Playing HALO With Your Special Lady Friend

I don't think I'm inside my own mind today... and it's not because I punched my girlfriend in the head at least four or five times in the head yesterday...

IN HALO

Come on people!

Yes, I got Halo: Reach over Christmas time and my girlfriend has become absolutely addicted to the game. I bought it because I have many friends from out west who play the game and I thought it would be a great way to keep in touch with them. I enjoy Halo: Reach and I think it's made many improvements to the Halo franchise that had bothered me about Halo 2 and Halo 3 but this blog isn't about that. This is about the experience that playing Halo on X-Box live with your Girlfriend.

I'm sure there are many of you who have played online games with your girlfriends. Many of you red blooded full y testosterone infused males know the... aggression that comes from playing a first person shooter. To digress for a moment, Kobe Bryant was on Conan the other night and he talked about how when he plays basketball he enters his alter ego "The Black Mamba" The fact that that is Vivica A. Fox in Kill Bill aside. When I play Halo, I enter my Black Mamba...

My... Enigmatic Evil if you will.

I get aggressive, I get worked up. I love to talk trash, I absolutely LOVE  it. I will curse to the extent that a sailor would most likely blush. I enter this zone that is really unlike anything else I experience in day-to-day life and when I am playing with my girlfriend it's... different.

Not different in the sense that I play in a different way but it's different because she's there. Now she is not like me, mostly because she's a woman obviously. She will get worked up and she will talk trash but she rarely does this on the microphone like I do. She will often do this with the microphone on mute and she rarely says things on the mic to the other players.

Here's an example of an awful thing that I would say to a player online: "Fuck you! I hope you inherit a sexually transmitted disease!!!"

Here is an example of an awful thing that she would say to a player online: "You are an awful person!"

Quite frequently she is sitting beside me while I am 'in the zone' and she will be trying to talk me down because, I'm not going to lie, I get nasty. I will be sitting there, telling a guy about how he bites cocks and here she is sitting beside me rolling her eyes and asking me not to be so rude. It's funny to me because when I play Halo it's like I have Tourette's, there is no filter, no control. I want to slay and if that means slaying verbally then so be it!

Here is a common exchange between the GF and I while we're playing halo.

Me: FUCK FUCK FUCK

Her: What?

Me: I just died

Her: Oh I thought you were saying that to me?

Me: No... if I start swearing profusely, assume that I just died

Me Later: SHIT!!!!

Her: Huh?

Me: Died again

Her: Oh... good.

I mean there's no sympathy especially if she gets a kill on me, and usually when she does there's a well timed "Suck it!" thrown at me from her direction. She gets FURIOUS when I kill her, not as mad as when I die, especially by her hand or gun but still. Usually this is because I will stalk her. Make a condescending remark before my fist smacks the back of her helmet and puts her down, usually followed by a nefarious cackle because it's amusing!

There's certain social guidelines when playing Halo that throw all the camaraderie of relationships out the door. It's kill or be killed, every man, woman or child for themselves. And there's a lot of children on Halo.

To digress from the lady friend for a moment. Trash talking children is hilarious. They're kids, usually 13-ish and their trash talk is usually awful, consisting of "Fuck you!" or "you suck!" So to throw big words at them is awesome because they really have NO idea how to respond. It's like "You suck, noob!" "Yeah... well, come talk to me when your balls drop, infantile!" "Uhh.... you suck! Pwned!" There's just no intelligence there. I mean, when I was a teenager, I was still a top notch trash talker. It's in my blood.

Back to topic, playing Halo with my special lady friend is an awesome experience overall. I don't think she's always ready for when I'm embracing my inner enigmatic evil and this is mostly because she's not always ready for how worked up that Halo makes her, or makes me. The trash talk, the aggression, Halo is a full contact sport where the only contact is button mashing. It's a lot of fun playing with her and a lot of that fun is entirely based on the kinds of conversations we will have. In the future, we will play more Halo and we will punch, shoot, and swear at each other but it's all in good fun!

Until next time guys, PEACE!