A slight chill was in the air this October evening, but fire grenades and flamethrowers can keep you warm. And so, once again, we gathered for Halo Night. As it has been in recent months with conflicting schedules, tonight was pretty light, with only five in attendance. Even Riley Craven missed Halo Night for the first time since before we started the website last year. As we've found with recent Halo Nights, smaller numbers opens a whole new realm of gameplay.

We started on a classic: old-fashioned Slayer on Last Resort. As a medium-sized map, its larger areas allowed for strategy and its confined spaces allowed for frequent combat, despite the lower player count. John486 established his domination in the absence of Riley Craven early in the match and maintained it throughout, winning 25 to 17 (Zamurai 278 had second place).

Later in the night, however, we experimented, combining the generally useless Grifball arena (well, useless for anything but Grifball) with the "Hide and Seek" variant of Infection. The basic premise was that non-infected were invisible, but it was wide open for them to walk up behind the rocket-wielding zombie... Playing this combination with more than five players could indeed be very interesting. SPARTEN 4000 was the victor of the map, and bubbagump finished scoreless, but it was still fun.

We also played a few rounds of Rocket Race, with stinklikeonion being the "annoying man out" (a role he is well-suited to fill). The teams were moved around a bit between rounds, but everyone got a taste of victory at some point or another. The first time, though, SPARTEN 4000 and John486 dominated despite stinklikeonion's meager attempts to even the playing field, winning 10-5 in under two-and-a-half minutes.

In a round of Slayer in Divided We Fall, bubbagump was fortunate enough to spawn the sweet spot, and he made full use of his time there. Beyond the simple grenadier and machine gun kills he collected, he managed multiple vehicle laser kills, including two on highly mobile targets (a Chopper and a Ghost) rather than the slow and easy-to-hit Wraiths. It took him a minute to figure out where he was, but once he realized what was spawning at his feet, he enjoyed the token of luck.