Loving Xbox Live

So yeah, after writing an inspiring post about taking the day and making it yours, I'll now follow up with how 20+ hours of my life have now been wasted in front of a little white console known as the Xbox 360. And it's all thanks to the $60 box of crack cocaine known as Call of Duty 4. Seriously, this stuff has to be harder to quit than heroin.

My last online multi player experience came nearly a decade ago, when I ventured online in Red Baron II. Getting blasted out of the sky by ubernerds with modified flight models and Sopwith Camels equipped with more radar guided weapons than an F22 Raptor didn't exactly provide me with a lot of fun. Since then, I've been strictly off line... that is, until a few weeks ago.

Live is fantastic, when it works. I unfortunately, came in on Live in the middle of some heavy outages due to the Christmas crowd hitting their servers in mass. But once it started working, and I picked up the latest Call of Duty title (which pits you into Modern Warfare, rather than in World War II), the addiction began.

Picking off my first enemy at nearly point blank range, complete with the deep thwack of my first few rounds hitting his chest and the final plink as my spray led upwards to his helmet, left my brain giddy, and hungry for more. From there it was a matter of customizing my weapons to suit my particular style of warfare (medium to long range shooting with high accuracy) and off to the servers I went. I'm about to surpass 2000 kills, which ranks me somewhere around 800,000 in the world. It's been a great couple of weeks, at least in my gaming life, and while getting whipped by some thirteen year old snot whose voice hasn't even dropped yet kind of sucks, fragging my friends online makes it all worthwhile.

Getting a game together with myself, Grubbs, Ryan, and his buddy, Matt, proved to be exceptional fun. Grubbs is the ubergod of shooters. His experience goes all the way back to the dawn of time. He's capped more headshots from long distance than just about anyone in history. If you want to see Carl in his element, get him Gillied up, put him in a high tower or a far off field, and take the reigns off of him. You'll see his name popping up frequently, and the obscenity will quickly flow from the hapless opponents who can't figure out where in the hell the fire is coming from. Ryan's handle is IrishSniper20, so you get a good idea that he's also a fan of sitting quietly and putting someone's brains about three blocks behind their head from downrange. Matt and I are the flailers of the group - typically screaming into the mike and laying down as much fire as humanly possible and hoping to God we don't hit any friendlies.

Speaking of friendly fire, it's a good thing that none of us are actually in the military, because we're not terribly good at identifying targets. Ryan has shot me at point blank range with his high powered sniper rifle. I've shot Grubbs at least a half dozen times - for which I blame that damn gilly suit - it freaks me out. I've shot Matt a number of times. And just last night, I took out half my squad when I mistimed my grenade throw and accidentally blew up the car they were all crouched behind. Okay, so it's a good thing that I'm not in the military. Because I am rolling death to anything near me.

High comedy comes when two friends take each other out online. In the case of Ryan's misfire, he was guarding a stairwell in a building which housed a fixed machine gun emplacement - meaning it's a spot on the map everyone is wetting themselves to get to - visions of a Rambo-esque scene of them spraying a wall of led and racking up hundreds of kills dancing through their heads. Ryan had it well guarded, complete with Claymore mines and a pissy disposition. I came up on the floor beneath him and heard footsteps. Immediately I drew my weapon and begin creeping. Unbeknownst to me, Ryan was doing the same thing about eight feet over my head. Finally, in some sick comedic fashion, we both moved slowly to the stairwell, weapons drawn. Instead of using my brain, and my headset, and asking if friendlies were on the floor above me, I went silent. Somehow, we both turned at the same time and moved until we were on top of each other. I manged to get "Agh!" out before his rifle laid my brains out about fifty feet behind me and dropped me like a sack of potatoes. "Dude! I'm sooooo sorry! I'm sorry!" came Ryan's plea. I was too busy laughing my ass off to say anything.

Then came the other night with Grubbs, which, admittedly, wasn't my best work. In addition to being a slow draw, I was also misidentifying every target I came across. So leave it to me to shoot Grubbs in the back not once, but twice. We were facing each other from across the map, and without knowing it was him, I put a few rounds in his direction. Knowing it was me, and feeling a little miffed about me shooting at him, he put one round right through my neck and said, "Dude... what the hell are you shooting at me for!?" Follow that up in the next map, when, feeling I had a good plan to hit the enemy where they spawned, I moved to the back of a grassy lot. Feeling so smart I drew my SAW, which pumps out several thousand rounds a minute and waited. Little did I know, that by moving to the new spot, I had inadvertently changed our spawn point to about three feet to my left. Sure enough, the first hapless victim to show up is Grubbs and I put about 800 rounds into the small of his back, dropping him to the ground with his pistol drawn. He points it right at me as I'm screaming, "Friendly fire! Friendly fire! Dude, I'm so sorry!!!" Leaving only the now trademark Grubsian Existential sigh of "what the hell?"

Of course the nerdy bad ass moments also make the game a blast. Grubbs and I teamed up, clearing block after block in search of our enemies, calling out over the mike like we're members of Easy Company, gives the nerd inside quite a buzz. Couple the hilarity of shooting your best mates with the ability to do some seriously hardcore combat and drop a real life person with a well placed shot or a strategic drop and you have a seriously potent addiction that will blow hours away in a heartbeat.

I suddenly see why Grubbs had such a hard time actually getting any work done in College.