The Nerd Next Door

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 ...

Halo is in sort of a rocky place right now, the franchises entire hopes ride on a return to the classic style with Halo Infinite after the disaster that was Halo 5: Guardians . But Infinite won't be the first return to a classic style, as little more than a year after Halo 5 , Halo Wars 2 dropped on Xbox and PC. With a more simplified premise, a return to a classic world in the series, and a new villain, does Halo Wars 2 outshine the first one? Halo Wars 2 is set 28 years after Halo Wars and about 6 months after Halo 5:Guardians ; after being lost in space at the end of Halo Wars , Halo Wars 2 sees the crew of the UNSC Spirit of Fire being awoken in orbit around a restored Ark from Halo 3 . However, the crew quickly discovers a Brute dominated ex-Covenant faction called the Banished in possession of the Ark after slaughtering the scientific survey outpost and Spartan escort that previously occupied it.  The Spirit of Fire, along with a new AI named Isabel, finds itself a...

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...