kill vehicle

Thanksgiving is sort of an odd holiday for me. I love the feasts, but the day itself was never particularly important in my family. We don’t have a big extended family — I’m an only child, my mother is as well, and my father has one sister who never married. My parents had cousins, but they lived far away and we were never very close to them. On top of that, my parents’ relationship was, er, strained and they divorced when I was in high school.

This means that Thanksgiving didn’t really have the traditional “let’s all gather together and be thankful for each other” meaning for us. At best, we were thankful that nobody was throwing anything or hitting anybody.

Now that I’m living in Pittsburgh, Thanksgiving is becoming more important. We do the big family dinner each year with Laura’s family. She has a half-dozen siblings, so the Thanksgiving feast is the sort of pile-all-the-tables-together extravaganza I’d heard about but never seen as a kid. We all sat around one table, even if we were eating at my grandparents’ house, and there was no point to a kids’ table that would only have consisted of me. Laura’s immediate family alone is twice the size of my usual holiday dinners, and there are usually at least as many guests and friends as family members.

So, I’ve gone from 3-5 person dinners to 16-20 people. It’s been an interesting change. Even if family relationships get strained, it’s nice to visit and see everyone, talk, and eat. In the six or seven years I’ve been eating there, I’ve grown very used to it.

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This message brought to you by the good-for-you-but-not-good-for-you department:

On a clear and cold-but-not-too-cold night, there isn’t a whole lot more relaxing than sitting out on the porch with a cigar and a nice bottle of bourbon.

This stuff might kill me, but I think I’m pretty okay with that.

Bungie hates me.

Well, not me specifically. They just hate everyone who’s left-handed. I’m assured it’s nothing personal.

I’ve been getting pretty into Halo 2 multiplayer, but the controls are awkward for me. The left thumbstick is movement, and the right thumbstick is aiming. The triggers fire, and the buttons on the right do everything else. Basically, the left hand just makes you run around, and everything else is loaded onto the right hand. You generally don’t need to be both aiming with the stick and pressing the buttons at the same time– either they do things like ‘reload’ or ’switch weapons’ where you can’t fire anyway, or they’re letting you jump, so you just need to be moving.

My aim is much better with my left hand than with my right, so I’d like to be able to swap the sticks. Fine, the game will do that if I pick the ’southpaw’ stick setup. Unfortunately, if I do that I’m stuck trying to move with the right thumbstick while simultaneously pressing the buttons with my right hand. You generally need to move while jumping in order to go anywhere useful, and if you’re reloading or switching weapons you probably want to dodge incoming fire so you can avoid an embarrassing death. If I had two right thumbs, this would be fine. Maybe my parents should have exposed me to more radiation and hopef for mutations.

The game will also helpfully let me switch to a southpaw button layout, but all this does is swap the triggers so that the left trigger fires the right-hand weapon and the right trigger fires the left-hand weapon. Huh? Who wants that? Who does it even make sense to? I was hoping that maybe the A/B/X/Y button functions would be mapped to the four directions of the left-hand-side D-pad, but no such luck.

Did Bungie even have any left-handed people test this? How is it possible that nobody looked at the southpaw button config and said “Wow, this is pretty goddamn stupid. We should change that.”?

I know I’m not the only one irritated by this — there are scattered posts about it in the Bungie forums, all helpfully answered by the foul-mouthed twelve year olds who are the scourge of gaming forums everywhere. They suggest that left-handed people “stop being so gay”, by the way. I’ve tried that, but it doesn’t seem to help. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.

This is all partially Microsoft’s fault — the controller is designed with the assumption that most players are right-handed, so that’s where the buttons go. I’m surprised that nobody makes a left-handed controller, though. Is there really no market for that?

Halo 2 single player: eh.
Halo 2 online: composed entirely of pure love.

The Live interface is pretty smooth, and the games themselves flow very very nicely. Weapon balance is nice, maps are pretty, and stuff explodes all over the place.

I need to fiddle with the Clan support a little more, and I’d like to spend some time with the non-deathmatch modes (especially the more vehicle-based games), but overall it’s one of the best multiplayer games since Counterstrike.

Picoreview: I think I played this game before. Except last time I couldn’t play multiplayer online, so I guess that’s a win.

Less pico: So far, nothing earth-shattering. Dual-wielding weapons is neat. Things look a little prettier. I played a bit of the single-player campaign, and it was okay but didn’t blow me away.

I think I’m basically bored with the “run down a hallway shooting all the bad guys” FPS thing, and even though this iteration is nicer than the last one, there’s a strong feeling that I’ve just played this before over and over and over. I didn’t finish the single-player campaign in the first Halo, and I bet I won’t finish this one either.

Maybe I’ll be more positive on the game after I’ve spent more time with multiplayer.