![]() ![]() ![]() Halo 2 began the series’ long struggle with grandiosity. I couldn’t get both this and Halo 2’s split-screen mode to work on a borrowed Xbox 360. No conversation about Halo: Combat Evolved is complete without a discussion about the game’s multiplayer … except for this one. Right around the time the alien super-zombie things known as the Flood are introduced, Halo: Combat Evolved starts recycling old level designs like there’s no tomorrow. It is, however, incredibly obvious that Bungie ran out of time midway through development. The less said about “The Library,” the better. I played through all of these games on normal difficulty, and Halo: Combat Evolved was the only installment to seriously kick my ass. The game is, however, significantly more difficult than most modern shooters and, indeed, its descendants. Halo: Combat Evolved popularized many tenants of modern shooter design, including recharging health and limited weapon slots, so going back didn’t feel particularly strange or jarring. Importantly, the game’s core mechanics and design have aged well. The game’s story relied on Master Chief and gang trying to make sense of alien prophecies and ancient superweapons, leaving little time for Master Chief’s blandness to be detrimental. Still, at least in Halo: Combat Evolved, his nonpresence largely works. Since the very first game, he’s been largely devoid of personality and only occasionally speaks during brief cutscenes. He was basically a dude in green power armor, like a souped-up version of a Warhammer 40K space marine. I can totally see why his AI buddy Cortana, a scantily clad female hologram in a game marketed mostly to teenage boys, hit it off, but Master Chief? In retrospect, it’s surprising how quickly Master Chief became a pop culture icon. So, in honor of Destiny’s upcoming release, this winter’s Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Ridley Scott’s Halo: Nightfall, that Halo 5 beta, the Master Chief Master Chef knife collection, the limited edition bath towels and the many other Halo events slated for the end of this year, I decided to play through all of the old Halo games this past week to see how they’ve held up. Yet I had a nagging feeling that my recollections of the earlier games were tainted by nostalgia, that Halo probably hasn’t stood the test of time. Plucking away at space wizards and grunts brought back fond memories of a misspent youth filled with, um, plucking away at space wizards and grunts. That is, of course, until I played the Destiny beta, the next big game from Bungie, the creators of Halo. Other video games, movies and books filled that Master Chief-sized hole in my life. Growing up, I loved Halo an embarrassing amount: To this day, my email address contains a barely veiled reference to the series protagonist.īut, after my Xbox 360 died several years ago, I drifted away from the series. Halo, Microsoft’s epic sci-fi video game franchise, holds a very special place in my heart. ![]()
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