I don't know why I always start posts on this place with trying to reason away my absence. Simply put, since my last post a lot of good (and an equal amount of bad) has happened to me in my life. Last year I had decided to join the staff of Inside View Gaming, got a position on the review team and then became their community manager. Almost one year later I'm still helping out around there and I have no plans on leaving any time soon.
We still have content going out on an almost daily basis, plus our social media sites are starting to kick off in terms of activity. (Totally not a shameless promotion here... https://www.facebook.com/IVGUK and https://twitter.com/IVG_Official). We've started up some new series' of posts as well, one of which is our semi-regular Xbox LIVE Arcade game reviews in our Arcade Bytes series. Our other series of posts is geared towards those that take interest in the world of Grifball. We cover any Grifball related news we can find, but our focus when we first started this series was news from within the leagues. Such as the International Grifball League and the Good Games League.
Speaking of Grifball, remember how last April Storm and I had decided to try out for a GGL team for their next Spring season? However, we decided to forgo that idea and start our own team a little bit later on (yup...we did) and thus the Light Redcoats were established. We played for about a month together, participating in the first Spring Fling ran by GrifballHub and even a Vanilla GRUNT they had a couple weeks before the next seasons sign ups were open. Unfortunately, after our losses in the GRUNT the team eventually fell apart.
Fast forward until the end of January this year and I begin thinking it would be cool to join a team for a season. It was sort of like one of those "bucket list" items...only a little more realistic. So I decided that maybe with the Spring season coming up for the GGL, I'd try my hand at getting on a team. As I almost always do; I decided to tweet what I was planning on doing and it just so happens that I'm following two people who already have a team in the GGL and are looking for players. Coincidentally, they both see this tweet at the same time and start telling me I should join this team called the Aces. After sitting on it for about 15 (or less...) minutes I said yes, I figured it would save me some time (and maybe frustration leading to discouragement eventually) of trying to search for a team.
I'll admit, at first I was extremely excited but mostly nervous. This was my first time on a team to start with, I knew once I faced against real teams I didn't do that well but it seemed like I was doing superb in matchmaking. Plus I didn't know too much about Grifball, basically just enough to survive in matchmaking; and add in the fact that I was in my rookie season on a team playing in the Veterans Division. I was mainly concerned that when our team lost, it would almost always be my mistake. Apparently the captains didn't care too much as they rarely had enough people online to play their games to begin with.
My first season started in late March, sadly I didn't get much practice in with them as I had a personal issue to deal with most of that time. The result of that was I didn't play in many games either. If I remember correctly, the first ever league game I played in with the Aces was a two game series against What the Grif. This series was also part of GrifballHub's regularly streamed games they do each Wednesday, appropriately entitled Wednesday Night Grifbrawl. Aces took game one 7-2 and game two 6-3, we were commented on being such an aggressive team during the live commentary. Which I guess is true, the Aces do seem to play more aggressive compared to other teams; heck even a group of randoms in matchmaking are less aggressive than we are. But it works...well only for so long, the Aces eventually finished the season at 3-20. Despite the record, we made the playoffs based on getting all of the Achieveables during the season. We drew Hammers of Thor for our first round match, and only played one game in the series before being eliminated. The curse of not having enough players online struck us again...
Just recently one of the captains had asked one of our other players (elves shame) and myself if we were planning on coming back for another season. I was already planning on going back for another season, the only question was if I would be on the Aces again or searching for another team. I decided to return to the Aces for another season. They are the kings of betrayals after all. I never thought I would have enjoyed playing on a team as much as I did, it certainly is ten times easier than being the captain of one. I've met some amazing people during this season starting with the captains of the Aces, XeroZebra and ProAceJoker. If it wasn't for the two of them hounding me over Twitter to join their team, I probably wouldn't be on a team to begin with.
Then there are those that I met just by playing in the league, BaconFadays from Captain Crunch and the Cereal Killers last season, now on Church's Squad for the upcoming season. Perfect Demise from Sarge's Squad, now the captain of Church's Squad. And yes, the two previously mentioned teams are related. Vetteking95, the founder of the International Grifball League and also on Sarge's Squad.
The entire team of What the Grif holds a special place with me also. When I had tried to start my own team last year, our first GGL event was a Vanilla GRUNT tournament, WtG was our first game of the night. We almost had them by going up 2-0 quickly on them and then our team got overwhelmed and lost 3-2. Needless to say when I got to play against them again as a rookie on the Aces, it was awesome. Just like old times.
I know there are other people I've met out there due to this, but now I have some more news (if you could call it that) to share.
I finally had some time to capture some clips from Grifball matchmaking the other day. I still have some reserved but I need to piece them together and upload them yet. Here are the three I have uploaded, this first one shows me taking the ball and going (almost) one man army all the way to the goal.
I almost had a goal! CURSED HAMMER!
This next clip has my good ol' buddy (and family member) BCX4STORM (Storm) in it in one of his first few games of Halo 4 Grifball. This happened not too long ago so I have had some league experience already. While I will admit this was rather lucky on our behalf, it gets better and better each time I watch it.
Yeah, a half court pass right as Storm was getting killed and I was setting up behind the enemy team to clear a path for our runner to score.
This final clip is just a simple pass from Storm to me. I honestly had no idea it was coming until he threw it...
My last bit of news for this post is in the near future I am going to really be kick starting the activity on my YouTube page. I hope to start my doing my own videos like the "Let's Play" series by Rooster Teeth (and numerous other people) and kind of like the ones from my good friends at NuggetHatGaming. I still need to get some stuff in place before doing these, I'll need audio recording and editing software along with an external storage device so my videos aren't taking up all the space on the laptop I use. Plus I need to learn how to edit videos better than what you see in the above clips. Once I get started I don't know how often I will get videos out, right now my current goal would be at least one a week to start with. It all depends on when I can record and how much time I can and want to dedicate towards this.
With all of that, I shall leave you to...whatever it was you were doing before reading through all this.
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