This is long, but it's a great story. Settle in if you care.
In HAWX, a combat flight game on the order of Ace Combat, most people would complete the campaign and then jump into the multiplayer. This means that you have two kinds of planes: the Raptor, which you unlock for the final campaign mission, and all the planes it dominates. So, despite not having yet unlocked any good weapons for it, at least a good half of the planes online would be Raptors since you don't get any plane even nearly as good until some of the highest experience levels.
Between this and the massive overuse of one of the most noob-friendly special weapons in any game then or since, I finally got sick of it and decided I'd use a Raptor for the next round.
Turns out I end up in the waiting room with two guys, brothers, who haven't completed the campaign yet and are flying F-15's.
These are really nice, talkative guys, college age, so we spend a while talking about the game, and after telling them it's a good idea to complete the campaign first, a few of the problems online, and just some all-around tips, they ask if I wanna go ahead and start without a fourth person for the 2-on-2. I think they're joking, they're not, and I end up in a one-on-2 versus both of them. And, unbeknownst to me, this is a guns-only, simulation-level damage, 4-round match of ten-minute rounds. Brutal.
Now, after years of Ace Combat, I've always really enjoyed scoring gun kills, and I've gotten really, really good at it. The entire match it was just me versus both of them. And it was a slaughter. For the first two matches, it was like boxing toddlers. I was just getting behind them without them even knowing what was happening and a second later they'd be gone. I think it was like 18-1 that first round. Second round, they start to get a feel for my tactics, and they do better. It's still just totally unfair. I think about all the awful things I thought and screamed over the mic about Raptor and noob-missile users sucking all the fairness out of the game as I absolutely wiped these brothers out of the sky and I honestly felt terrible. Second round: 15-3.
Now, in the third round, I realize immediately that something has changed. Now I'm taking damage left and right, and I'm getting shot down before I can score any kills. Then I realized that was going on: amazingly, they had, apropos only of getting their asses chewed off, started flying like an actual flight lead and wingman. As soon as I got on one's tail, the other would be there to knock me out of the sky. I hadn't been holding back, even in the godly F-22, but now I really ramped things up. Despite my best efforts they pull out a 5-7 victory.
Now, in the last round, all the gloves are off. All the camaraderie from the waiting room? Gone. We want each other bleeding and in pain. We want to shoot the parachute after we make the other guy bail out and watch the body fall. And this is when I prove that, plane notwithstanding, I am not to be touched in this genre.
We're over a map consisting of a central bay surrounded by mountains, cut by narrow, winding river valleys. This time, when they come for me as a pair, I'm winding through the river valleys at top speed, treetops literally brushing my fuselage. It's suicide, and I'm sure they thought I'd just given up. But when they come for me, they can't keep up. I'm pulling the roughest maneuvers I can manage so close to sheer rock walls and the ground below that I'm missing death by feet every single second. Just trying to get behind me is too much for them, and I slam them into the earth and the mountains; their planes, not as maneuverable as mine, are given the choice of either attempting maneuvers they can't make and crashing into the mountains, or pushing their Eagles past their normal limits and almost certainly stalling out, a one-way ticket to cratering into the valley just feet below. And once one of them is out of the way, I go all out and do my best to bring the fight to the remaining, often bringing the helpess solo F-15 down while they hope their brother spawns in time.
Finally, they get smart. They dive in steep, using their boosted speed from gravity to get on my tail whenever I have to speed up and fly straight to avoid a stall, and using that time to get whatever gunshots they can on me, wearing me down as a team. I'm at a loss again, but I was ready. As one of them is coming in for a pass that will kill me, I hit the afterburners and rocket straight upwards. The one following is taken of guard, and slams into the ground, unable to change attitude in time. Immediately afterwards, I reach out and fatally touch the other Eagle, just getting into position for his own diving pass.
Now I'm in the air again. Familiar territory for them, since we both know I can't beat them in a straight-up air battle anymore. But as one gets on my tail, I start screaming at the mountainside, well beyond the speed of sound, twisting and turning as well as I can to avoid his cannons, and once the wall of rock is painfully near, a push my aircraft past it's limits to pull up over the mountaintop with inches to spare. They don't. Boom. One down, other gets gunned. Try it again a few more times, pulling them back into the valley again for close combat if the manage to get over the peak or if they pull away early, wary of it.
For all my efforts, they get the best of that maneuver after a while, too. Now, this has been a highly-lethal round for both sides, but we end up tied 5-5 with one minute left in the round; all our suicides, theirs from my own efforts and mine the inevitable drawback of my suicidally-difficult tactics, have lowered the scores to single digits in spite of the huge number of deaths on both sides. With one minute left in the match, they've figured out all my tactics and I just can't think of anything else to throw at a 2-on-1 match to try and salvage anything from it. Just as I start to prepare for another loss, a fourth appears and helps me out in the final minute. He's in a MiG-21 bis, the worst plane in the whole game. But even with just his help to distract one of the planes while I work, we pull out of the round 8-6 to close the match 3 rounds to 1, 46 kills to 17. And the funniest part, to me, is that my callsign was 'Crash.'
This was without a doubt the only real fun I ever had on HAWX's troubled versus play. And even after years of Ace Combat, this was the most difficult, most cerebral, most harrowing fun I had ever had in the genre. And it was the smartest, most testing, most tactical team play I had ever seen in the genre either, from the AI or from other players, and it had come from two guys who had never picked up a flight game in their life, in inferior planes.
After that match, going back to the suicide-oriented, trial-and-error ammo-throwing that characterized HAWX's versus play was even more unpalatable than it had been. I never got to play with either of those guys again, and I never had another good match. It was also the only time I ever flew the Raptor online, and I had never used All-Aspect missiles online or off. I traded in HAWX a month later, having seen all there was to see with it.
And that's the worst and best thing I had ever done playing any game online.
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