5 alternative punishments for Halo: Reach cheaters

It’s only been on general sale for about fourteen nano seconds, but already the inevitable Halo: Reach cheatery has begun. It’s no surprise really, and although Bungie’s reply has been swift and stern (and thorough: how we’d love a system to track and humiliate persistent quitters in other games), we don’t think that it goes far enough. Nowhere near, in fact.

5. Banning them from various forums

Look, everyone’s made mistakes. Just ask the parents of most of the population of Xbox Live. But for a first or minor offence such as griefing or being twelve years old, a little slap on the wrists will suffice.

As such, because most of these people are fueled by their own ego and insecurity, a little banning from the various hives of scum and villainy that is internet message boards will hopefully put them on the straight and narrow. After all, if we can prevent them from fraternising with the other weapons-grade a**holes on the internet, then maybe, maybe they’ll learn some manners. If not, though…

4. Punish them via the same means they punish us

If you’ve ever played Halo, or CoD or any competitive online game, you will have heard that noise, the noise that we’re fairly sure Stalin used to decimate the morale of the invading Nazi’s at Stalingrad: the twelve year old whine.

If only they were better prepared

Now, it may be unfair to label all younger players as snot-nosed wastes of carbon that, if they were to disappear  this very instant no one would care or even notice, but it’s equally unfair to have to listen to this aural atrocity. Granted, we could just mute them, but that doesn’t mean they would stop doing it to someone else.

Sadly, in cyberspace, everyone can hear you scream.

While the famous angry german kid video shown above is a parody, we’ve all encountered him. Now it’s time to fight back: by deploying that weird mosquito noise thing that shopping malls use to dissuade hoody-wearing oiks to get the hell out of their middle-age nightmare emporioums. For your second offence, you get a blast of ear splitting brain-melt that only you can hear, due to the magic of frequency waves and all of that stuff.

3. Changing appearances/abilities

Sort of like Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden director Tomonobu Itagaki does with his many, many games about heaving breasts and, er, some other stuff we can’t remember at the moment, Bungie should actively humiliate players who insist on being douchebags with a visual change to their avatars. The punishment would, of course, fit the crime.

Those players who insist on using map exploits to get out of the gameworld will be duly rewarded with what they seemingly desire: a digital version of the Zod prison from Superman II, where our little darlings can neither move nor speak, forced to watch people playing as they look on longingly at people, having, you know, fun.

Of course the effect will be persistent, so even if you turn off your Xbox and turn it back on, remove the disc or just cry with frustration, it won’t matter, and they could even include a looping Marlon Brando sound effect that repeats his famous/demented green suitcase line. Or the one about all of the people of Krypton being, er, bagels.

As for the seemingly billions that insist on using bigoted sexual terms, we’d love to see them hand them out with their avatar dressed like Captain Fantastic-era Elton John that only their opponents could see.

2. Introduce a more stringent policing action

In the same way that you will find it hard to get a job should you decide to commit the (lesser) crime of mugging old women in the street, it should be harder for people who ruin the enjoyment of others online to get hold of all of the DLC for their favourite  shooter. It could be tricky (after all, this is a business), so maybe there should be MS Points rewards for players who report others and get a conviction of their douchebaggery. Or, and this is a big leap, there should be a To Catch a Predator esque lobby where fools are lured on the proviso that they will get to pwn some noobs. Unfortunately, we all know who comes out next…

Pictured: Justice

1. Make them play through the entirety of Infinite Undiscovery. In Japanese

The ultimate punishment, as it will require our friends to not only learn new gameplay related skills besides ‘Noob Tube’ and ‘fail’ to their meagre set, but they’ll have to learn a whole new language (although to be fair the speed of which they picked up their ‘leet’ speak from the internet means that they might have some language skills).

lolwut?

Essentially, Bungie would download the whole game onto your hard drive and only allow you to play Reach again once you’ve completed it. Given the JRPG-ness of it all it would be like a digital version of Saw, attempting to make your way out of a nefarious, confusing trap to get back to something you have abused and taken for granted. That’ll learn ‘em.

The Deal’s views may never represent those of X360, or any sane person for that matter