This is all about Firefight, the super cool mode on Halo 3: ODST where you are in an arena and wave after wave of Covenant rush at you, shooting their futuristic neon laser guns in your direction. It was going to be about Pokémon, I figured I’d not written about it in a while. I am still playing Pokémon Emerald on my PSP, but it’s slow going as I’m trying to level up every catchable Pokémon in an area before moving on to the next. How long have I been playing? Two weeks? Three? Anyway, I’m only up to Lavaridge Town, still with only a vague idea of what my final team will be, fighting-fire-chicken and HM-whore-Linoone aside. So yeah, FIREFIGHT!
Jane and I have been playing it quite a lot over the past few nights, and although we’ve only been playing on easy, we’ve racked up the 200k Achievements on Rally Point, Crater, Windward and Last Exit. They only took about 80 minutes each, and luckily we managed to hit the 200k before all six skulls were active – we usually got it with Tough Luck, Catch, Tilt, Famine and Mythic. Adding Black Eye to that combination would’ve killed us, for sure.
The first few waves of the first round of any set is always easy if you have access to a turret – as Catch isn’t turned on, the enemies don’t throw many grenades. When Catch is on, however, move around a lot or you’ll be peppered with exploding blue things, or worse, patches of fire. Flame grenades are one of the things that will kill you most. At first I kinda freaked out when skulls like Tilt and Famine went on, but on easy they don’t tend to make that much of a difference, you can still power through most things with a few melee attacks, even Brutes. Just keeping your head down and getting on with the job in hand is a better approach. Melee attacks are even better if you have a Gravity Hammer (even if it’s run out of juice), as killing five enemies in a row with it nets you a nice points bonus. I’ll say this again, just to clarify: Yes, even if it’s run out of battery and you can only do standard melee attacks with it, it still counts towards the Hammer Spree/Dream Crusher.
Last Exit was the first one we cracked – having a supply of Ghosts at hand really helped. That, and the map design gives you a massive amount of control over where your next enemies are coming from (unless it’s Drones or Jet-pack Brutes, of course). We started well on Windward, clearing the landing pads before the Covenant even got inside, but it got quite tough towards the end where we were pretty much pinned down in the middle room. Still, we powered through, the extra points from killing the Banshee helping loads (Keeping the Missile Pods intact is a key point on this map). Crater was simple enough – I had actually scored the 200k on this one on easy by myself before, and by this point I’d figured out that using an empty Hammer was brilliant for points. Rally Point, again, was simple enough, no real problems there. Well, apart from the Wraiths, but the points they gave offset the lives they cost.
It may have only been like 40-50 Gamerscore, but all in all, we’ve had a great time killing Covenant together.
