The Nerd Next Door

When I was a wee lad  Naruto was the hottest anime on the air, Linkin Park had just dropped their Minutes to Midnight album, Michael Bay was breaking the box office with Transformers , and Halo 3 was one of the hottest games released. This was actually the game that got my parents to set us up with Xbox Live, my brother, father, and I all got accounts to play Halo 3 .  A lot of things from Halo 3 are nostalgic for me, but what has recently come back to my mind is its lobby system, a system so good that even Call of Duty copied it. In this era of gaming, when you start playing matchmaking you get taken to a pre-game lobby where you can mingle with other players, vote on map and modes, and listen to slurs dropped by 12-year-olds. Outside of those slurs this system was great, it let you get a feel for who you were playing with or against, and let players choose which maps they actually want to play. After the match you got to choose whether to stick with those people or bail. ...

I've been thinking lately about Call of Duty's  "advanced movement" phase.  When from 2014 to 2016 Call of Duty gave everyone jet thrusters in an attempt at advanced mobility. This era is generally regarded fairly poorly by the COD fandom. Most of the issues behind it have been talked into the ground, about how weapon balance got thrown off, how map design got ruined, and how futuristic movement doesn't belong in a series like COD . But I think this era is vital, as it can teach people about why momentum in a game is so important. Now, for those not in the know; Momentum is what allows the player to carry movement energy from one action to the next. If I'm running and jumping my movement doesn't dead stop when I hit the ground, I'll keep going a little more than expected. The best games with speed usually allow the player to carry their momentum from action to action using the resources the game has given them. For example, in Classic Sonic the Hedgeh...

I love Halo , but recently I've been realizing that Halo has a serious weapon sandbox issue. It's not that the guns aren't fun to use, far from it, the problem is that Halo has for so long diluted it's weapon sandbox. It's resulted in cases where either one weapon dominates the sandbox or every weapon except power weapons have their role in the sandbox left unclear to the player.  Unlike other games like Call of Duty , this is a major issue for Halo as it relies more on it's weapon sandbox than COD's loadout system. Halo is a series defined by it's weapon sandbox, how one approaches a situation with the tools at hand or has to dip until they can find better tools. But in terms of those tools no Halo has done it better than Halo 1 , every other game has been a steady downward spiral. Halo 1 is the game with the least amount of overlap and therefore dilution in it's weapon choice. You had your bullet weapons for tearing through flesh and plasma weapo...

   Retro Shooters seem to be on the rise lately haven't they? Retro Shooters being fast paced shooters where if you either don't kill everything in the room or blaze out of there at 420mph you failed your ancestors. Six years ago the Retro Shooter was dead and buried; consigned to the dustbin of the 90's along with Jnco's and Vanilla Ice's career. But unlike those things Retro Shooters are back with a steel barreled vengeance. So what changed? Well to understand how the Retro Shooters came back, we have to understand their rise and fall. In 1992 id software released Wolfenstien 3D , the first mass market First Person Shooter; here the objective was to shoot your way out of a Nazi lair because fuck Nazi's. This however was less shooter and more maze game, you had about three types of enemy who did the same thing at varying speeds and your real concern was escaping their lairs, all 60 of them. This would change with id's follow up, Wolfenstien Spear of Desti- ...

   I could have done productive things this weekend, and I kinda did. But for the most part life  this weekend was two things, work and Halo Infinite . 343 put out the first technical flight for Infinite and that consumed my life from Thursday to Monday. But now it's over and it's time for some closure by talking about the flight and what I liked and what could be fixed.  I think we should talk about what's most important, Halo Infinite's gameplay which is so good. Infinite feels like a hybrid of Halo 5 and Halo 2 and the guns feel great to use. I mean for once the meta isn't just Battle Rifle which is nice, it's kind of an issue I've always had with Halo where the primary weapon is the Battle Rifle, Pistol, or you die. I actually found myself using the AR a lot which is viable at mid-range now but needs to be burst fired, which encourages variety in weaponry.   The new weapons slapped too, namely the Skewer which has some great feed back and serves as a...

Turns out one article wasn't enough to satisfy my Half-Life kick, because when I was choosing to play Half-Life 1 I had two options, Half-Life 1 or the remake Black Mesa. And while I chose Half-Life 1 I was fascinated by Black Mesa, a fan remake of Half-Life 1 that Valve allowed to sell for a profit on Steam.  And it got me thinking about fan games and how they're important to most gaming companies... except one. I'm a Nintendo fan and Nintendo's logic on fan-games is that if you do any fan game and it gains traction you will be automatically shut down. They have the right to do so mind you, but I feel it's a net negative on fandoms in general. Fan works are important and I feel that if developers support fan works in a healthy way it can create a sense of camaraderie and love for a company that would allow it to, in the eyes of the public, elude a lot of criticism. The biggest example of supporting fans is Valve. Ever since the release of Half-Life, Valve has suppo...

I recently beat the original Half-Life and it's expansions after years of putting it off; fairly fun game though anytime you have to go to Xen it sucks my soul out. But that's not really what i want to talk about, if I straight up reviewed Half-Life I wouldn't have much to say that others haven't; basically, "Great but aged, stop at Xen." What interested me however was how Half-Life and it's expansions nail the art of the side story in a way that I've only really seen once; with the original Halo on Xbox and it's book adaptation.  Both Half-Life and Halo have fascinating tales in their own way but both also leave room to see various sides of the same conflict. Its an odd similarity, but I think it's worth exploring the kinds of stories they tell. Who knows, maybe it might inspire others to try something similar. Half-Life follows Gordon Freeman, an MIT graduate working in the massive underground Black Mesa Research Complex. When a teleporter ex...

  Halo 3: ODST , one of my favorite games of all time, has finally received a proper PC port so I felt it was time to talk about what made it so special. ODST stood out in the Halo series for changing the formula; new gameplay ideas, new design, throwing what a Halo game was on it's head, and focusing on more personal stories about the world you're in as opposed to the big epic scales one got used to. Over the years however, I've noticed one game that does the same thing in it's own series and stands out for those same reasons as ODST , the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask . Sure it's a different series and gameplay styles, but you'd be shocked at the common story these games share, right from inception. ODST and Majora's Mask both started out as other projects entirely, for ODST it was Halo: Chronicles , a failed project meant to be directed by Peter Jackson. When Jackson bailed however the team behind Chronicles were left with nothing to do. So, ...

So now we are at the end of the line, all the mainline Halo games have played and now the wait begins for Infinite and the MCC port on PC. A wait that honestly is taking longer than expected, but I can wait, I'm a patient lil sausage. But there is a path here, one I've seen over my journey through Halo , one that in my opinion can perfectly explain what the hell happened here and we can find out jsut what the hell happened to cause the rise and fall of Halo. In my opinion and in terms of single player, what made Halo stand out from games like DOOM, Quake, and Duke Nukem was it's ability to flawlessly switch from hallway style linear shooting to big outdoor arenas with lots of vehicles and weapons, all of which encouraged experimentation and approaching things how you want to. It also had a sense of humor about itself, the stakes were big, epic, and serious, but the tone of at least the human characters indicated that they were having a bit of fun with the wh...