Lunchtime Halo Highlights

I play Halo on Mondays for a little more than an hour with some co-workers. I've been playing with several of these people for years, a few since Halo 1. This page is for gathering screen-shots and video clips from those games using Halo 3's saved film feature. I started this because only some of our players have Halo 3, so most of them can't review games after the fact like I can. I've kept doing it because it's enjoyable to re-visit interesting moments, and it adds a little more fun in the times between our game sessions.

We almost always play free-for-all games that are tuned to be fast paced. We don't have enough time for a protracted game of CTF, and several of the people in our little group only play at this time so they want to pack in as much action as they can. A good example is the game we call "John Woo" after the action film director: nothing but magnums, no shields, no grenades, no motion tracker.

Since we have players of different skill levels (some who only play during our weekly sessions), we want to keep it fun for the weaker players and challenging for the stronger ones. In Halo 2, we would often use the voluntary per-player handicap, but deciding when to turn it on was a matter of negotiation and it was usually only after a lop-sided game that the leading player would agree to do so. As we've gotten more experience with Halo 3 we've been using and tweaking a FFA Slayer game type called "Handicap Leader". Currently the settings we use make the person in the lead (or multiple people when there's a tie) have the following handicaps:

  1. They do 50% damage. (It's not any easier to kill the leader, but it's harder for the leader to kill anyone.)
  2. They have a nav point that everyone can see. (Can't find anyone to shoot at? Go fight the guy in the lead.)
  3. No motion tracker. (Don't worry, the nav point will bring them to you. Well, maybe you should worry about the guy sneaking up behind you.)
  4. No use of vehicles. (The leader does not get to run around splattering people with the ghost. Interestingly, this also seems to prevent turret use.)

This seems to work pretty well, but there are still some weapons that kill pretty well even at half damage (e.g. the needler).


I'm Xor1an on XBL/bungie.net
Last modified: Tue May 11 12:05:23 EDT 2010
Lunchtime Halo Highlights was created under Microsoft's "Game Content Usage Rules" using assets from Halo 3, (c) Microsoft Corporation.