A Long and Drawn out Death

The other night I foolishly entered a $10000 deathmatch. Even more foolishly, it was on Happiness Island, that dullest of venues. As usually happens with the prospect of 100 kills for a win, most of the players soon left the game. I was leading so I decided to stay.

Eventually there was just me and one other player. I decided to try to wear him down but he was annoyingly good at first and he caught me out a couple of times with the rocket launcher. With his success, however, came predictability; he was going for the rocket every time. I found places that would confound a rocket (around the buildings on the south of the island) and the scoreboard started going my way. I was $1500 in the lead. When this increased to about $2000 my opponent appeared to stop trying to kill me and started hiding instead.

I expected him to leave the game but he didn't. He swam off the island onto the Algonquin mainland. I had no intention of chasing him so I stayed on Happiness just exploring and looking for effective cover. Of course I was keeping my eye on the map and saw him edging towards the helicopters at the south east of Algonquin.

I waited for him just outside the entrance to the Statue of Liberty - sorry, Happiness. He flew over. Auto aim was on so I easily killed him through the window of his helicopter when he tilted it to fire at me. He respawned some way away and was off the island again. This time he swam to some distant rocks. Through my sniper sight I could see he'd glitched it: his body was repeatedly falling in the same place. It took about 8 shots of the sniper to get him.

Next, he took a boat and came back with another helicopter. I went back to the statue entrance. He took the copter out of sight above the statue walls and I crept out. He'd become very predictable to me and I knew what he was going to do - rev the helicopter to make me think he was flying jump out and shoot me over the wall. Guess what he did. I blew his head off before he could take aim.

Slowly, the gap between our scores increased. Then came a period when we kept respawning next to each other. This brought me quickly up to $9800 but then the battery went in my PS3 controller. He got me while I was plugging in and the respawning suddenly became distant again. The thought of a quick ending was gone.

Three hours had passed since I'd started the game. It was nearly 4:30am (real time). I had to get up for work at 6:45am. I was determined not to let him drag it out any further so I chased him down before he could get off the island and the game was over.

Who was the idiot? Him, for prolonging the game or me for going along with it? The urge to teach him a lesson was too strong, and I'm a known compulsive/obsessive. The $10K was also guaranteed to take me within $200000 of level 9.

But I know that, unless I have several hours to spare, I'll never play another $10000 deathmatch and will stick to timed games instead.