~ Thirty-one days earlier ~

Today is not a normal day. My longtime partner of almost ten years and I have just broken up. We are living together, in business together, with dog together, and everything is intertwined - family and friends and schedules and work and finances. It was my first real relationship, and I'd assumed there'd never have to be a second. Yet here I am, suddenly feeling adrift and alone and so goddamned scared. I want nothing more than to take solace in distractions.

I feel like I need to get as far away from here as possible but things we had set in motion years ago meant that simply wasn't an option. We are about to open a business together, long in the making. In the short term at least, I have to see this through.

Somehow I got through 8-9 hours of full time work today, only to return to a place that no longer feels like home, and work alongside the woman who I can no longer hold. It gets late. I sit up in bed, utterly exhausted, and decide to boot up Wind Waker HD on the Wii U gamepad.

The twinge of frustration upon first trying to move the camera in Wind Waker HD is a familiar feeling. I'm an "inverter" you see, so this means a trip into the pause menu for me. The trip is a little longer than usual though, as Wind Waker HD has no option for third-person inverted camera controls. Horizontal inversion, sure! But outside of the first-person "look" view, there's nothing for me. I'm actually going to have to put up with this.

The slight frustration quickly becomes a question of whether or not I would continue to play this game at all, especially given my current state of mind. Yet I never finished Wind Waker on the Gamecube, plus the HD version looks so damn PRETTY. It's like a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. It commands my full attention. I welcome the distraction.

So I put up with it - until I get better at it - until, a few hours of game time in, I stop actively thinking about it. I look at the time. Shit. I guess I only get three hours of sleep before work in the morning. "Well at least I'm over this camera thing," I think to myself.

"It almost feels normal."

~ Thirty days later ~

Link's sword is properly in Ganon's head. Ganon says something about the wind blowing before he turns to stone. The King talks about how his thoughts are often with his kingdom of old, how he feels bound to Hyrule.

I think of the things I feel bound to. I think of my former partner. It's been a long month.

As the credits roll, I feel like I need to be in a different headspace. I check the Xbox, and sure enough my copy of Wolfenstein: The New Order has finally finished installing. May as well give it a whirl before bed.

As soon as the game gives me control of the character, something feels immediately wrong.

~ Several months later ~

I've just purchased Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Waiting for 50Gb to install, then 15Gb to download gives me plenty of time to think. The last few months have been a blur.

We are both exhausted.

Our business is almost ready to open.

I can hear her laughing through the wall dividing our rooms.

This all feels normal.

The signature Xbox chime pulls me from my thoughts as the install finally completes. I boot up Halo CE and within a few minutes I'm running rings around the Covenant. Oh, and "Look invert" is set to "off". This feels normal too.

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(I'd originally posted this as a reply to a forum topic, but thought there was enough there to constitute its own blog-thing)

Last week I was replied to by the wikileaks account on twitter after I questioned them jumping on the 'gate hashtag. As a result, my timeline was unreadable for a good couple of days - not even with abuse (though there was some in there) but just so much goddamned NOISE. Tweet after tweet of useless junk, just 'gaters talking at each other in slogans and @mentioning me in their back-and-forths. I would occasionally engage one in conversation, but it was nigh impossible to keep track of who was saying what amidst the din. It's impossible to reason with an attention-seeking stubborn hydra who has infinite spare time and nothing better to do.

Over the past few weeks I've started to feel shitty for sharing a lifelong hobby and passion with a bunch of assholes who seem to have no sense of empathy or compassion. Honestly, this whole thing is a black hole that is sucking up so much of people's time - time which would otherwise be spent on making games. Enjoying games. Critiquing games. It's heartening to see more and more reasonable people making their sentiments public, even though in the case of women it almost always means another round of threats, abuse and possible doxxing. My little twitter adventure is a blip compared to the amount of shit they must get, and it only makes me admire them more for speaking out about it.

I know this is about seven years too late, but I was thinking about tension in narrative games, and how easy it is to ruin a good buildup with something as trivial as bad checkpointing or enemy placement. It got me thinking about the last time this was really made clear to me.

