Self Similar – Page 11 – self similar's personal gaming nonsense blog

Halo Fest 2020 – Halo 3

The Story So Far: Taking blame for the loss of Halo Installation 04, an Elite commander is tried for heresy. He’s given the opportunity to become the Arbiter, a position that serves at the Covenant leadership’s behest to embark on special, typically suicidal missions in order to atone for his failures. The Arbiter is then dispatched to recover 343 Guilty Spark. Meanwhile, a small Covenant fleet led by one of the Covenant leaders, the Prophet of Regret, arrives near Earth. During the ensuing battle, Regret’s ship gets through Earth’s defenses and begins to assault the city of New Mombasa. As the battle turns, Regret retreats, making a slipspace jump right above the city. The UNSC frigate that Master Chief and Cortana are on manages to jump along with them, arriving at another Halo installation. Master Chief and the small UNSC force with him head to the surface to prevent this new Halo from being activated and the Master Chief manages to kill the Prophet of Regret. The main Covenant fleet jumps in and the Arbiter is dispatched to intervene. While successful in stopping the humans, the Arbiter is then betrayed by Tartarus, the commander of the Brutes, as they assume the Elite’s power within the Covenant. As a civil war between the Brutes and the Elites breaks out, both the Master Chief and the Arbiter find themselves held captive by an intelligent Flood creature called the Gravemind. The Gravemind reveals to the Arbiter that he’s been lied to and then sends them both to stop the activation of the Halo installation; Master Chief to the Covenant’s mobile capital city High Charity and the Arbiter to stop Tartarus on the Halo installation. The Arbiter, teaming up with some of the remaining UNSC forces, succeeds in stopping Tartarus though, interrupting the activation already in progress, a failsafe system engages, threatening to remotely activate all of the remaining Halos. As the Flood begin to overrun High Charity, Master Chief tracks the last of the Covenant leaders, the Prophet of Truth, to an ancient Forerunner dreadnought in the city. The Master Chief manages to hitch a ride just as the ship takes off and jumps to Earth while Cortana remains behind to finish dealing with the Halo installation, and inadvertently, the Gravemind.

Unlike Halo 2, I was actually anticipating the release of Halo 3. As mentioned in my last post, I was actively working on finishing off the original Xbox games on my backlog before finally migrating to the Xbox 360, and I capped off the effort by purposely lining up another playthrough of Halo: CE and my first real playthrough of Halo 2 with the release of Halo 3. This felt like the perfect transition from one generation to the next and I certainly wasn’t disappointed with the last installment of the trilogy. Probably more significantly, Halo 3 also became a highly social game between me and a few different groups of friends which continued on to some degree through the life of Halo: Reach. So many Xbox Live Slayer matches, innumerable in-person get-togethers for couch matches, custom game types and house rules, custom maps via Forge, coop over Live, etc. Halo 3’s multiplayer was for me, I suppose, what Halo 2’s was for so many Halo fans, and I look back on those times quite fondly.

“Master Chief and the Arbiter, back together again!”

So, playing the campaign for only the second time, I once again relied on the Master Chief Collection for Xbox One. This time I played it on my new Series X, which on my 1080p TV, only really benefits me in Halo 3 by way of quicker loading times. In any case, I mentioned last time that I was worried about playing this game right after playing the beautifully remastered version of Halo 2, but I’m glad to report that I have zero regrets. Despite lacking the extra layer of graphical flourish that Halo 2 Anniversary brought, Halo 3 still looks absolutely gorgeous today. Its only major shortcomings come down to some fairly hideous human faces and some jerky character animation during cutscenes, neither of which are an issue for the vast majority of the game.

As far as the game itself goes, I don’t know if it was actually a stated design goal for Halo 3, but if Halo 2 was “quite a different animal than the original Halo: Combat Evolved” (as I said in my Halo 2 post) than Halo 3 seemed to make purposeful efforts to find a middle ground between the two games, taking a lot of the best additions and changes brought by Halo 2 and smoothing over the rough edges just a bit, often taking a half step back towards Halo: CE. It’s not incredibly easy to summarize, but it feels blatant to me when playing the three games back to back like this.

“Ahhh, my beloved AR. Fits like an old glove!”

