I have the flag.
On my radar, a swarm of red dots is closing in from my right. I duck into a tunnel, bullets pinging my shields. A teammate in a badly damaged vehicle, my ticket out of here, is hurtling towards me. I break hard in his direction as he swerves the truck and crashes into a nearby wall. I have no faith in his driving skills, but he's my only shot at salvation.
I dive into the passenger seat. My teammate makes to reverse and get us back on the road, but he takes just a tick too long. I look over just in time to see my would-be savior get yanked out of his seat, his skull bashed in with the butt of an assault rifle.
Panicking, and seeing that our hijacker is headed for my side of the vehicle, I jam on the button that will bail me out of the seat. In so doing, I accidentally thumb two buttons at once. The truck explodes. My world goes white.
I'm 30 yards away before I realize what happened. All vehicles in Halo explode if they take enough hits, and that other button I'd pressed was the one that swung my flag like a weapon. It had done the last bit of damage to the already ruined truck. The blast shredded my attacker while blowing me clear to safety with a shred of health intact.
I laugh my ass off. This is Halo 4 multiplayer, more ridiculous than any episode of Red vs. Blue.
The 2012 Xbox 360 shooter may clothe itself in the raiment of serious sci-fi drama, but its exaggerated physics systems make multiplayer matches play out like slapstick comedy. The bumbling characters in the parody web video series Red vs. Blue are more appropriate characterizations of the way Halo players act than anyone in the game's actual plot.
With the recent release of "Champions," the fourth and possibly final package of downloadable content for Halo 4, it's a good time to look back on its most popular feature.
Microsoft has sold over 8 million copies of Halo 4 so far, and at any given moment, about 25,000 people are playing it online. Halo 4 has a lot of gameplay features that previous entries do not, like Call of Duty-style equipment loadouts, weapon drops, and sprinting.
But those ridiculous, only-in-Halo moments remain, like the spontaneously exploding jeep or the bullet that bounces off a friendly soldier's shield and kills the person who fired it.
The developers of Halo, previously Bungie and now internal Microsoft studio 343 Industries, have always tried to balance the product both as a serious competitive game and as a vehicle for cheap laughs. Sure, the boys in the lab put a lot of effort into tuning the damage-per-second on that pistol, but they've also spent time fine-tuning players' ability to hump the corpse of their fallen enemies.
Called "teabagging" by players and "celebratory crouching" by Bungie, it is achieved by alternately crouching and standing while straddling a dead body, and it has always been a fan-favorite feature of the series. The games' designers have embraced it, accommodating their hump-happy players by pointing a camera at the action after you're killed. Every time you're bested, you get a few seconds to watch some guy named BluntLuver420 virtually violate you.
Not all humor in Halo multiplayer is so crass, but it is usually violent and filled with schadenfreude.
It's not enough to just shoot a guy when you can stick a grenade to his feet and laugh while he careens into his own teammates. Halo pretends to be about headshots and well-timed punches, but it's at its best in that moment when some gutsy lunatic successfully hijacks a flying enemy vehicle while 200 feet in the air.
Many of the maps in older Halo games had features that were meant to provoke crazy things. The Halo 3 map called "Narrows," for example, had two giant launch pads on either side of a bottomless abyss. Inevitably, players from opposing teams would sprint into both pads at the same time and collide in an spray of bullets and a tangle of legs.
"Zanzibar," a Halo 2 map, featured a giant wheel in the center of the level that could be ridden like a gigantic hamster exercise toy. There was rarely any sort of tactical advantage in climbing into it, but players got a kick out of climbing it and hopping down on enemies from above.
Sadly, almost none of the 24 maps in Halo 4 are designed with such shenanigans in mind. Most are designed to work solely as well-balanced arenas for combat, rather than playsets filled with fun toys. Matches in Halo 4 often feel desperately devoid of the zany style of fun that could be had in many of past Halo game arenas.
But of course, there are still crazy moments.
After that warthog exploded, I made it back to base totally unscathed. I was toting the last flag that my team needed to take the victory.
A few of my teammates saw me as I neared the capture point and began jumping around in celebration. Instead of immediately turning in the flag and ending the game, I celebrated with them, spinning wildly in circles and firing my pistol into the air like a man drunk with power. We stood on each others' heads. We punched a vehicle until it exploded. One of us was killed by the shrapnel, and he could be heard laughing maniacally over his Xbox Live headset.
A guy from the other team stumbled upon the show, fired a few shots, and was immediately taken down with punches and shots from three of my own. He fell amongst the center of the group, mere feet from our own well-protected flag.
Somewhere else in the world, that Halo 4 player sat on his couch and watched as a whole team of blue guys crouched repeatedly over his dead body.
