• Planet Earth
• The Matrix collection
• Transformers
• 300
• Casablanca
• The Bourne Identity
• Hot Fuzz

 

Check out the DC sports blog (by cheese-boy Dan Steinberg) on the Washington Post

Seems that the Wizards guard is boosting on Halo 3 with his friends, Dan has more:

Is Gilbert Cheating at Halo?

You thought Bill Belichick was bad? Just wait.

I was first alerted to this budding scandal via Reader Eli, who wrote with the tales of Gilbert's Halo 3 adventures. Using one of his three gamer tags (Agent Arenas is one), he'll start a "social doubles" game with a friend, each using a phony teammate. Once the game starts, the two phony players are eliminated, and the real players take turns beating each other up to drive up their experience points.

"I love Gil," Eli wrote, "and it's almost laughable what he's doing."

Threads concerning the matter popped up at Bungie.net and IGN.com, with the response mostly anti-Gil.

"Your stats obviously show what a joke you are. I'd be so friggin embarrassed if I was him," GreenYoshiJosh wrote.

"what a loser...... why waste ure time doing that..." Leprechaun007 wrote.

"I want to write an email to ESPN and see if they put this PTI or something," wrote MC187, who discovered the scam.

(Tell me again how I don't do real reporting.)

Anyhow, like any good reporter, I went to Gilbert to get his response.

"Gilbert," I said, approximately, "people say you're cheating at Halo 3."

"I'm cheating?" he said. "How am I cheating?"

"Gilbert," I asked, approximately," are you creating dummy games with two fake friends and using the wins to rack up experience points?"

"Yeah," he said, laughing. "Yeah."

Sigh.

"It's a glitch," he explained. "It's a glitch in the game. I seen some kids that were like 600s, they won 600 Halo games and we only had that game for two weeks. And all the kids go to school. So I'm like, 'What the hell you all doing?' And they said that's what they doing, two-on-two."

I don't play video games, and feel free to correct me, but let me try to explain, via Gilbert. The highest still rank you can get in the game is 50, and such rankings come from serious competition. But you can also rack up experience through "social" games that don't affect your actual skill ranking, and hence, the scam. Gilbert said he three accounts have skill ratings of 42, 45 and 47, but that this free experience can drive up your title from commander to major and double major and triple major and so on. Sort of ceremonial honors, in his view.

He said there are other Halo scams that he doesn't know how to pull off; one he described as "lagging," where kids somehow freeze you out of the game and then kill your helpless character.

"They go around killing you and get the win every time; there's people who've played the game 200 times and have 200 wins," he said. "People do that and they don't get complaints," Gilbert said. "But if I go two-on-two to get experience points?"

He said he just discovered the trick last night with a buddy, and that they did it about 25 times. He said usually he plays with the kids from his own team, Final Boss. And he scoffed at the suggestion that he was doing this to compensate for below-average gaming skills.

"That has nothing to do with me playing against other people, because when I play against other people I'm a 47 out of 50," he argued. "It has nothing to do with your [skill]. That's just like me playing basketball and I say, 'The first one to 100,000 shots...' and I go in there and say 'Yeah, I made 100,000, I won.' But when you go out there you can't shoot the ball."

In other words, his argument is that he can shoot the ball, so any trickeration should be forgiven. But now that he'd been called out, I suggested, he wouldn't keep pulling the scam, right?

"Why not?" he said. "I mean, who is it hurting? It's two dummy players playing against each other. It's not messing with anybody. I have my friend, it'll be him and his fake friend, me and my fake friend, we'll take turns losing back and forth. There's nobody involved. I can see if we were playing against other people, [but] it's not ranked games, it's social games. So that's the messed-up part. You can win things off of social, when you shouldn't [be allowed] to. All you have to do is do what we're doing. I guarantee everybody's doing it. I mean, how would they know anyway?"

Which is how I soon found myself on a nearby computer, watching an NBA All-Star and MVP candidate read video game message board threads on something called "Bungie.net," cackling at all the outraged comments from people named "Godofdarksouls" and "HydrogIsBack."

"They want to put this on PTI?" he said. "How do I reply?" he asked me. "I want to reply."

But then Coach Eddie Jordan showed up; "C'mon, GA, let's go watch tape," Eddie said.

To be continued, I guess.

I've just completed John Woo presents Stranglehold.  Ok, I was only able to get through it on normal so far, but it is a fantastic game.  If you are a fan of John Woo's Hong Kong movies, this will enthrall you.  It's a sequel of sorts to Hard Boiled and you play as Tequila (Chow Yun-fat's character).  You'll journey from Hong Kong to Chicago and back and have fun blasting everything to bits.  The environments are destructible and there are moves inspired by Woo's direction.  The game can get very difficult at some stages, especially on the higher difficulties. 

Rent the game, at the least, if you enjoy blowing things up.