It got me thinking about Halo: Reach.

I had a memorable (not in the good way) experience at the end of Halo: Reach that really stuck with me (spoilers follow)

The final level of Halo: Reach arrives on the back of an impressive buildup. The campaign is dark, illustrating the folly of fighting this unknown foe and yet showing moments of true bravery and sacrifice. There's a certain doomy inevitability that permeates this game, making it unique amongst the Halos, I think.

Any way, this final stage shows me my ultimate objective right from the beginning - the Pillar of Autumn. Covenant are everywhere, and I have (according to the story) limited time to get to the ship and deliver Cortana. I'm playing on Heroic (because that's the way Halo is meant to be played!)

Off I go, playing faster, more carelessly than usual. The orchestral score is fantastic, constantly building, constantly driving me forward. Each enemy encounter is now heightened by the knowledge that it's slowing me down - time is of the essence here, and these dudes picked the wrong Spartan to mess with.

Amid the hail of grenades and weapons fire, I catch a fleeting glimpse of the Autumn in the distance, a looming beacon over the battlefield, growing larger as I inch closer. I am having a ton of fun right now.

After tense gun battles and breakneck driving sequences, I finally make it to the flagship. Cortana is delivered, though at a great cost, as I'm the only Spartan left of my team. As the covenant ships converge, I choose to stay on this dying planet and provide cover fire for the Autumn's escape. A suitable, bittersweet end for a brave warrior.

This should have been the climactic scene where I ran to the turret unimpeded, and expertly took down a couple of covenant ships while the Autumn took off just in the nick of time. It would have been awesome.

But that's not what happens. Instead, a covenant cruiser drops off a bunch of enemies between me and the turret. "Whatever, I don't have time for this!" I shout in my mind as the music swells and I rush to meet them head-on. "Time to cut through these fools and get to that turret!"

Turns out "these fools" are tough-as-nails cloaked Elites that don't place much value on dramatic tension. They cut me down instantly. The music stops. A beat passes. Reload.

The music is swelling again! I run up towards the Elites, firing madly and throwing grenades like the badass just-in-time-to-save-the-Autumn Spartan that I am. But now one of them is behind be somehow. Dead. Music Stops. Reload.

This happens a few more times. Like a LOT actually. By now all the tension is gone, I'm frustrated as hell and I just want this to be over. Eventually, somehow, I take them all out with barely enough ammo to spare. I'm relieved, but not enthused. I'm sure as hell not "immersed."

I jump on the turret, ready to take out the last couple of rogue ships - but here's more than a couple. They shoot the Autumn down and it's game over. Music stops. Reload. Motherf...

You see, my turret has a low fire rate and each shot has travel time, so hitting these moving targets before they shoot down the Autumn becomes an exercise in trial and error. Another death. I now know where the third ship comes in from. Another death. Another death. I plot out the exact arc to swivel the turret so that it fires just in time to take out ship four while I reposition the crosshairs over the empty space that I know ship five will soon occupy.

Another death.

WHY IS ANY OF THIS HAPPENING?!?!

30 seconds (maybe a minute at the most) of game time should have passed from the moment I dropped off Cortana to the moment the Autumn broke atmosphere. The dramatic tension that had been so expertly built up over the course of the level, of the entire game, should have culminated in a powerful moment of cinematic payoff. Instead I got half an hour of trial and error, frustration and disbelief, dying and reloading. By the time I finally got it right, it didn't matter anymore, and the poignancy of my final moments alone on a doomed planet fending off an endless covenant horde was shattered.

Halo: Reach got so close. So close to one of those transcendent moments where everything comes together, where everything clicks and feels exactly as it should. Like in a well-crafted film where you realise what the twist is seconds before the main character does, and get to share in their revelation.

But it wasn't that. And even though I can look back now and say I enjoyed my time playing through Halo: Reach, my lasting impression is one of squandered tension. A missed opportunity. A botched payoff.

Maybe I should have played it on Normal.

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