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...

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 ...

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...