Any weapon I had complaints about in Halo 2 feel much improved for one. The shotgun, being one I explicitly mentioned last time, is a perfect example of a “half step back” Halo 3 takes – while the rate of fire is still lower than Halo: CE’s shotgun, it definitely feels faster than Halo 2’s, and its range feels a lot closer to Halo: CE’s as well. Additionally, dual wielding no longer comes off like a gimmick that Bungie really wants you to test out, but just a handy thing you can do when it feels advantageous to do so. Oh, and the damn assault rifle is back! Melee feels reasonably powerful again too! Hoo-fucking-ray! While vehicle damage is largely unchanged, vehicles do at least seem a bit more resilient this time around – no more hopping into a vehicle to have it shot to pieces all around you within seconds.

Of course Bungie added some new things as well. Halo 2’s selection of weapons is further expanded with more Brute weapons such as the Mauler, the Spiker, the Spike Grenade, and the Gravity Hammer, and there’s some other goodies like the legendary Spartan Laser. There’s also the lovely addition of being able to pull mounted guns from their mounts and lug them with you which can’t go without mention despite being more cool than actually useful most times. Of course we get several new vehicles as well, like the UNSC’s Mongoose ATV and Hornet aircraft. Halo 3 also adds the concept of deployable equipment to go alongside the previously available power-ups. The relatively long list of these includes things like Bubble Shields, Power Drains, Trip Mines, and Gravity Lifts that you can toss out with various effects. These were pretty damn divisive (but pretty damn fun) when it came to multiplayer, but in terms of single player, while they can mix up encounters in some very cool ways, they always felt a little underwhelming to me. Having such a variety of equipment but only being able to hold one at a time meant certain effects couldn’t necessarily be relied upon, which in turned caused me to use them a lot less than I probably should have.

“You’d better get used to blowing up Scarabs.”

Level design was another area of improvement though. Both Halo 3’s open and more linear sections felt more open and more filled with possibilities than Halo 2’s. The pacing, both moment to moment and level to level, felt a lot more even to me as well. You could perhaps argue that Halo 3’s campaign was less “epic” than Halo 2’s, where each level felt more like its own interesting set piece. Hell, not counting the Scarab sections, Halo 3 didn’t even have any real “boss” battles to speak of, save for the very end of the game. You also don’t play as the Arbiter (though he’s often fighting alongside you, available for a second player to jump into when playing cooperatively) which loses that additional perspective on events in the story. Still, while Halo 2 might have had more big, memorable moments, Halo 3 was so much more playable and, well, fun. That extends to difficulty too. Playing through the campaign on “Heroic” again, this time I barely suffered for my choice – gone were the ridiculously bullet sponginess of the Brutes, the overabundance of enemies (except for when it made thematic sense, like in the level “Cortana”) and many of the cheaper feeling, frustration fueling deaths.

“Flood extermination.”

I’ll sum up Halo 3’s story when I post about Halo 4, but I did want to talk about an underappreciated character real quick: the Gravemind. In Halo: CE when we were originally introduced to the Flood they seemed to be little more than parasites and the mindless zombies they produced. Sure, there was obviously some sort of rudimentary (perhaps hive) intelligence there, but what we got in Halo 2 with the Gravemind was so much more sinister. Whether you realized it or not at the time, throughout the plots of both Halo 2 and Halo 3, the Gravemind successfully manipulated so much of what was occurring. For instance, in Halo 2, while it’s not explicitly explained, it seems clear that it had assumed control of Halo Installation 05 after capturing its caretaker AI, then it was able to capture the In Amber Clad specifically to spread itself to (and take over) High Charity. It then captured and interrogated Cortana, all but completely corrupting her programming and turning her, which surely led to much of what the Flood was able to accomplish in Halo 3. I liked fighting the Flood much more in Halo 3, actually – the new “pure form” was pretty damn cool, for one.

