Halo 2

At 12:01 am I became a proud Halo 2 own­er.

At least, in the­o­ry I did. I did­n’t actu­al­ly get a copy in my grub­by lit­tle paws until around 1:00 am.

I had pre­paid for the game and it was wait­ing for me in the store with my name on it, I just had to wait in line behind approx­i­mate­ly 200 oth­er peo­ple who also the­o­ret­i­cal­ly owned copies.

Really–there were at least 200 folks there, and I think the real total was clos­er to 250. For­tu­nate­ly most of them were groups of two to four folks who all intend­ed to go home and get their game on right after­wards. There were prob­a­bly 80–90 actu­al game acquisi­tors (is that a word?) ahead of me.

Over­all it took me an hour to make my way to the front of my line.

Nick Hasu­lak (a stu­dent from our min­istry) had bummed a ride off of me to pick up a copy. He had­n’t pre­paid or pre­order or pre­con­sid­ered. He just decid­ed to hop in my car and pur­chase the game for him­self.

Here’s the kick­er: he got his copy before I did in the “VIP” line for ful­ly-paid pre­orders. I guess the store fig­ured that since we had already giv­en them our mon­ey they did­n’t need to wor­ry too much about cus­tomer ser­vice.

I’ll remem­ber that next time I’m tempt­ed to pre­pay.

I’ve now rat­i­fied my geekdom–I stood in line at mid­night for a videogame.

Of course, Halo tran­scends social stra­ta and so at least half the peo­ple stand­ing along­side me looked like they had just stepped out of an Aber­crom­bie and Fitch com­mer­cial… maybe this isn’t the act I’ve been look­ing for to firm­ly estab­lish myself in geek cir­cles.

Any­way, I’ve start­ed play­ing and the game is incred­i­ble. It ful­ly lives up to my expec­ta­tions, at least so far.