The Nerd Next Door

With Bungie out of the series, successor 343 Industries takes over with a sequel to Halo 3 . With a changed world, changed cast, and new threat. 343 was under a lot of pressure to deliver on what Bungie had built and prove Halo could work without Bungie. Does it succeed? Well, it's... some where in the middle, let's talk about it. Halo 4 is set almost 5 years after Halo 3 , where the Chief and Cortana were stranded in space and the Chief became a chiefsicle. The game opens with Cortana being alerted to a presence on their half of a ship and wakes up the Chief, now with a so-so redesign, to check it out. Learning of a new Covenant faction who didn't get the memo that humans were cool, the Chief and Cortana find themselves orbiting a Forerunner planet they're soon pulled into. Now, a whole bunch of shit happens but the short of it is that Cortana is dying because her mind has reached overfill and the Covenant actually found and awoke one of their Gods thanks to the...

And now it's time for the most relevant game as of now, as it's due to release in the near future for PC, Halo Reach . Bungie's final game in the Halo series before they moved on to Destiny , is Halo Reach's attempt to return to the past a fitting swansong, or could it have used some improvement's? Set 2 months before Halo 1 , Halo Reach follows the Fall of Reach, the battle that leads to Halo 1 . The focus here though is on a group of Spartans who try to stop it called Noble Team consisting of Carter, the gruff no nonsense leader; Kat, a mischievous tech specialist with a knack for getting a bit in over her head; Jun, a sniper unafraid to speak his mind; Emile, a explosives and CQB specialist who enjoys all the blood and killing; and Jorge, a Spartan from the older class that the Master Chief came from and a heavy weapons specialist with a fondness for people that the rest of Noble doesn't share. Of course, we don't play as them we play as, and say...

Remember when I said Halo Wars fails as a Halo campaign due to it's terrible story and characters? Well in that same year the opposite happened when Bungie released, of all things, an expansion pack for Halo 3 , Halo 3: ODST . Taking the conflict to a smaller scale and focusing on a less powerful protagonist, Halo 3: ODST takes the series in a different direction than usual. But is it a good one, and is it still worth making it through to see the dawn? ODST takes place at the same time as Halo 2 's first three missions and focuses on a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, an elite special forces unit that strap themselves into pods and are shot at the surface. Th focus is namely on a squad of ODST's who are part of a mission to aid the Master Chief during the events of 2 . You've got Buck, the wiseass leader who just wants to get his troops through the next mission alive; Dutch, the heavy weapons specialist best described as a simple man making his way through ...

With the Halo Trilogy concluded, developer Bungie prepared their next steps, but Halo owner Microsoft decided to farm out the Halo franchise to another developer. Insert Ensemble Studios, the team behind the Age of Empires RTS series. The mission? Make a Halo based RTS that played smoothly on the Xbox 360, a realm few RTS' dared to move. Did they succeed? Or was Halo Wars the last game Ensemble made for a reason? Halo Wars is set in 2531, 21 years before Halo 1 and six years after the UNSC's war with the Covenant began. The game follows the starship Spirit of Fire, an ex-colony ship converted into a factory ship/carrier stationed on the colony of Harvest to battle the Covenant over some Forerunner artifacts in the planet's north pole. The main focus of the Spirit of Fire's crew follows what I consider the most mediocre cast in the Halo franchise. Sergeant John Forge, commander of ground forces on the Spirit of Fire and a cocky firebrand with a heart of gold...