“Warthog Run, version 2.0”

In so many respects Halo 3 feels like an attempt to make the sequel that some fans of Combat Evolved (like yours truly) wanted but didn’t quite get with Halo 2. Beyond all of the gameplay shifts back towards Halo: CE I mentioned above, there are even more, like how much more time was spent fighting on Earth this time around, addressing a complaint I and others had around Halo 2’s campaign, and how much more active and chattier your UNSC marine companions are. Then there’s all of the Easter eggs and intentional references to the previous games Halo 3 makes, like re-delivered lines and rehashed levels; Hell, the game ends with another (much improved) Warthog run sequence ala Halo: CE. As a fan of the first Halo, of course this all feels like an improvement to me, but more importantly, it was all just so goddamn fun to play through again. It’s the first one of these that, even before finishing, I felt compelled to play more of. Somehow I didn’t have that many fond memories of Halo 3’s campaign going into this, but man, I really loved it this time. Throw in all of the additional multiplayer features and things like Forge and Theater, and this is easily one of the best games in the series, and one of my favorites.

“Special delivery!”

As an aside, Halo 3 also marks the start of live-action Halo content with what is known as “Halo: Landfall” as well as these “Believe” ad campaign shorts. Landfall is made up of three parts that show us some UNSC marines fighting Covenant forces on earth while attempting to locate Master Chief, while Believe shows brief interviews with veteran of those same battles recounting their experiences. While neat, they’re hardly essential, but as I plan on covering some other official Halo related video productions when we get to them, I thought it these were a worthy footnote.

All screenshots by me!? Thanks to the Xbox Series X controller’s new share button I’m finally able to easily grab good screenshots from my Xbox. Fuck yes! I’ve been bitching about this forever.

Halo Fest 2020 – Halo 2

The Story So Far: The “Master Chief”, a genetically modified “Spartan” supersoldier, is woken up from cryogenic sleep aboard a UNSC cruiser during an attack by an alien alliance known as the Covenant. With no options left and a plan to crash-land the ship on a mysterious artificial ring world nearby, the Master Chief is entrusted with safeguarding the ship’s AI, Cortana. On the surface of the ring the pair regroups with other survivors skirmishing with Covenant forces and formulates a plan to breach a facility that they hope will direct them to the ring’s central control room. In addition to learning that the Covenant worships the race who originally constructed this “Halo” installation, the Forerunners, Cortana discovers a weapons cache which might help turn the tide of the battle. It turns out that this “weapon” is a sample of a parasitic alien species called the Flood. Accidentally released, the Flood quickly begins to spread, overwhelming both the human survivors and Covenant forces alike. With the assistance of the installation’s caretaker, an AI called 343 Guilty Spark, the pair is guided to the ring’s control room so they can activate its defenses. Cortana stops the activation at the last moment, having learned about the nature of the defenses in question – the installation itself is a superweapon designed to combat the Flood by eradicating all sentient life in the galaxy. Not really loving that idea, the pair head to the wreckage of their ship to attempt to trigger a detonation that will destroy the entire installation and prevent Guilty Spark from carrying out its apocalyptic task. Successful, Master Chief and Cortana are able to locate a still-operational fighter in the wreckage and make it off of the installation just in time.

Halo 2 was hotly anticipated by Halo fans everywhere, setting pre-order records and ending up with massive sales and an amazing reception. Despite all of this, I somehow didn’t give too much of a toss about it. The truth is that 2004 was probably the peak of my involvement in online gaming and my clan at the time, The Praetorian Guard, was still playing America’s Army and Planetside as well as dabbling in some MMORPGs, with most of us waiting impatiently for World of Warcraft to finally be released. My brother, who had introduced me to Halo, brought home a copy of Halo 2 in short order too, but the hook didn’t quite stick the second time.

“Back on Earth, at last.”

Halo 2 was quite a different animal than the original Halo: Combat Evolved. The game engine was rebuilt from the ground up and it really showed – the physics felt different, the game looked different, the weapons felt different, etc. On top of that, there were some huge gameplay differences too. One of the more notable ones was the overhaul of the health system. Now instead of having a rechargeable shield layered on top of a more traditional health bar, you simply have rechargeable shields which sit on top of a tiny buffer of unspecified, also regenerating health. This made tracking down health packs a thing of the past and really reinforced the importance of ducking out of combat to quickly recharge. While this feels quite jarring when playing Halo: CE and Halo 2 back to back, once used to it, I think I actually prefer Halo 2’s simplified take.

