It's probably impolitic to say so but I've been hungry for Halo lately. I love Gears, I love Rainbow Six, I love Splinter Cell. I really like Ghost Recon, and I've had a lot of fun in games like Counterstrike, XIII, Call of Duty and even Unreal Tournament. But my fingers and my tactics all come back to Halo. I've been thinking about that lately.
My clan buds, The Cult of Sun Tzu, and I have mostly been playing Rainbow Six Vegas since it came out. That's cut into my Gears time, and now I'm getting sloppy in that. But what really got to me was that I was doing something fundamentally wrong in R6 which was being aggressive. Aggressive play works best in Halo but it will get you killed very quickly in R6. So I spent a lot of time worrying about why my game was off and not thinking about it. It wasn't until I decided to play some Halo that it all came back to me.
Somebody may have the statistics somewhere for all games but in a Halo Big Team Battle the difference between the best player and the worst player in terms of average time between deaths is generally not more than 20 seconds or so. Staying alive for an average of 40 seconds and getting 3 kills per spawn will make you a pretty good Halo player. In R6 you're highly unlikely to do will if you only stay alive for 40 seconds in Team Sharpshooters, and you're probably not going to get 3 kills in that time. It takes 40 seconds just to get to the other players' spawn in R6, but that's another subject.
Rainbow Six is a slower, more deadly game than Halo. There's a lot of creeping and sneaking around, relatively speaking. But the very notion that you're on a team of six or seven makes your Halo senses kick in and your instinct is to run towards where the shooting is going on so that you can steal a kill as soon as someone's shield flashes. The problem is of course there are no shields and one of those shooters is going to be dead by the time you get there and probably hiding waiting to pick you off.
So there are interesting dynamics going on in the different shooters and maps, and you have to take that into account. Too much Halo is bad for your R6 and vice versa unless you are thinking about your tactics in each game as a completely different set of reflexes.
I'll probably be picking up a strategy guide for Gears after Christmas because I'm going to try to start getting ranked over there and the level of competition has started to rise. But I've noticed clearly that it's a much more intense short distance game. The new melee on Halo2 is a significant change too. I have yet to adjust to that. The way to use cover on Halo doesn't translate at all in Gears.
If I were to come up with a system of shooter tactics there would be some high level things I would keep in mind.
- Pace: How long should you stay alive in order to beat the averages?
- Vulnerability: Once someone is raining fire on you, how long on average do you have to escape or die?
- Stealth vs Aggression: Which does the game favor?
- Action Range: At what distance will you get the most kills?
Now I need to stop talking and get back online. All this talk is making my fingers hungry.
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