The reality and the grind

a little over 3 months ago I had decided to come back to halo after taking 2 years off from playing any video games. A lot of friends had asked me why come back, and my response was MCC. I have a lot of excitement for Halo 2 on dedicated servers and how much fun it will be.

What I didnt know or expect was how hard it would be to come back and get into what I considered "shape" for MCC. The first issue was remembering my login for my original xbox live account so I could recover it, that took about a day of going thru emails upon emails upon emails. Once I sorted that out i logged into Halo 3 for the first time in 2 years, the sound of the music, mmmm, i missed this, it was like a warm blanket.......

Im an MLG player, always have been, so i changed the playlist to MLG and up pops my rank, 45. In my mind I knew all the strats, all the maps, all the jumps, the nade placements, the callouts, but executing as I found out after a long hiatus was going to prove to be a very painful one.

I start up matchmaking and get into my first game, and promptly get my shit pushed in. It was an ampflied slayer game and everything seemed so fast, my aim was all over the place, i was missing jumps, late on callouts, blowing nades throws, some i threw at myself. WTF had happened, how the did I go from playing in MLG tournements and being pretty solid to I cant even buy a kill in just 2 short years. OLD AGE lel... over a 2 week period i continued to play everyday as I was determined to get myself back to my old playing days. well.....I went from a 45 to a 28, it was just a downward spiral of suck and I was not happy about it. I was spending 4 hours a night now every night trying to get better and I wasnt getting better.

thankfully Trizev and Biorod still played halo and were still damn good. I needed to get back to the my old practice routines from back in the day. The first was my aim and sniping and nades. So octagon it was, so for months every day i made them start the night with octagon and i could slowly start to feel progress being made as i the gap between me winning those games grew further and further. instead of winning by 1 i would start winning by 10, then 20 then 60. We started winning the majority of our games instead of losing them which was nice, but it took a lot of practice, more than I had anticipated. It was like my brain knew what needed to be done but my reactions just wernt there.

After 3.5 months i decided to create a twink tag, i wanted to see how far my progress had come. within 3 days I went from a 1 to a 40, and have been bouncing between 40-45 since. Id say im ready for MCC and that im back, with some major differences. Im older now, 38, so while im still competitive i have a lot more fun in games now then i did before, and im not as upset about losing as i used to be. Thats doesnt mean i wont bitch from time to time, it just means i wont put my hand thru a wall lol.

all thats left to do is buy an xbone and await the mcc drop. november cant come soon enough