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...

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...

Halo Reach is one of the most divisive entries in the Halo franchise. People either love it with all their heart, seeing it as the pinnacle of the franchise; or hate it with every fiber of their being, seeing it as the beginning of the end for the Halo series. Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle, it just has too many problems and while I could rant about how dumb the armor lock ability is and how it ruins the balance of the game I’m more of a lore guy and for me this is where the biggest problem is. The game tells you from the beginning that everyone is gonna die and that the Planet of Reach will be burned to the ground, but it doesn’t go anywhere with it like it should, it’s very scatterbrained. First thing’s first we need a basic recap to the plot, Halo Reach is set in 2552, where humanity is at war with a extra-terrestrial threat called the Covenant, and it is losing. But there are secret weapons helping tip the scales, the Spartan super soldiers, soldiers trained from ...