The Nerd Next Door

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...

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...

With Halo: The Master Chief Collection nearing it's first test run on PC, I decided to take a look back at every Halo game as it was originally released... because I own all of them and can do that. First up is Halo Combat Evoilved on the original Xbox. Now this wasn't my first Halo, it was Halo 2, I got the Platinum Hits of Halo 1 for Easter 2005 when I was 8 because I had very lenient parents when it came to content. It was loaded with a Halo 2 teaser and Behind the Scenes disc and that's not important is it? No, what's important is does the original Halo hold up in 2019? Because I like beating a horse to the ground as I said the same thing about Jak and Daxter last week and that is also from 2001. I love Halo's story, it's a great tale both in terms of books and the games themselves, but we're not here to talk about the books. We're here to talk about Halo CE, which follows the crew of the United Nations Space Command starship Pillar of Autumn...