The Halo Night on January 9 was our largest to date, with 12 players by the end of the night, scattered across a projector, a big screen, and two smaller screen TVs. General JJv2 even took one for the team, making a trip to the local GameStop to buy an extra copy of Halo 3 so no one would have to sit out.

Despite the delays associated with acquiring Halo 3 and downloading map packs (not to mention the unreasonably long time it takes to recover a gamertag [which had to happen twice during the night]), we managed to get quite a few good games in.

One of the newcomers, bubbagump, started the night well with a double kill against Zamurai and Mighty Nimrod 6 barely a minute into the first match. He continued to perform well throughout the rest of the night.

In the first round of Capture the Flag we've played in a while, Mighty Nimrod 6 demonstrated for the rest of us exactly how lethal a flag pole is. Twice. In as many seconds. And the second one was the opposing team's flag carrier... It wasn't an impressive moment for the blue team.

Since we had enough players to have even teams, we gave Grifball a try for the second time. It proved to be much more fun than last time since we had even teams. During the hammer-filled mayhem of the second match, stinklikeonion managed to get his first Killpocalypse, only to have Mighty Nimrod 6 steal his thunder a split second later.

A relative newcomer, fartbubble's son, managed to embarrass the crowd of grown men with his 11-year-old skills during a second trial of a new game type we've dubbed "Things Unseen." This time we played on Snowbound, and we found that the electrified-looking outline of an overshielded invisible foe was much more difficult to see against a white landscape. The youth seemed to have little trouble, though, as he took the first lead and regained it for an extended period toward the end of the match.

As that match came to a close, the final two players arrived (I Epeen King I and a EWatz v2). Since we all expected to fall to the King repeatedly, the mark of a winner was simply to get second place. The rest of us acted like first place (and the associated triple kills, killing frenzies, and sniper sprees) didn't exist. It certainly made us feel better.