We are your Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Media Champions!

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare finally landed yesterday and quickly established itself as one of the best entries the franchise has ever had. That’s mostly due to the game’s new Exo abilities, which transform the landscape of the eSports focused multiplayer mode. It’s going to be interesting to see how professional players adapt to it over time. We, however, didn’t have that much practice at last night’s Media Invitational tournament, but we still walked away victorious!

Last night Megarom and Microsoft hosted a friendly tournament between journalists, media and industry folk from far and wide in order to determine who were the ultimate Call of Duty kings. With Mountain Dew and beer aplenty, we arrived there not expecting to walk away champions, but to put up a fairly decent fight. After all, we managed to acquire the insane skills of longtime reader, fan and friend Craig Guild, but he had to pair up with Gavin, Matty and myself. Recipe for disaster, right?

Well, not really. Either we’re far better at Call of Duty than any of us expected to be, or everyone else is just really terrible. We kicked off our campaign against a team of community players. It was more of a “how the hell do I jetpack” tutorial than a proper game, as both teams struggled with the new Exo abilities. Once we got that down though, we were pretty much unstoppable in both Capture the Flag and the game’s futuristic combat basketball mode, Uplink.

We then took on a team of random players, which included local eSports hot shot Glenn Alexander and Evopoints owner Ricky Repolho Ferreira. Although Matty and I were against cabbage on cabbage violence, we had an obligation to Gavin (and our jobs) to win. We again dominated in Capture the Flag and Uplink, moving us in the semi-finals relatively unscathed.

That’s where things became a little interesting, especially since we had to now play Search and Destroy. We were up against IS Solutions, who were by far the scariest team to watch on the night. After losing the first point in Search and Destroy, things didn’t look good, but we all eventually got our mojo back. Which means Guild told us what to do and we actually ended up winning the game, as well as the Uplink match afterwards. Onwards to the finals!

Which is where we had to face the scariest individual, Craig “Jimmy” Martin. He’s probably the best Call of Duty player I’ve ever been up against, meaning Team Jimmy HTXT were the team to beat. Things kicked off with Capture the Flag, where we had been pretty much dominating the entire night. That didn’t change in the final, with the first match going our way with a comfortable 5-2 score. The Uplink game afterwards was probably my favourite of the night though, proving to be the most thrilling and nail-biting game of the evening. We traded points for the entire 10 minutes, eventually winning by a single 2-point goal after an insanely exhilarating final moments, punctuated by the shoutcasting of Nick Holden.

Which meant we became the first ever South African Industry Friendly Champions! A huge well done to all the teams that fell beneath our might, but mostly to everyone who made it such an enjoyable evening. There’s nothing better than playing games against friends in the industry, and I hope it becomes a annual event. Next year everyone will probably come far more prepared for us, so we’ll savour this glorious win while we can.

Last Updated: November 4, 2014