“Endure Any1?” reads the motto of my Xbox Live buddy Sabr3 as his avatar peers out from under the gold tint visor of the Recon helmet. You have got to be kidding me, right? I went out this evening to socialise, fuelled by the nagging suspicion that I might not meet the girl of my frickin’ dreams spending every Friday night with the curtains drawn playing Halo, and this is how I get paid? I did not spend time with real people of the flesh and blood variety so that my ragtag crew of ODST firefight achievement grubbers could steamroller ahead and obtain Endure in my absence. I’d been working on this all week.



You see, regardless of what the smug commentators of various Youtube guides will tell you, Endure is Not Easy. The achievement reads “In Firefight, on any mission, pass the 4th Set on 4-player Heroic LIVE co-op.” Sure, it sounds simple, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it even sounds easy, and I’m sure for all the dudes who eat, sleep, and ejaculate Halo, and have done since Halo 3 dropped over two years ago, it was mind numbingly, jaw-clenchingly teeth-grindingly easy.

Firefight in ODST is essentially survival mode. Wave after wave of Covenant spawn at regular intervals and you have to shoot them until they die. There’s five waves to a round, three rounds to a set, and each set is punctuated with a bonus round. You have to sail through four of these to get the Endure achievement. It takes about two hours if you and your three compadres spend every waking hour teabagging newbs in Team Slayer, and about two hours fifteen if you’re just a regular dude with a bunch of guys who completed the campaign on Heroic because Legendary would take all week, and you have other stuff to do.

There are three main obstacles to overcome in order to obtain the Endure achievement. These are: finding three other people with whom to attempt it, who do not suck, and have good (nay, reliable) internet connections. If you are lucky, the planets will align and all three conditions will be blessed upon you on your first attempt and Endure will simply be another achievement in the footnote of your Gamerscore and merely a pleasant way to pass one hundred and fifty minutes with some new friends. Chances are that one of these three criteria will be absent, but the only way to discover this is to first get deep into the firefight.



Finding people is fairly straightforward. A well-timed post on a forum, bathroom wall, or in the comments of a Youtube video will net you literally several responses. The difficulty comes in bringing all these disparate souls together in one lobby at the same point in time. This in itself can take an hour or more, with friends of friends popping in to say, “oh, you’re doing Endure? I just wanted a Firefight, I don’t have time for Endure,” before buggering off to meet whatever social or penal appointment they couldn’t shirk.
Finding people who are good is another matter entirely. You may not notice until you are forty minutes into the attempt that the guy who was quite chatty in the lobby hasn’t responded to a single instruction the whole time, and spent the entire time either dying, or firing a fuel-rod cannon up the adjacent player’s arse. The clue is that by the end of the first set, you have nearly a third of the score. If you have half of the current score, you are not doing well. Another clue is that you have only died once, but have less than ten lives remaining. The only real way to find out who is the weak link in your Xbox Live matchmaking exercise is to utterly fail and check the post-game stats. This is where you find out that one guy died over twenty times and contributed less than ten per cent of the final score. A regular Halo 3 buddy of mine put it like this, “there are two types of players going for Endure, people who are good at Halo who just got ODST cos it’s cheap, and people who suck at Halo.” I hoped that I was in the former category.

Having a good connection is vital. Lag is okay, and good players will compensate and it won’t slow them down too much, but if the connection drops out and one player’s machine doesn’t keep up, then the whole thing will crap out dumping you back in the lobby. There is nothing worse than rounding the second set with twenty lives remaining having just won an Invincible medal to have the whole thing freeze up while the sound loops for three minutes before returning to the lobby where the guiltless facades of your teammates stare back at you.



I have suffered all of these pitfalls. Last Monday I was the witless newb holding everyone back. Tuesday I found some good players and started to find a rhythm, but no real plan had emerged and we still struggled to make it through the first set. Things gelled on Wednesday, but we crapped out in the ultimate wave of the fourth set. Reconvening on Thursday, a new player in the fourth spot brought connection problems resulting in a good run going bad at the beginning of the fourth set.

