The Nerd Next Door

I recently beat the original Half-Life and it's expansions after years of putting it off; fairly fun game though anytime you have to go to Xen it sucks my soul out. But that's not really what i want to talk about, if I straight up reviewed Half-Life I wouldn't have much to say that others haven't; basically, "Great but aged, stop at Xen." What interested me however was how Half-Life and it's expansions nail the art of the side story in a way that I've only really seen once; with the original Halo on Xbox and it's book adaptation.  Both Half-Life and Halo have fascinating tales in their own way but both also leave room to see various sides of the same conflict. Its an odd similarity, but I think it's worth exploring the kinds of stories they tell. Who knows, maybe it might inspire others to try something similar. Half-Life follows Gordon Freeman, an MIT graduate working in the massive underground Black Mesa Research Complex. When a teleporter ex...

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 4 not exactly being up to snuff but not god awful, 343 got to work on Halo 5 , the first in the series with a subtitle in the name. The game that would save the ailing Xbox One and show that 343 could learn from it's mistakes while expanding on the story of the Master Chief. Does 343 pull i- fuck no, this game is fucked, let's talk about it. Set a year after the end of Halo 4 , Halo 5 follows the Master Chief as he, after learning that Cortana is alive on the world of Meridian, decides to go on the run with his squad to find her. Except not really because the game is actually about Jameson Locke, an Assassin turned Spartan tasked with his team, Fireteam Osiris, to hunt down the Chief. Although the emergence of a new Promethean villain, giant death robots, and the splintering of the Covenant will lead to events that will rock the Galaxy.... and the dumbest cliff hanger since Halo 2 . And the game's first problem comes to light just when I was trying to sum...

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...

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...