Except for the mine tunnels. The mine tunnels sucked.

Long, tedious, and painful, the video game equivalent of a root canal being performed rectally.

Yet that's where one of my favorite gaming moments took place. In one of those tedious passageways, something appeared in front of me. It was a tiny little white and red something, like a bug, or maybe a torch, and it was getting a bit bigger, and oh shit, duck.

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It's coming right at us!

What I was seeing was a rocket that had been shot at me by some asshole at the other end of this miles-long hallway. I moved to the side, and the rocket sailed past me, but another puff soon appeared. The video-game literate among you will recognize that, as I was now pressed up against a wall, if this next rocket missed, it would still hit the wall behind me, hurting me with splash damage. In short, this was a spectacularly bad environment for dodging rockets, and I think I was supposed to retreat at this point and loop around to catch this guy from behind or something.

Instead, I charged him, moving toward the rocket but away from where it would strike, watching it miss by a few inches and hit the tunnel walls well behind me. I opened fire with my submachine gun, which had an effective range much less than the mile I really needed for this situation. Another rocket sailed past. I reloaded. Four more rockets. I kept shooting and reloading, and when that gun was empty, I switched to another. Twelve more rockets came by. It was a long fucking hallway.

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Somewhere a mighty oak sprang from a tiny acorn.

Recall that this was an era of FPS when health kits and ammo were a little rarer than they are now, and it wasn't unheard of for a player to beat a section of the game, only to reload an earlier save and try to do it again more efficiently, to save ammo. And what I was doing was just about the least efficient way possible of dealing with this situation, dumping every bullet I had into a single enemy. This was dumb, and there was a better way, and yet, when I reached the end of the tunnel, dry-firing an empty gun at what was now just a bloody smear, I knew something special had happened. Two men, 20 rockets, 7,000 bullets, and the principles of splash damage and geometry had combined into something beautiful. I didn't retry that shit.

Even if it meant spending the next half hour getting slaughtered while lamely flailing my crowbar at people.

This had a couple of interesting side effects. For one, I now felt really proud of myself, unusually so for someone playing video games in a smelly, darkened room. I was now the badass vigilante justice dealer of the desert, and all would tremble before me.

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Much as they do when smelling my video game room.

But this also turned the most powerful faction in the game completely and irrevocably against me, to the point that they started sending squads of assassins after me every half hour or so. That early in the game, I was in no way prepared to face twice-hourly squads of assassins, and I spent basically the rest of the game limping and scurrying from town to town trying to avoid them in a decidedly ignoble manner for a badass vigilante justice dealer.

No regrets, though. Fuck those guys.

The GTA games are packed with ways to murder people, but these missions were still a little tricky, simply because the bad guy was almost always in a car and the player had limited means of both keeping up with and stopping a car. A typical vigilante mission soon devolved into a clumsy sequence of ramming and randomly sprayed bullets.

And thus lacked much of the formal elegance that has given GTA a reputation as the "chess of video games."

On this particular mission, however, I simply didn't have the necessary time for clumsy ramming and spraying. I only just managed to catch up to the guy with a few seconds left on my timer (after which murdering him would have been illegal). So, with the usual tactics ruled out, I used the powerful lateral thinking skills that all gamers have (for murdering) and noticed the large patch of blue to our right -- the ocean, filled with the curiously fatal water of early GTA games. By that point I had never seen anyone but me die in the water, but with little time to do anything else, I gave it the old college try, and I rammed the guy toward the side of the elevated highway we were driving on.

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What am I going to do? Not try to murder him?

It worked, spectacularly well. That poor bastard Dukes of Hazzarded off the edge and into the water, a glorious THREAT ELIMINATED splaying across the screen as my clock reached zero. That I received $2,000 for this seemed almost an insult for a murder so creative and well-executed.

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Really the game should have stopped for the mayor to give me a medal.

Oddjob was exactly as armed, fast, and capable as every other character in the game, only with the minor advantage that he was impossible to hit. Every bullet in the game would pass over his head, because his head was 4 fucking inches off the ground. Anyone playing as Oddjob gained a massive advantage over their opponents, and in the few games where he wasn't banned outright, he was hated with a pure fury. Any time Oddjob died was a cause for celebration, and I haven't forgotten a single death.

One time, because my time just wasn't that valuable, I started a four-player multiplayer game by myself, filling the level with three other stationary Oddjobs. This was to "practice" and "look for his weaknesses," if anyone asked.

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The fact that I was semi-erect while butchering that little bastard should be considered a coincidence.

I shot his tiny little ass and cackled wildly. I threw knives into his tiny little knees and moaned with pleasure. I shot a rocket into his tiny little face and clapped and laughed like a studio audience. It was, in every sense of the word, insane, and the only sensible move I made that day was to lock the door to my dorm room halfway through.

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"If this room is rockin', I'm in here doing something almost certainly worthy of mockin'."