After venturing outside of Bungie.net for Humpdays we brought it back home this week in a Humpday against the nearly 2,000-members strong group Mjolnir Battle Tactics. The original intent was to play MBT for their three year anniversary (sure, why not) but we just missed that date by a couple of weeks. Last week, Frank and I were talking about ways to change the Humpday going forward and coupled with the simple truth that I’ve been on a weird binge of Judd Apatow films lately (don’t ask, seriously) so we decided to start a random McLovin Ride-a-long where we’ll pluck someone from the Community and have them roll with us for the night and hope they get the booze to the party at the end.

Ride-a-Long’s won’t be every week, they’ll occur from time to time, though. This week’s McLovin is a guy named TJ Ramirez who had a film on Bungie Favorites eons and eons ago that piqued a bunch of our interest (it was a 25-0 on Guardian in Ranked Lone Wolves). A bunch of us have played with him from time to time – I’ve known him for a while – and he’s never called us racist names, so we brought him along.

Coincidentally, he’s a general.

Bungie

• TJ Scoot
• Eamon
• Frankie
• JonnyOThan
• New0001

McLovin

• TJ Ramirez

Mjolnir Battle Tactics

• Papa John0
• AgateElite
• jmemerson567
• BigD Bassist 11
• EMPTY SPARK
• Spirit113

Game 1

Team Slayer, Guardian
Tone of Game: Crowded

Five on five is a lot of men on Guardian. I’ve been wrestling with a six-year old habit these last few days trying to switch my control scheme from Default, where it’s rested quietly ever since I picked up a Halo Xbox controller, to Bumper Jumper, one of the new control schemes in Halo 3. I don’t really have a good reason beyond “I picked up a controller in the playtest lab and it was set to Bumper Jumper so I tried it and was naturally even worse than usual with it, but I could do things with that control scheme much easier than I could with default.” That said, I’m relearning the game, much to Frank’s enjoyment. When you see a reload where a melee should’ve been in the films – now you know why.

Jon Cable (JonnyOthan) was on hand tonight and that means his Patriots-ian like record of undefeated in the Humpdays was at stake yet again. And despite the crowding we had our way with them.

Final Score: 50-34 (Bungie Wins)
Check out the Game Assets

Game 2

New0001 got home from work, or the gym, or karaoke at the bar near his house and got online and we blew the game up to 6v6 and picked Team Slayer on The Pit. Now, the MBT guys are an incredibly chatty during games and in the post-game lobby. But for the life of us, we couldn’t figure out what they were talking about. Sure, we, being nerds, understood the references, but we didn’t know what they were referring to. Here’s a from-memory transcription, any misquotes are probably a part of the transcription process.

“Oh, I’m afraid this battlestation will be fully operational when your friends arrive.”

“Wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

<Singing of Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday>: which for the record is about a million Internet Years old.

Cat memes: OK, this one might have been us

Milennium Falcon jokes: OK, this one happened when I was playing in games before the Humpday

Final Score: 50-36 (Bungie Wins)
Check out the Game Assets

Game 3

Grifball, Grifcourt
Tone of Game: Triology [sic]

Either Mjolnir Battle Tactics have seen our atrocious Grifball record in the Grifball league or they just thought they’d throw us a curve ball since the whole Team Slayer thing wasn’t working out for them. We shoehorned six guys on each team into Grifball court and played an older version of the game – the version that only requires three scores to win, because of game length and “tons of dudes” constraints.

Aside from a pleasant, sporting experience one of the fortunate and foreseeable side effects of more dudes piling into Grifball court is the appearance of rare-medals for killing the bejesus out of a team. To put this in perspective I still get excited, incredibly so, at getting an Overkill. In Grifball, with this many people we had five Overkills, two Killamanjaros and a Killtastrophe. Ridiculous. Big D Bassist 11 had two Killtaculars one of which he converted into the Killtastrophe.

If only that Killtastrophe had converted to a win!

Final Score: 3-0 (Bungie Wins)
Check out the Game Assets