It’s true.  Valkyrie’s trash-talk really would embarrass even the most grizzled of sailors.  I’m tempted to euphemize her most colorful sayings, but that would ruin their charm.  Instead I will simply say we’re lucky that the Bungie dudes are strange enough to find such antics amusing because they were dealt heavy doses of Frag Doll sass before, during and after our Halo Humpday match. 

We didn’t really know what to expect.  It seemed certain that their team would consist of some hardened Halo veterans as one would hope that developers would have some experience playing their own game.  But aside from this golden assumption, we had only rumors to work with.  Before the match we kept getting spammed with untraceable messages saying things like “Oooh, the Bungie guys are hella l33t!!”, “Be scared cause they’ll pwn j00!” and “OMG, Frankie is so hawt!  Don’t look at his picture while you play or you’ll be distracted by his hawtness and lose like teh suxx0rz!” Despite this barrage of suspicious propaganda, we decided the best thing to do was to prepare ourselves for anything and go in guns blazing.

Unfortunately, the first round wasn’t a great testament to our skills.  Maybe we needed a warm-up round, or maybe it was that we were nervous (their team’s overall hawtness did, in fact, prove to be quite distracting).  Valkyrie’s pistol/SMG combo was hot, Brookelyn’s grenades were deftly bounced, Seppuku’s sword was appropriately deadly for Lockout, and I think I managed not to fall off the map (I also got Anima8tr with a most excellent two-grenade series; I love expertly tossing ‘nades at a sniper on a tower and seeing the announcement of his defeat flash across the screen long after I’ve left the area).  Overall it was the teamwork we failed to pull together, and we made sure not to make this mistake in the next two rounds.

Ivory Tower: Team Slayer.  50-49. That 1 kill is going to haunt us (particularly me) for a long time.  This fierce competition was set to the soundtrack of “You have lost the lead”, “You have tied the leader”, “You have taken the lead”.  Apart from the heated fire-fights and obscene victory dances, this match could be used as a case-study for comparing male and female play styles.  I’m partial to Frankie’s description:  the Frag Dolls were “clumping together in sensibly powerful groups” while the Bungie guys “used the old “split up and run around in a panic, bumping into stuff” strategy.” But alas, our cooperation only works so well when someone on the other team has figured out that a rocket launcher is a great way to drive us out of the corners where the pistols live. 

It came down to a moment when we all simultaneously saw the 49-49 score and screamed “nobody die!” This happened to be not long after I had respawned and was racing up the long overshield-bearing ramp to join my sisters when I was met by a sword-wielding opponent.  Seeing that turning tail wouldn’t help protect me from the lunge, I actually managed to survive long enough to unload an entire clip of lead into him all while jumping and dodging.  *sigh* I swear that losing by 1 point can be way more frustrating than losing by 15…

Round 3 was as fun as Ascension promises to be.  It’s got such potential for good sniping, good rocket launching, good grenadiering… we again managed to play to the chorus of constant lead exchange.  This map taught us that Bentllama gets lucky with sniper shots (regularly), Ske7ch has his plasma pistol strategy down pat, and Evil Otto has the annoying propensity for showing up at violently inconvenient moments (we didn’t really get a sense for Shunji’s skill, but I think I recall him deciding to be annoying with the Banshee on several occasions). 

As Frankie mentions in his write-up, the deadliest battles didn’t happen in the center dish, but were instead transported to the platform space that yields easy access to our favorites: the shotgun, pistol, and sniper rifle.  The problem with protecting said area is that, like the dish, the different approaches are numerous so we had to endure several creative bombardments by opponents wielding everything from needlers and grenades, to pistols and Banshees.  More often than not, total annihilation was the reward reaped by both sides, but they had the upper hand by the end.

We didn’t (and don’t) like to lose, but after a few minutes of fuming silence followed by a few more minutes of muttered expletives and ribald derision (a therapeutic process, I assure you), we felt capable of appreciating how close we had come to beating Bungie, a justifiably tough Halo crew.  Now we take comfort in knowing how things will work out next time… What’s that, you say?  Rematch?

P.S.  I guarantee that the other three girls have entertaining stories to tell.  Be sure to ask them about it.  ; )