My buddy Midnight just won a HALO 1 XBOX tournament over in Fallujah, Iraq. He wrote about it on his blog. Nice to see that even the USMC understands that HALO 1 > HALO 2 when it comes to competitive play. Good job, Jeff.
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Look, guys. THIS is how it should be done.

You spend countless hours in training stateside. You haul TV’s on your back. You go for hours without food or water through the middle of the night into the early morning. You play with RAYNE on your team. You are preparing for your big moment.

And then, when you get sent off for action for the REAL THING, you step up and execute. Fantastic! Well done.

Now, hurry back. Let’s LAN.

Oh yeah, hope you got a good break from running a LAN, because we desperately need your leadership at ours. :)

I would say I’m impressed, gg, you rule, etc. but I really expected nothing less of you! :)

I’m proud of you for your service - Semper Fi -

Stonesand

I laughed when I read your following comment.

“It was a great time, partly due to the fact I got to LAN Halo without lifting a finger or herding any cats.”

LOL. You should have been at the last one here. It was at J-Doggs and Insane’s place. Organizing teams was a nightmare. Everytime we started to get things settled out someone would turn up missing, or half the people on one team would wonder into other rooms to see what was happening. At one point I told someone to sit down and not move till I told them they could (I think it was one of Foulbreeds clan, or maybe Slayer…I’m not sure.) To make things worse, a pack of nubs contributed one of the set-ups and insisted on playing together on the same team. Balancing things out after that was a nightmare.

In general I’m not assertive enough in large crowds. We need you back.

At least we didn’t have problems this time with people popping out the game disks at every intermission and playing geometry wars or something like that.

Plus I got to see Hollywood clothesline Celery and visa versa…goodtimes.

GG.

AND if it counts for anything, I DO know who those Golden Girls are ……………

For those that may not know:

* GG = “Good Game” in lazy gamer language. There is basically an acronym or shortened version of just about every word you can imagine.
* MadCatz is a knock off brand that tends make cheap controllers that make your character move when you are not even touching the joystick. They also break easily.

Mintz,
My skills were a tad rusty. However, I played through the first two levels of the Halo 1 campaign on legendary in the few days prior to the tournament. That was a lot of fun. I figured if I could get used to killing elites on legendary then opponents on multiplayer wouldn’t be difficult. If I hadn’t done that I would have lost the second round. I still felt rather lost at times. I couldn’t remember where some weapons spawned, and I spent the first 10 seconds of the second round in Hang’em High trying to throw a grenade from the back of red base to blow the RL to me (I love you Diesel!), when I realized I hadn’t started with grenades. Doh!

Brick,
I’ll be glad to exert some leadership if it means I can LAN with you guys again. It’s actually not as much work as I make it out to be. Being an asshole with a loud voice comes quite naturally to me.

Stonesand,
Assuming I understood your question correctly, Halo takes place in the internet cafe with my butt plastered to a chair and my eyes plastered to a TV. Combat takes place outside Camp Fallujah while wearing 60 pounds of crap and carrying real weapons. It’s very easy to differentiate between the two.

You stay safe and get back in one piece (not including hair/fingernails), ya hear?

Glad to hear you’re getting to play some competitive MP Halo over there! I’m just now reading about your experience because I am a fellow soldier (Army Infantry; don’t hold it against me! ;) and I just got back from NTC (National Training Center, in case you Marines don’t use it) in the ol’ Mojave desert in CA. Yes, I spent just under a month there, where we were “in the box” (actually training, not at the preparation FOB) for two weeks during a heat wave! Temps were anywhere from 110 upwards of 120. It reminded me of my tour in Iraq… But I digress. I’m glad to hear you are getting to play The Best Game Series of All Time. I too plan to play over in Iraq. When my unit deploys this fall, the 360 and all my games (and my laptop, etc.) are going with me. Hopefully I’ll have enough time between missions to keep my leet skillz up! ‘Til next time… Buenos Tardes!