At one point, Trevor walks out the front door of the tiny house and closes it behind him.
"Hey, how do I open the door again?" he asks me.
"It's the 'u' key." I was ready for that one.
"It's doesn't work." Trevor taps the 'u'.
"Sure it does," Peter says, hitting the 'u' to swing open the attic door and shoot some guy in a lab coat after yelling at him to put up his hands.
"I don't think you're supposed to shoot him," I say, flipping through the manual.
"Maybe it's a fake door, like in No One Lives Forever," Trevor suggests, still trying the 'u' key. Peter commands a bank teller to get down on his knees, then shoots him. He yells for a woman wrapped in a towel to drop her weapon. When she doesn't comply because she doesn't have a weapon, he shoots her.
Trevor is hitting the space bar, the enter key, and the 'd'. 'D' for 'door'. "Hey, Peter, come down to the front door and let me in."
"Just a sec, lemme get this wizard." Peter is shouting at another Greek Orthodox priest. The respawn box Trevor checked is restocking the level with innocent bystanders as fast as Peter can shoot them.
"Hey, you guys," Trevor yells, "I call 'time out'. I'm locked out on the front porch. I can't get back in."
"Ha ha," Jude yells back, "I guess you'll have to sit the rest of this one out."
"Dude, I'm your partner," Trevor says to Peter, "Get your ass down here and let me in."
"Okay." Peter comes to the front door, felling another Greek Orthodox priest on the way. "What do I do?"
"I don't know. Can you throw the deadbolt or something?"
"What's the key to throw the deadbolt?" Peter asks me. I flip through the manual.
"Fuck it," Trevor says, "We're cops. Just shoot the lock."
"Shoot the lock? Where is it?" Peter looks at the door.
"Hell if I know," Trevor is examining it from the other side, "I doubt the door has location-based damage. Just shoot it everywhere."
Peter lets rip with a steady coughing sound from his MP5. He sprays the entire door with gunfire. Trevor slumps dead on the other side.
"Dude, you shot me! I'm on your team and you fucking shot me!" Trevor shrieks.
"Cool. It models penetration through walls," Peter notes, "But the door's still locked. I'm going to have to leave your body on the front porch."
"Not cool. Friendly fire, dude. That's coming off your score, you know. How do we check the score?" Trevor asks me. I flip through the manual.
"Nevermind, I'll figure it out." He starts hitting all the buttons. Suddenly he teleports and he's standing right behind Jude's character. He drops him.
"Hey, where'd you come from?" Jude calls out from the other room.
Trevor hits the key again and suddenly appears in a new location. "Whoa, I think we've got cheats enabled or something. Dig this." He taps the "l" key several times and zaps through a quick succession of new locations. He eventually comes up behind one of the other guys and shoots him. "I can teleport," he whispers to Peter, "I have special after-death powers." Trevor keeps hitting "l" key and firing wildly.
"No fair," they howl from the other room, "Trevor's cheating."
"Nope, I just had the presence of mind to equip a ring of teleportation when I was choosing gear," he cackles, blinking from place to place so fast he's untouchable.
Something's wrong. The game was supposed to end at ten points, but Trevor has used his trick to shoot the other guys at least twenty times and the game is still going.
"I'm so good, I broke it," he says as I flip through the manual to find out how to end the game. We finally quit and the score screen comes up. Peter has -71 frags for shooting neutrals. Trevor's has -138 frags because the "l" key is a suicide respawn, not a teleport key.
"If this was golf, I'd be kicking ass. Okay, so that's SWAT 3. Let's play Rogue Spear now. Rogue Spear makes SWAT look like the My Little Pony Ride in the Country Adventure Kit."
"Man, no wonder Daryl Gates got fired," Peter says.
I later discover by reading the manual that there are all sorts of great options for setting up multiplayer games in SWAT 3. Unfortunately, there's no second chance to make a first impression at Shoot Club. Introducing a new game takes careful planning and research. SWAT 3 will always be known as the game where Trevor got locked outside and then became a magically teleporting angel of death after he was killed by his own partner. Months later, Trevor will lock his keys in his car when we take a road trip to the Comicon. "Why don't you just teleport in?" Jude says.
"You know, dude," Trevor muses as he struggles to get
the coat hanger through the lining around the driver's side window,
"Who I am in Shoot Club is not who I am in the rest of the
world."
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