On a hot day in a typical Texas June, a gathering of men joined together to participate what has become a time-honored tradition: Halo Night. With summer definitely upon us, we had some people out of town, and others under the weather, which led to a mere seven players. On the plus side, we were able to play all the new maps thanks to the need for only two Xbox consoles (which just happens to be how many in our group have all the map packs).

One of our earliest matches was on a Sandbox map variant called Antiquity, which was found online by stinklikeonion. It features a nice balance between open spaces, close quarters, and falling to your doom. And there was a lot of that part. In fact, at one point, stinklikeonion jumped over the edge to flee from the onslaught of Riley Craven, who, in a reckless moment, jumped right over the edge after stinklikeonion, shooting him all the way down. Despite the ground below being littered with corpses, the map proved to be a lot of fun.

Our first official Halo Night expedition into Avalanche took the form of Vehicle Fun 2.0, an aptly-named vehicle-heavy symmetrical variant of the horseshoe-shaped map. Many players found themselves disappointed (and others relieved) by the severe diminishment of the Hornet's attack power on Avalanche. It didn't seem to inhibit second-timer Daryl Endicott, however, as he quickly outgunned and outflew vehicle veteren stinklikeonion.

We briefly played a classic map, Guardian, with a new-to-Halo-Night twist: Infection. We also found that Infection matches are extremely brief when playing with just seven people. The match lasted right at three minutes, but stinklikeonion managed to still get a zombie killing spree while being the last one standing. He, like many other remaining humans, found himself using fallen zombie swords as his weapon of choice. At least this time everyone seemed to understand how Infection works.

Heading back to Sandbox, albeit with a very different feel from Antiquity (we played the default map this time), we tried a round of Rockets. Despite complaints of his rockets being deflected (maybe someone's using the Force?), Riley Craven performed well, including a "strategically placed" (the rest of us call it "aiming") rocket that gained him an easy double kill. Plays like that could not match up against a bad variable, though, as he rocketed his way past the 25 marker, winning with 26 (with Riley Craven in second with just 19).

We also played another round of what is quickly becoming a staple of Halo Night: Mayhem on Standoff. bubbagump and stinklikeonion performed well, though some of the newer players were still clearly getting accustomed to the high speed and shields situation. We made a minor tweak this week to the gameplay settings for Mayhem, changing shield leech from 50% to 25%. It seemed to make a notable difference in the pace of the game, as people died without needing to be assassinated.