So Friday is when I eschewed Endure for socialising that didn’t involve a plastic headset, only to come back at 4am and find out that my Halo teammates with whom I’d spent a week developing and honing my skills had big fat done it without me. Which kind of made me feel like the weak link that was just holding everyone back. “Yeah mate, we just sort of breezed through it. Had about twenty lives by the end of it, simple” they said as I scrabbled around trying to find some people who were good, with good connections, who would let me piggyback their achievement. No such luck, as I found myself back at square one, but this time being the good player in a team of swill, watching the lives count circle the drain attempt after attempt.

I finally found some good players, and got deep into the fourth set, but the lives count was always precariously a single figure, and after each round someone would say, “oh we’re not gonna make it” having spent the round charging everything down with sticky grenades and a grav hammer, chewing through lives like a second stringer quarterback chews gum. Unhelpfully, one of the dudes had his mic set to ‘friends only’ (“too much Modern Warfare 2” apparently) so I didn’t hear a word he said and vice versa. The post game carnage report highlighted why we had failed so miserably. My eight deaths and fifty-to-one kill/death ratio was seriously undermined by their having 60 deaths between them. The Modern Warfare dude had an impressive 35,000 points and 23 deaths, to my 115,000 and 8.

Previously, with the guys who then went on to complete Endure without me, I had reached the final wave of the fourth set, only to watch our eight lives evaporate like dog-piss on a hot pavement. Checking the leaderboards told a similar story for some of the other guys I’d played with previously. Team scores of 600k, but no cigar. People who said, “oh yeah, I got that on my second try” got struck from my friend list. Most telling was the time I joined a party just as the four players had completed Endure (to ask them if they wanted to do Endure, great timing as ever), and amongst the self-congratulatory whoops and hollers, one of the players said, “guys, I gotta go, I should call my girlfriend. I think we broke up…” to which his Xbox Live buddies consoled, “why do you care, man? You just got Endure!”



It became something of a daily ritual, same bat-time same bat-channel, trying to grind out Endure with the same couple of faces. Give it the best attempt, and if lag or lack of skill did us in quickly, take another stab at it before calling it quits for the night. I did finally get Endure, but it wasn’t without incident. Firstly, it took a good hour to assemble a team in the lobby. Ahead of time, a friend binged me a message to say that he was ready, willing and able, only to disappear for 40 minutes into Team Fortress 2. Just as he finally joined, my router decided to throw a wobbly, and boot me out of Live. Rather than risk this happening during our Endure run, I hunted around for a long enough patch cable to run from my box right into the router. This took about 10 minutes, and of course to my buddies, it looked as though I’d just upped and left. So it was no surprise to find that one of my team had logged off for the night, so we had to wait another 15 minutes for a fourth guy to appear. An unknown element, who could very possibly suck and drag us all down.

To make matters worse, the party-chat that was hunky-dory in the lobby, but went to shit as soon as the game started. I only had one guy in my ear, and had to assume he was the only one who could hear me since the other two guys didn’t respond to any of my instructions, startling wit, or cracks at their expense. This continued until the end of Set 1 where I could no longer converse with anyone at all. It took me until the beginning of the final round to pull out my headset and realise that I could then hear everyone talking to each over through my speakers. I plugged my headset back in when we quit out of the fifth set in anticipation of the post-game lobby debrief, only to find that it worked and I could hear everyone again. One guy said, “I have a friend who wants me to help him get Endure, but now I’ve actually got it, there’s no way I want to go through all that again.”

I know how he feels. It explains perfectly why all the guys who forged on without me and offered to help me get it later on all ducked the invites when I sent them out. It’s the same reason that when someone who has been reading the bathroom walls in the service stations off the M4 bings me a message that says, presumptuously, “Endure?” that they get a swift reply of, “Never Again.” So if you got it first time, second time, or thereabouts and in your eyes anyone who took a little longer to reach those dizzying heights is a grotty no0b suckling at the taet of your milky greatness, good for you. Seriously, I mean it, you’re awesome. Don’t take any time off! If you’re still slugging away at it, or will take a stab when you finally get round to playing ODST, good luck – you have my very best wishes. And no, I will not help you…