College effectively killed my time for actual productive gaming, so I was forced to fall back onto straightforward and easy-to-save-and-quit shooters. Namely, Halo 3. Like most every other person on an American college campus, I was at least familiar with the Halo franchise prior to borrowing the game from a friend's roommate. I'd of course played Halo in the past, but I have never been anything close to any game's MVP, campaign OR multiplayer. But hey, what better way to kill time between classes than to improve what could become a valuable life skill? So, after working my way through the Normal and Heroic difficulties of Halo 3, I finally decided that I was ready for Legendary. After a relatively long time, I finally improved enough to be able to get through each level of the campaign with relative ease, and before I knew it I was watching the secret ending after the credits rolled. Ironically enough, not long after this accomplishment I got a call from a friend seeing if I wanted to come over for a Halo LAN party. It was this call that prompted me to think about whether or not I was actually prepared for facing off against actual human opponents.Now in shooters, certainly not unique to Halo, there is more often than not a marked difference between playing through the campaign and playing with and against other people. Campaigns, be they solo or two player, tend to be you and whatever meager allies accompany you against a veritable horde of enemies (albeit not always all at once). Games involving human teams and opponents just require a slightly different skill set. Campaigns need players to be able to fulfill one objective after another while shooting at mobs that are shooting back at you, and while they can be numerous, these mobs and their abilities tend to be very scripted and relatively simple to out think and maneuver. Games against human opponents can be more or less the same, but the key difference is that you are up against opponents that are not scripted and, odds are, have out thought and out maneuvered the exact same enemies that you have.
While being great at one doesn't necessarily guarantee being great at the other, skill in one area does make it easier to adjust and adapt to the other. I suppose I'm banking on the hope that facing off against an opponent in a first person shooter is more or less the same as facing off against an opponent in a real time strategy game in that it all comes down to being able to read your opponent and reacting accordingly. I guess we'll see!
