On the 52nd day so far in 2011 over the 100° mark in DFW, eight guys got together to cool off with some cold Dr. Pepper, warm back up with some hot pizza, and then settle in with some tepid demonstrations of Halo skills. Rambiant joined us this month for the first time in a long time, and he even took home the O'Brien award after a tight competition with Riley Craven, the trophy's keeper for the past two Halo Nights. So, good on ya, chap.

We played a quick round of Headhunter early on, with an unsurprising victory by WhiteNoise486. Perhaps the more surprising aspect was that he didn't gain the lead until late in the match, just inching by mushashi. And no, that's not a typo. On a skills-heavy match type like Headhunter, mushashi performed well, reaching 13 to WhiteNoise486's 17 and bubbagump's next-best 9.

Yet again, stinklikeonion tried to load the first Halo Night custom-built map on King of the Hill: Mush Pit. And yet again, for the third month in a row, he failed miserably. And, for the third month in a row, Mush Pit proved to be quite the decent Slayer map. And though we attempted to play a round of Hogs of War, the "unanimous" (as Riley Craven put it) decision of half the players was that Hogs of War sucks. So for the most part, we stuck with classics like Capture the Flag on Hemorrhage.

Like any other good Halo Night, however, we balanced the new with the old. We tried out Safe Havens, an Infection variant we'd never played at Halo Night before. We played simple and team Slayer on several maps. We had a round of Grifball, and a round of Shotty Snipers. We played a good variety of maps, mixing things up a good bit, leading to a decent balance of winners.