Another more “back of the box” change was the addition of dual wielding weapons. While nifty, it rarely felt advantageous to me since holding a second weapon came at the expense of being able to chuck grenades or melee attack, two staples of Halo: CE combat. On the other hand, basic melee attacks felt a lot less effective anyway, even if Bungie did decide to add a bit more depth to them by taking into account movement and what weapons you’re holding when calculating damage. Speaking of weapons, shocking at the time, my beloved assault rifle had been traded out for this new battle rifle thing, along with a new (weak and obviously intended to be dual wielded) submachine gun. While I’d eventually warm up to the battle rifle in future Halo games, neither gun felt like an adequate replacement for the assault rifle. There were numerous other weapon differences too, like the shotgun being all but ruined with its lower rate of fire and shorter range, and some new weapons like the Elite’s energy sword and Brute’s brute shot. Most of these special weapons were quite awesome though, thankfully.

“That said, I love dual wielding plasma rifles.”

Another big change to the core gameplay was to vehicles, and like the aforementioned melee changes, the theme here is added complexity and depth. Unlike in Halo: CE, where vehicles were totally invulnerable, there’s now a vehicle damage system in which the vehicles degrade with damage until they eventually blow up and become unusable. While I sometimes miss Halo: CE’s simpler system, Halo 2’s updates feel more advanced and ultimately much better, even if it can be incredibly disheartening to watch your ride disintegrate around you. The graphical effects of having pieces fly off your vehicle as it gets smashed up by a huge explosion (or a poorly planned jump, as is often the case in the Warthog) definitely only adds to the already impressive spectacle. It also pairs nicely with the new ability to board and assault and/or take over vehicles, critically leveling the playing field a bit more, especially in multiplayer matches.

As for level design, Halo 2’s maps are constrained to open arenas connected by corridors. The larger arenas sometimes come close, but nothing really quite captures the feeling of Halo: CE’s more open environments and battlefields. Despite being more linear, the backtracking and repetitious sections are mostly absent, and even when present, aren’t anything like the more tedious sections of Halo: CE. For better or for worse, Halo 2 feels a lot closer to a modern first person shooter than its predecessor. One other difference I noted was how the later levels often feel more chaotic in Halo 2. “Containment Zone” for example, features some insane battles as Elites, Covenant loyalists, Forerunner drones, and the Flood all go at it, often with an array of vehicles and powerful weapons to spice things up. The insanity translates into more of a challenge on higher difficulties too. Playing this on “Heroic” difficulty once again, many of these encounters felt a bit untuned, with too many enemies that were a bit too bullet-spongy for my tastes, even if they were a bit less frustrating than the harder encounters in Halo: CE.

“Hooray for vehicle damage?”

So, while none of the above is bad per say, in fact most people would call most of these changes improvements, for someone who loved Halo: CE but didn’t get caught up in the hype around Halo 2, all added up, it was a bit of a hard pill to swallow. I still dabbled with Halo 2, of course, occasionally playing a few matches of Slayer with my brother and my dad, but it didn’t come anywhere close to pulling me away from my PC. In fact, I don’t think I ever made any real attempt to get into the single player campaign until years later when I made a concerted effort to beat all of my old Xbox games before finally moving on to the Xbox 360.

One aspect of Halo 2 that was closer to universally unpopular was the addition of a second protagonist. You take control of the Arbiter, an Elite who had been entrusted with a series of special missions which has him ultimately crossing paths with the Master Chief by the end of the campaign. A lot of people hated playing this random alien instead of their beloved Spartan, but I and many others actually thought the Arbiter’s story was pretty damn cool, as was the addition of a new Covenant adversary key to this storyline in the powerful Brutes. Perhaps spreading the missions where you play as the Arbiter out a bit more and having less of them overall would have helped avoid people feeling that the Master Chief was being overshadowed, but who knows.

As with last time, for this playthrough I played Halo 2: Anniversary, included with the Xbox One Master Chief Collection. Like with Halo: CE, this was my first time playing the Anniversary edition remaster, so naturally I’ll pick the particulars of this version apart a little too.

“…and this one’s Great Journey, are the same!”

