speed (the good old parts) and some random other stuff. I was all about singleplayer, getting into the story and just playing through those games multiple times, as you might know from my first blog post especially the Knights of the Old Republic series, which I still look upon as the best RPG series I ever played (yes I did play Final Fantasy...).
So back to Halo, I didn't know what to play next so one of my school buddies, who I'd talk about KotOR a lot, recommended me this game called Halo. At that point I had never really heard about Halo, and the main thing I used to play on was my PC, so I bought the PC Version for 10 bucks. The only console I owned was the PS2, which I used to play a effing lot of Dragonball on. Anyway Halo was sort of my first Shooter (republic commando being more of a team shooter) and since I was a huge star wars nerd I feel in love with this hole scifi alien shit in halo. I still remember spending most of my free time playing through campaign, and since I sucked at shooters back then (and game time been limited given the fact that I was like 12 years old) it took me 2 weeks. Yeah two weeks to finish a game that wouldn't take me more than a day or even a half nowadays. As I said I feel in love with the gameplay, story and characters so I played through H1 a lot. After finishing it I remembered that there was a thing called Internet (which I wasn't able to use a lot due to us having a shitty dial up connection (ISDN)), so I googled Halo and guess what the second part had just come out for the original xbox. I'm not sure whether I already owned an xbox to play kotor 2 (since around that time my pc was a bitch and I had to buy the second kotor for the xbox) or if I bought it for h2 and kotor 2 was after that. Anyways I picked up Halo 2, sucked even more at shooting thanks to the controller shit, and played through that campaign. I did play some coop with my bust buddy everyone ones in a while, but the idea of multiplayer was still a stranger. That all changed when I started watching montages, got decent internet, played h1 pc online like there was no other game, and I found out about XBC (esentially allowing you to play custom games in halo without xbox live, which was credit card based at that time). So I started to play like there was not much else to do (keep in mind that I was at the age where you don't really have anything to do since you are inbetween chilling at the playground and going out to drink) and it got to the point where me and my best buddie (I shall refer to him as Mudda for the sake of this article) played halo 2 on my xbox via xbc every weekend, and even when I had to do a presentation for school I'd end up spending most of the time preparing that presentation playing halo 2 with my buddies.
This avid Halo 1/Halo 2 playing (at one point I picked up the h2 mappack disc for moar maps) went on until one thing should change online gaming for me forever.
Christmas 06 aka Xbox 360 fuck yeah!:
As you might guess from the title I got my Xbox 360 at christmas 06 and it did change everything. I could use effing XBL, my 360 came with Kameo and PGR3 (boooo!), but the real deal where the 2nd controller and the 3 months of xbl. I signed up, put in halo 2 and that disc would not leave my xbox for the next month. The h3 beta came out in mai and I never played a game more within 3 weeks. At the end of h2 I was at a point where I got into mlg and competitive gaming and would spent my halo time playing mlg customs and ffas with pros (for those of you who know: gunsh0t was one of the names).
Halo 3 :(
Halo 3 came around and it fucked my love for halo straight up in the ass. I loved the beta, but I guess I love everything close to halo in the first few weeks. The more I played the more I realized the flaws: Melee which had so much depth in the previous games (can you say bxr, bxb?) became just dumb, the br, which was a weapon that I used to crush hole teams with, was bullshit now, and the netcode was straight up bullshit. Matchmaking was full of AR starts and shotty snipes was the main gametype. But MLG came around to safe the day and thanks to the mlg playlist (the last good thing bungie did) I stuck around and played the game a lot again. Just to keep in mind: I still played a lot of h2 and h2 for pc (aka vista). So anyway that went on till like 09 where I was so fucking sick of this broken game that I literily stuped caring.
