This month's Halo Night had a small turnout once again, being midway through the Summer and with some players out for Victory Weekend. However, despite having only six players for most of the night (Mighty Nimrod 6 came in late as he was working on VBS), we had a lot of fun. The major theme of the night seemed to be Rocket Races, an appreciated suggestion by Riley Craven. We played seven matches of Rocket Race, which sounds like a lot until you hear that we played a whopping twenty-five matches total.

During the early matches of Rocket Race, we had six players, which made for a nice, even three teams, and fast-paced, driving-centered gameplay. The matches tended to go quickly, but none so much as the round on Standoff, wherein John486's amazing driving skills won the match (10 to 3 to 1) within two minutes. In fact, his driving was so good that his teammate fired only six rockets through the whole match and was knocked off the back of the Mongoose even less.

After a few quick rounds of Rocket Race, we returned to classic Slayer on a classic Halo Night variant: Direction. We actually ended up playing this map twice, as Riley Craven's Xbox lost network connectivity (bad cable?) midway through to what appeared to be an easy victory for John486. Once we restarted, Riley Craven controlled the lead for much of the match until John486 once again swept in and commandeered it (final scores of 25 and 24).

Returning to the small team approach on Orbital, we played a 2v2v2 round of Team Slayer, which proved to be a lot of fun. A lot more strategy seemed to come into play with such a clear opportunity for front-man and rear-guard. Riley Craven and stinklikeonion gained the lead within the first few seconds of the match and only lost the lead once for a few seconds early on in the match (though they were [very] briefly tied several times).

Toward the end of the night, we returned to Rocket Race with seven players. We kept the three-team model and left stinklikeonion on a team by himself to just be an annoyance to everyone else. After four rounds, each of the three teams felt particularly "picked on" by him, but he explained that without a Mongoose, he can't chase after anyone. So he's left with being trying to trap people and keep them there. He seemed amused, though the rest of the players lacked his enthusiasm.