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 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...

We're not exactly done yet, if you haven't noticed I didn't talk about Halo's mobile spinoffs, remasters, ports, and fan games. Well I was saving this for an all in one encompassing look at all the other ways to play Halo beyond the games that defined the series' legacy. The mobile games, fan works, ports, and remasters that tend to follow a series as storied as Halo , let's have a chat about it. Ports First up is Halo 1 on PC, released two years after Halo 1 on Xbox and oh boy this one is special. On one hand the game's visuals are butchered with various effects that helped pretty up the game missing, leading to a worse experience overall compared to the Xbox version. On the other hand this version has online multiplayer and mod support along with having all of the engine tools released for Halo 1 . This has in turn inspired some magical works we'll mention later. So if I were to recommend this game, it would probably be for the mod support ...

One trilogy finishes as does another, it's time to look at Halo 3 , the franchise's jump to the Xbox 360. With a brand new console, does Halo still have what made it work? Well of course it does, but does it still hold up today? Well of course it does as well. But why is this held up so high amongst fans, including myself? Well let's dig into what I consider the apex of the series. Also I played this on Heroic because I can play through Halo 3 with my hands behind my back, Normal would be done in like 5 hours for me. Set hours (and a shitty graphic novel) after Halo 2 , Halo 3 sees the Master Chief wind up back in Africa, but this time on the slopes of Killamanjaro, where he is found by a squad led by returning Sergeant Johnson and the Arbiter. Things aren't looking good however, the UNSC is reduced to a resistance movement hiding in an old NATO base and a few frigates, the Flood are rampant with a super intelligent eldritch leader, Cortana is trapped on High Cha...

With Jak II complete, it's time to head back to Halo 2 . Now I have a long history with this game, one of the people who worked for my Mom got the Limited Collectors Edition for me as a Secret Santa gift when I was 8 in 2004 and my Mom "acquiesced" to me playing it (turns out she bought the game and had them give it to me).  Halo 2 quickly became my go to game and I fell in love with shooter's as a result, putting me one a path that leads to, well writing in general. All this to say that, with 15 years experience, I could have easily reviewed this off memory alone, but I decided to give it a normal mode play-through and give it a fair judgement. How did that fare? Let's find out. Set 1 month after blowing up Halo during, well, Halo , and arriving back in human space (and having a totally bitchin adventure in the process). The Master Chief is attending an award ceremony on a orbital defense platform when the Covenant decide to invade Earth. This begins a ...