2010: Woo beta time, and damn those bastards killed my love
2010 came around (I did buy ODST, and thanks to the midship remake I played quiet a lot of halo again, but not as much and not as intense as I sued to) and MS announced that they'd shut down live support for xbox 1 games. The good part was that that allowed me to spent the last week in the live of the game that will always be my love (yeah I am at a point where I look upon h2 as the greatest game ever, and every single time I get around to play again I love every single fucking second of it, god damn it h2 I fucking love you) to play the game at its best: I was in a clan from the mlg community that had around 30 people on at every single point and I did nothing else than midship ffas and random 4th with mlg settings, I had so much fucking fun in that week, just thinking about it makes me fucking sentimental.
Switching away from my love, cause it makes me damn sad, the reach beta rolled around, and I don't know how bungie does it, but they're always able to give me a beta that I love. I had one of the sickest 2 screen-lan-all-the-time setups ever during those weeks and I played like I was 14 again.
In between reach beta and reach release I didn't play too much anything, just chilling enjoying live and shit.
So anyways Reach rolled around and Bungie managed to rape the beta in the ass.
The game is bullshit, literally. The only formed of ranked playing is the most broken system I have ever seen (and I played a lot of shit in between all that halo time), the mechanics are dumb and slow, and I can not force myself to enjoy that piece of shit. But it was still halo, I still had a lot of buddies playing, and I did play quiet a lot till november or so.
...Starcraft comes in bitches:
And in november Starcraft came in, I heard about it through MLG and here and there before, but I obviously didn't understand shit while watching it at MLG. But one of the guys at my school who I started to become good friends with played it, and through him I got one of those fancy trial codes and I enjoyed it, long story short I picked it up before my trial ran out and played quiet a bit. But my being a halo machine I sucked, which I was not used to, so I stopped playing, or atleast playing often. I still watched it when the halo stream was boring at mlg, but I played a lot of h3 (at that point the only playable halo that had a competitive playlist and was not dead, looking at you dead2 vista) and eventually made it back to reach every once in a while. I could write about two more paragraphs about that, but the main point would be: "Some halo, no halo, some halo". So I'll just switch to me and Mudda being at a point in Reach where we reached (icwutididthere) the skill gap, or were close to (given that the game is easy as fuck) and ended up upsetting the 2nd ranked 2 on 2 team in Europe, after about 3 weeks of really playing halo again. But shortly after that (and us not loosing in team doubles for a few weeks) we realized how fucked the game was. Magically I ended up really getting involved into SC2, and realized that it was not just the new MLG game, but a global phenomenom, I spent the last week watching more starcraft (day 9 daily, onemoregame.tv shows + a lot of pro matches) than I have ever watched anything in that short amount of time, and this tuesday I realized that Starcraft 2 offered all I wanted in my main game:
-a developer that cares; a great and friendly community (gl, hf, gg); a huge global movement; depth; a lot of skill to master + I fucking love winning and getting better at that game
Combined with the fact that I look upon Halo Reach as a raped version of what I once loved, I made the decision to switch to starcraft and become good at that. I'm still in bronze league ( 1 on 1) but it does not matter in which team league I play placement stuff I always end up in silver and I usually get matched up against way higher seeded players in every ladder, so I guess the game sorta sees me on the silver level (for all you americans thats gold - platin on your servers). I love winning in this game, I love getting better, I love all the tactics envolved and I have not have that much fun playing/discussing/caring about a game since halo fucking 2. I effing love Starcraft and I am more excited for Heart of the Swarm than I have been for anything in a long long time. That does not mean that I stop playing halo, but I will not choose Halo as my main game again, unless reach gets patched into something that actually is halo or the rumored h1 remake is h1 and not some fucked up form of h1.
So after 7 years (and I'll probably end up writing a lot more about those 7 years since this was a really, really small summary on top of head) of playing the shit out of halo I do make the switch to Starcraft 2, the greatest competitive game out there at this point. <3 SC 2
To round this up I felt like going into PS and so some SC wallpaper action (still work in progress):
Again I really hope it won't be another ~ 3 months till the next post!
