First time playing Platinum was awesome. It was the first day of the DLC and I had saved up a lot of credits so I could get all the new characters and weapons immediately. I hosted and put the game to U/U/P and got Giant and Cerberus (haven't played that combination much since then *cough*) and I took my Shadow equipped for full melee damage and Shadow Strike, didn't even use my weapon at all even though it was the insanely OP Paladin pistol!
Salmon didn't even put on any equipment for the match because he was being pessimistic and kept saying things like "we'll never make it" and then kept committing suicide every now and then just because he thought it would be better to fail sooner rather than later. Our other two friends weren't really that good players so they kept dropping and bleeding out a lot.
I basically had to solo the entire match with my Shadow and I used Shadow Strike on everything! I had so much fun with that character and just kept laughing and singing all the way to our full extraction.
If I recall correctly the whole match took us about 60-70 minutes to finish (if only I would have known about the GI GPS back then!).