I've been out of the office all week, as some variety of Streptococcus has colonized my wife. I've had to parent full time for three days, just three fucking days, and already I know why housewives once turned to Laudanum.
Independent of mysteriously derived patent medicines, though apparently no less addictive, Minecraft has occupied my cohort every hour of my absence. He sent me a mail that eschewed capitalization entirely, with a link to "minecraft" nestled within and an exhortation to purchase the aforementioned because "it is only 9 dollars." A link to the crafting wiki was also provided. This was clearly a quick mail, he had not labored over it. This is because he had somewhere to be.
He's well and truly gone; the Gabriel we knew is dead. He delved too deep and was remade in the hot veins of the Earth. I have heard him suggest that the game is crack, but it's more like all of the ingredients and equipment that you need to make crack, which I'd say is worse. It's like: give a man some crack, and he'll... but if you teach him to make crack, and then... There must be a saying that explains all this, surely.
Because I have a hard drive and also because my disc works, I am able to play Halo: Reach. And I do.
But I don't have a lot of use for vanilla Invasion, and I'd be surprised if it became a true part of our Halo lexicon in any context but as a Forge toolkit. There are so many ways to compete in Halo, and so many interpretations of this concept elsewhere that it feels sort of perfunctory. Invasion Slayer, though, hey. Now we're getting somewhere.
There are many ways that the flow of a game-in-progress can be modified, explicitly or implicitly - if you need to capture three flags and both teams have captured two, you step lively. Bad Company maps tend to be massive affairs, but you actually play what are essentially discrete rounds - a series of immediate goals that progress to an apex. Killzone 2 approached things in a novel way, where each round was actually made up of a number of smaller, individually scored rounds that cycled through traditional multiplayer modes. Invasion Slayer has a very interesting arc that I haven't quite seen before.
The game starts out like any Slayer match, staked out in a roomy map somewhere, and things progress normally until the first capture point appears. Once a point is captured, it becomes a drop zone - fifteen seconds later, the game's best weapons spawn in places just like this. As the round progresses vehicles start popping up in them, and they're fought over tooth and nail, because these are the only vehicles this gametype has. It communicates everything I like about the game in such a tidy package, and its progressive revelations reliably exhilarate.
(CW)TB
