"I need a weapon..."

As you panned over another non-updated morning of FM just a few hours ago, you almost assuringly glanced to the right side of the screen and noticed something a little bit different about the sidebar. "Jesus titty-fucking christ!" you screamed aloud as you stared mercilessly at the Master Chief striking his best ass-kicking pose on the cover of the Halo 2 box, "bironm is back to playing Halo online!"

Relax, it's cool. While I do admit my Halo 2 kill-boner did flare up this weekend, I acted on it in a way that normally is unbeknownst to me. I'm fairly sure I became the first person to rent the original version of Halo from Blockbuster in 2 years, and worse, I paid $7.99 to rent it for a week (it's about $5 to purchase on Ebay I later discovered). I did originally have Doom 3 in my hand, but then I remembered I had Halo 2 - and why I hadn't played it yet...

See, I'm a sucker for a good story. I mean here I've had my Xbox and Halo 2 for about 4 months now, and I'm yet to even begin the campaign mode on it because I didn't want to sacrifice my Halo virginity without playing thru the first one. So needless to say, I spent virtually all weekend playing thru my latest rental.

Badass. Holy shit, it was clear to me why people were going nuts waiting for the second one to come out. Playing thru this game provided one hell of an experience - I mean, after all these years of watching Red vs Blue and reading about the mass hysteria on the Halo website with thousands of LAN parties and whatnot, here I was witnessing this stuff for the first time. I just gotta say - for the record - there was a lotta dead fuckin' aliens on the bironm xbox this weekend.

Now, if you're 1 of the 3 people left in the world who haven't finished Halo & are a fan of the franchise, you probably don't want to read below. However being as you've read this sentence right here, I assume you either A) already have beaten it or B) don't give a fuck, to which I'm guessing both responses will run about 50/50.

Now the thing that interested me the most about the first one is that there's a greater evil to both races then each other, with the "both" being of course the Humans and the Covenant. I had no idea, but the story plays in really nice with the Covenant fearing The Flood, the Human Captain becoming infected by the Flood, and then that one annoying ass C3PO robot-sounding dude tricking me into using Halo as a weapon. Was a really good story, plenty of twists and had some good substance to it - a feat for an FPS a lot of times. Anyway, after getting done, I loaded up Halo 2 and started right into the campaign mode on that one as well.

I did manage to play some online again, and I was so rusty that the only way to compete was to curse loudly at the TV, as I so often do in...well, any game I play.

So ya, that's my weekend and my immediate gaming future. I did manage to play week #2 of my DaONE league, winning a game over Purdue in convincing fashion, moving my overall record to 2-0. The way I see it, I have plenty of time to finish Halo 2 before NHL 2K6 comes out, so expect me to talk about that prolly several more times prior to that release.