Set Start, Tough Luck On

If you have every played even a little bit of Firefight from ODST, you know exactly what I mean. If not, I'll quickly explain it here. Each time a new set starts in Firefight, the Tough Luck skull is turned on in the first round and stays on in the following rounds. Now with that out of the way, you're wondering why the title is that way(most likely not though); well I have been playing a huge amount of Firefight lately and now I realize how awesome it is. So in this post I was going to dig through my games of Firefight and post the ones I thought were good. Maybe even through in a screenshot from it or two. And, if I can think of what to talk about it, maybe even discuss some more Firefight 2.0. I'll kick things off with the very first game of Firefight I played, which also happend to be the first time I played ODST the night it came out. http://www.bungie.net/Stats/ODSTg.aspx?gameid=777802&player=StoredGrunt360

Didn't do too bad for the first game, however; it's nothing compared to what I could do now. When I played later that day, I did have one decent game. 87,428. Next day when Storm and were trying to make the campaign last on Normal, we decide to hit Firefight co-op for the first time on the map Windward and here are the results. We also grabbed our first Firefight related achievement by getting par score(which is set at 200,000) for that map. Still though, we can do better than that. So we continue to get the par score for each of the maps fairly easily, until we have one map to do; and that map is Last Exit. First try we get 58,902, second game only a small 11,756, third game we think we finally might get it with 64,700 only to fail there and in the next game getting 12,994. Well we finally get it after like 6 tries. Traveling back to Windward we get our first high score above 200,000 points. Set 5, Round 2, Wave 4; 740,804. Moving forward a couple months, here is our first game where we reached one million points. Yes it was on easy, but so what; we were aiming for massive amounts of kills not points that game. Although the points were a bonus. I would like to note that that game was the only time I thought we would reach a million points. However, this game begs to differ and so would this one. Okay, so I was wrong and we have been able to get to a 1.5 million points at least twice and one million points once. This next game was our first(and only) attempt at the Vidmaster: Endure achievement. Which is to pass the fourth set on Heroic four player co-op over Xbox LIVE. Sound simple right? Well I thought so at first since at the start of the third set we had a decent amount of lives stockpiled until we used them all up. I was left as the last man standing on the fifth wave of round three and got owned horribly by the never ending amount of Brutes. So yeah, we were close since all we had to do was get out of set three and get past set four. This last game was played just yesterday and we almost made it to a million points four a fourth time. We could have kept going except I was the last man standing and was trapped in a corner by a Brute, but when I was finally able to get away from him to reload I jumped right into a suicide Grunt. I hope to get a screenshot of that soon.

Moving onto Reach's Firefight 2.0. If you played the Beta back in May, mainly in late May that is, you probably played the playlist that was dubbed Network Test 1? Well that was meant to test the network coding I guess for the game, however it turns out that the basic gametype for that playlist is going to be a Firefight gametype. From the games I played of it in the Beta it was awesome and I can't wait to see how it is going to work with an endless amount of aliens coming after you not only trying to kill you, but also take out the generators as well. The other gametype I'm interested to try out is "Rocket Fight" I think it may have been called, but anyways; it's nothing but rockets with infinite ammo for them. One thing that I am sure will happen with that version of Firefight is chaos will ensue. I've already talked a bit about the customzation in the new Firefight, but let me elaborate a little as to why I like it so much. Probably the main reason is you'll be able to do pretty much whatever you want to in it. If you want to fight nothing but Grunts then go ahead and do so. If you are tired of being screwed by the Elites in the campaign and just want to slaughter a couple hundred(or thousand if you're like me) then you'll be able to do that also. I'm pretty sure you get the point by now. I know a lot of people that are actually against us being able to do all that; however, their only argument is this: "People will be able to get high scores easily and no skill is involved." Well you know what, fun > skill. Yes it helps to know how to play the game at points, but really if you are just wanting to have fun are you really going to care how far you get? And yes, I also know that to some people, doing to good is having fun and that's fine, but to me it really isn't worth getting mad at a game because you aren't doing good. I know, "But I'm still not having fun." well maybe you should reconsider your current definition of fun.

Anyways back on topic here. Besides what I mentioned in my last post about what I plan on doing in Reach's Firefight. Another thing I think I might end doing sometime in it, is having at least one wave or round dedicated to Hunters. I really think they could be a challenge in Reach and from the screens I have seen of them; they also look larger than they were in ODST. Also, I would easily settle for a round or two of Jackals and their counterpart, Skirmishers.

On a closing note; I'll leave you with some screenshots I have taken over the past few days from Firefight.