Game with Fame Recap:
Jesse Alexander of Heroes
Published March 21, 2008
Last Friday, March 14, we hosted a Game with Fame with Jesse Alexander, producer of Heroes, to celebrate our SuperMarch event. This was one of those rare occasions where several Xbox employees mobilized to play in the event as well. Major Nelson, e and the biggest star of all, KP, set out that night to play some Frontlines™: Fuel of War™.
Jesse Alexander was a great sport.
We started off with some heavy action on Solar Farm, where Major, e and Jesse formed squads on the Western Coalition side. I decided to go over to the Red Star Alliance side to balance things, and indulge my Communist yearnings. Knuckles Dawson and several others rotated through my squad for the rest of the night. Everyone was in a great mood and contributed to a very positive atmosphere for blowing each other up. In the recaps we received from participants, there was no shortage of praise for Jesse's skills. He did quite a bit of killing and capturing of objectives, routinely finishing near the top of his team in each round. He was no easy kill.
Jesse was no slouch in Frontlines.
Major spent the bulk of his time ferrying his compatriots about the map, dropping them off on objectives and covering them with the ferocious guns of the Western Coalition's attack chopper. After having had quite enough of his tomfoolery, I decided to take the anti-aircraft vehicle for a spin and lit him up. There was a constant struggle between the two sides to keep each other's helicopters out of the air, which resulted in some pretty hilarious instances of espionage involving full choppers remotely detonated with C4.
Throughout the night, I was using the Air Superiority special ability, which lets you drop a single precision bomb, a cluster bomb and a giant fuel bomb (in that order). I caught the other team with the cluster bombs quite often, though the other two proved to be more about intimidation than anything else. However, I did manage to call a precision airstrike that, in a sweet one in a million chance, hit Major's chopper. That made the night.
The matches remained relatively even despite consistently lopsided teams as people joined the Western Coalition so they could join Jesse's squad. The next map we played was Oil Field, a map dominated by ground vehicles where the tank reigns supreme. We only got a couple matches out of this map as the night came to an end, but they were very fast-paced and lots of fun.
Drive, Major, drive!
We received tons of positive feedback from this Game with Fame, and everyone appears to have had fun. Of all the e-mails, here's our favorite:
I was lucky enough to make it into the GWF session with Jesse tonight, and I was even lucky enough to be in a squad with Jesse for a little while. It was an absolute blast! Everyone was cool, mature, and fun to play with. Jesse actually seemed to know what he was doing, too.
As cool as it was to play with Jesse, my highlight of the evening didn't involve him. It was taking out e and Major Nelson in a helicopter with a single missile. Pure gaming satisfaction.
—Sigmund (Pittsburgh, PA)
Article by KP
