Tales of Festive Gaming - The GTA Christmas Day Massacre

Christmas is a day for spending time with your family, eating lots of food, and getting very drunk. If you're a gamer, it is also a day for spending some of that valuable time off catching up on games, or maybe just a session with your friends online. Every year I will sneak off around the time that Dr Who comes on, this is because I'd much rather shoot people online than watch Dr Who. Christmas 2014 was a bit rubbish as some idiots decided they needed to bring down PSN for everyone, because why not eh? So I'm going to take you back even further, Christmas two years ago.

It had been a few months since GTA V had come out and my friends and I were all starting to grow a bit tiresome of its "you must pay to have fun" ethos. We had all gotten what we wanted out of the game and found ourselves really lacking the effort to progress towards the expensive premium items. This was mostly because they were locked behind a ridiculous paywall, and Rockstar were continuously cutting the monetary reward for online missions. Fair to say we had pretty much given up on GTA, and we were waiting for next game we could all move on to.

Right at the point of giving up on the game, something magical happened. One evening whilst playing online, a bounty was posted for $100,000,000 in game currency. That might not be the exact number, but it was an absolutely silly amount none the less. The entire server spots it and suddenly there are eight or so people rushing towards this poor person with the bounty on their head. Luckily for us my friend is relatively close to the person, and has little to no problem getting the job done. My friend instantly has un-spendable amounts of money in his bank account, and like the good chap he is, he shares at around those who are online. The first thing I do is buy myself the Entity and a couple of the other really high end super cars, whilst also buying myself one of the nicest available apartments. We have our fun that evening; blowing people up and generally just being dicks (only to those who ask for it). We can do that though, we are millionaires after all. After the evening’s festivities are over, we leave the game for a few days, due to having jobs and other commitments.

It's Christmas day and I've done all the family stuff, I've had more than my fair share of Southern Comfort and I am ready to play some games. I send my friend a message on Facebook.
" You ready for some GTA?"

To which I get the reply of.

"Meet you online in 5-10 minutes"

We get a few others in on our session, and set time to all be online. It starts like any other session of GTA, we all spawn in our respective garages and drive to one of our usual meet up points. Driving around was much cooler than usual because Rockstar decided to cover Los Santos in Snow, making the driving pretty hilarious. The snow coupled with my steady supply of whisky and coke had me feeling incredibly Christmassy.

The evening’s proceedings start like any other, we go for a drive around the Los Santos hills and generally just get a feel for what’s going on in this server. It doesn’t take us long to notice that there are four or five people in downtown LS constantly killing people. We pay it no mind for the time being as we are just chilling, cruising around the mountain roads. Just as we are sat there paying no mind, one of those guys from central LS zooms in out of nowhere in a jet and decides to take us all out in one fell swoop. I had to admire their accuracy, but this obviously meant war. Everyone calls in some form of support, I jump in a helicopter and let my buddy man the air to surface missiles. We head for the centre of town where they all lie and start raining absolute havoc upon the group causing trouble. What follows is an absolute massacre of explosions and bullets, with everyone dying over and over again. This goes on for a short while before our adversaries decide to change the game…

It goes quiet for a few moments, with each side kind of doing their own thing for a short while. Me and my friends can’t help but wonder what is about to happen, but then suddenly it becomes very clear. A tank appears out of nowhere, instantly laying waste to everything Our group disperses, discussing the next best move once we are at a safe distance. We try using another helicopter, hoping to take out the tank from the air but the player driving the tank just hides under a bridge making it impossible to get a shot. This is when one of my friends goes quiet for a few minutes, while we are all unsure on our next move, he already has everything planned out.

So my friend re-appears, and luckily for us he is now sporting his own tank. I had forgotten that his rank was far ahead of everyone else’s, so this coupled with our extensive amounts of money , meant he could splash out on a tank. He rolls on and basically annihilates this team, taking out the enemy tank before they even had a chance. We then proceed to clean up for a while, as the other clan were defenceless without the tank. We stopped playing GTA after this as we found ourselves having fun elsewhere ,but this was such a great way to part ways with the title.

The streets were paved with blood and snow, and my stomach was full with food and whisky. I’d ended my relationship as a gamer with GTA V in a way that suited me and created a memory that me and my friends still bring up in conversations to this day.