Halo 4 bootcamp: the quest for a respectable K/D ratio

You know that bit in every sports or martial arts saga ever made, when the hero takes a pummelling at the hands of his own immaturity or hubris? The bit where he proves himself unworthy not just of his foe, but of himself, a broken ruin on the canvas? Well that was the week before last in Halo, for me. And this week gone? This week gone was supposed to be that other bit in every sports or martial arts saga, when the hero learns some tough truths, claws back his dignity and rises from the ashes to jump-kick his former conquerer square in the macho glands. It wasn't. I'm still terrible at Halo, though I think it's fair to say that I'm now vastly better informed of just how terrible I am.

If you recall, the purpose of this blog series is to render myself worthy of Halo 4's boulder-crushing awesomeness in November. Thanks to sympathetic OXM readers and unsympathetic colleagues, we now have some clear objectives. Clearer objectives, anyway. One, I'm going to build a map in Forge World and use it to utterly humiliate my aforesaid colleagues - a heinous marriage of the most unfair elements the game's editing suite can muster. It's going to be like D-Day, only without the underlying note of whimsy. And two? I'm going to turn this here pathetic Halo: Reach K/D ratio into something I won't feel embarrassed about when they carve it into my gravestone. Last Monday, the figure stood at an abject 0.6. At the time of writing, it's soared to the giddy heights of 0.61, like a Warthog tipped by the echo of a passing fart. So there's improvement, then. At this rate, I expect to hit battle-readiness for Halo 4 sometime during or after the release of Halo 6.

I had a few observations to make about where Halo: Reach differs from other shooters last week. With your kind permission, I'd like to qualify them a tad before we plough on with the tale of how I fared in certain, carefully selected competitive modes. Firstly, the one about the weapon drops exerting a Magneto-like power over the fortunes of war. This is still true - a man with a sniper rifle can royally wreck everybody's mojo on a vertical map, like Spire - but there are caveats. Heavy weapons take a bit of skill. You can't, as I discovered, just swipe that Covenant grenade launcher thing, swan down a side tunnel on Delta and bounce bundles of kaboom around till everybody's a smear of Spartan chutney, because if you rush in wielding a gun which fires timed projectiles, any opposing player with a measure of sense is going to scurry under your shells and uppercut your face off.

And as showy as the special guns can be, their usefulness pales before the apocalyptic all-purpose appeal of the Designated Marksman Rifle, which is often the starting gun. Pace your shots to match the blooming and dwindling of the aim reticle, swerve gently from side to side as you fire and always aim for the head, and nine times out of ten you'll comfortably nobble a player like me, who understands all these things in theory but can't persuade his thumbs to do the honours.

I'm not much shop with grenades, either, though again I'm starting to see what's necessary. Prior to this, I thought of the standard issue UNSC grenade as an amusing means of moving dead bodies and other loose furniture around, a sort of futuristic Jack in the Box filled with corpses. Only now do I understand their cleverness and, in particular, how they "integrate" with overshields. Getting a grip on the uses and abuses of grenades in Halo is like unlocking a new class in an RPG, so drastic is the gear-shift involved.