I love to shoot’em between the eyes
“I am looking for them through my 10x scope sniper-rifle, while continuously moving left and right to make it hard for them to snipe me. I spot two of them coming from behind the far tower to the left.
I now have a tough choice to make, I can either go for body shots, which are much easier, but require at least two hits to kill, or I can go for the instant kill head-shot, which is much harder to land. Since there is two enemies, and since my bullets will leave a trail revealing my position, I opt for the head-shots to give the second guy less time to look around and fire at me.
I line up my scope, I focus, I steady my aim, and I get the first moving head within my cross-hair, I fire, he drops. Now the other dude is on to me since he saw the trail of my bullet, he turns around and I can see his visors looking towards me. He fires first, but luckily he misses, and that’s all the time I need to land a head-shot and take him out.
Just when I was about to take a sigh of relief for landing two head-shots, I see my body falling down, I just got wacked from behind, the cycle starts all over again.
“
This whole hunting scenario takes around 1.5 seconds within Halo, one of the most popular online first person shooter games. The purpose of this little story, besides showing you the dark side of Amr, is to emphasize how critical latency is for online gamers. Unlike doing a web search, or reading your email online, the smallest delay can turn the outcome of an online match upside down. This was the motivator behind my paper entitled “The vMatrix: Equi-Ping Game Server Placement For Pre-Arranged First-Person-Shooter Multiplayer Matches”.
Click here for a nice PowerPoint summarizing the idea I proposed in this paper.
That said, I am really puzzled why I like such killing games. I mean, I never held a rifle in the real world, and would never think about shooting a guy in the body, not to mention the head. Yet, I get an amazing kick out of Halo (its my favorite game by far), is it the visceral feeling of landing such a perfect kill ? Is it the adrenalin rush I get when in a tough situation ? Not sure, all I know is that at the end of a long working day, if I spend 60 minutes playing Halo, I feel much better and I am ready to go to bed 😉
Why do you love killing games ?
— amr
PS: This is a nice Halo l33t sniping video clip: Halo Killing Spree.
You can see a lower quality version for it at YouTube: