Star Wars Battlefront I and II are both probably in my top five video games of all time. My love of Star Wars in addition to the addictive gameplay and awesome multiplayer of those games make them about perfect for me. Needless to say, I had a feeling that a new Battlefront game was going to drag me into the current generation of gaming, and I was right.

I told myself I was never going to get an Xbox One or a PS4. I have plans to (someday) build a kick-ass gaming PC and I didn’t see the point in a console other than the Wii U, but I changed my tune when I started reading some good things about the Xbox One, its upcoming backwards compatibility, and when an Amazon gift card for the exact amount of the console landed in my inbox.

My mysterious benefactor

Obviously I haven’t been updating this site much in the last couple years, but I still get a decent amount of search engine traffic thanks to my years worth of posts. Occasionally, I get a tiny amount of money from Amazon affiliate links, but it’s usually only a few dollars a month. A couple months ago, however, someone actually paid over $6,000 for an out-of-print LEGO Star Wars set (from this article) through one of my links, and I ended up with an Amazon gift card for about $350. Crazy.

Rather than use that on something I really needed, I decided that it was the universe telling me I needed to get a new gaming console so I could play Battlefront. Someone spent six grand on a Star Wars toy so I could play this game. Thanks, rich stranger.
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I vividly remember when I first encountered Halo way back in 2001. I was working with a bunch of serious gamers at the time. A couple of them picked up the new Xbox on the morning it launched on Nov. 15.

One of the guys bought the new console and a few of the initial games before coming into work. I went into his office to check out his haul. He showed off two the games he considered to be the best, NFL Fever and Project Gotham Racing. He’d bought a third game on a whim. It was Halo. “It’s supposed to be pretty good,” he said giving his justification for the purchase. Looking back, that was the understatement of the decade.

In the months that followed, my coworkers and I convened at lunch to play a little on the Xbox. Halo quickly became the lunchtime favorite. Not the campaign with the sci-fi storyline but the multiplayer which pitted player versus player. Our lunch sessions would sometimes spill over to after work. Other friends would often stop by to join in the fun.
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