The first thing that stands out about this new version of Halo 2 are the graphics. While Halo: CE Anniversary still looked a tiny bit rough around the edges in spots, Halo 2: Anniversary is a total triumph. First, they got the legendary Blur to produce beautiful new cinematic cutscenes to replace the previous in-engine ones. These new cutscenes are based directly on the original ones but, with the higher fidelity, they feel a lot more expressive to me. I particularly love the new Gravemind scenes! I also can’t escape the fact that the game, given a similar new “coat of paint” to its in-game graphics as Halo: CE, wears them a lot better. I’d largely attribute it to how much more advanced Halo 2 was – given its release being so late in the cycle of the original Xbox, it was practically an early Xbox 360 game. The remaster being one generation newer, targeted for the Xbox One instead of the Xbox 360, doesn’t hurt either. On top of that, while some areas of the game do look radically different than their original incarnations, for the most part it feels like 343 was much more respectful of the game’s aesthetics this time around. Also, on a totally subjective note, I could never stand how oddly washed out Halo 2 looked, an issue that has been absolutely resolved in this remaster.

Like Halo: CE Anniversary, the sound effects and soundtrack have been completely re-recorded too. The original soundtrack was already a masterpiece, so while which renditions you prefer is definitely a matter of opinion, there’s certainly nothing wrong with the new tracks. On the other hand, as with last time, I find the new mix to be a bit distracting. It’s not quite as bad about overpowering the dialog but it can certainly drown out other sound effects. A great example of this is the level “Uprising” in which the ambient jungle noises and sounds of distant battle are all but missing because the music is so much louder. A nitpick, sure, but these little things do make a difference. Halo 2: Anniversary also includes the awesome on-demand instant swap between old and new aesthetics, which I’m mentioning now, because it also includes swapping between those original and remastered sound effects and the soundtrack now. Excellent.

“The Arbiter heading to The Anodyne Spirit on High Charity.”

This new version also revisits the idea of including hidden terminals in each level. The cutscenes triggered by interacting with the terminals focus on the history of the Covenant, and particularly the concept of the Arbiter. Although I did like the terminal cutscenes from Halo CE: Anniversary, I found these ones so much more interesting, and more likely to be appreciated by a first time player too. The additional background on the Arbiter only made me appreciate his role in the story that much more. Very cool stuff. That said, Halo 2’s story (which, like last time, I’ll wait to spoil in the next post) didn’t leave as many seemingly crucial background details out and it’s told in a much more cohesive way overall, so these scenes really do feel like bonus content rather than a necessary attempt to fill in gaps.

In the end, Halo 2 is a mixed bag for me. On one hand, the game still undeniably feels like a bit of a departure from what I loved about Halo: CE. On the other hand, it’s a richer and more skillful effort, and the lovingly crafted makeover it received with Anniversary only reinforces that, feeling almost as easy to pick up and play today as it would have 15 years ago. That is, of course, a massive compliment to both Bungie and 343 alike. How impressed I am with this remaster does make me just a bit nervous to return to Halo 3, which has yet to receive any such overhaul. More on that next time though!

Screenshots taken from the Steam community for the PC version of Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

Halo Fest 2020 – Combat Evolved

Halo: Combat Evolved rounds out a trio of FPS games, along with GoldenEye and Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64, that my brother and I did some serious bonding over in my late teens/young adult years while he was living back with my family – we’d watch each other’s playthroughs, hop into cooperative missions together from time to time, and of course, play tons of “Slayer” deathmatch against one another. Unusually, my dad, not much of a gamer, was also strangely drawn to Halo, often filling a third slot in our split screen multiplayer sessions. My dad really got into it and probably spent far more time with the single player campaigns of the first Halo games than either of us did. In fact, through sheer force of will (I imagine assisted by unabashed abuse of the checkpoint system) I think he even eventually beat them both on “Legendary” difficulty.

“Well, well, well. What do we have here?”

Beyond what it meant to me personally, Halo: CE was a special game. I still vividly recall my brother bringing home a brand new Xbox that he’d unwisely blown a chunk of a paycheck on, hyping us up on how awesome Halo was. At first I wasn’t all that impressed with what it was doing, since games like Half Life and Unreal had already started evolving the FPS genre in similar ways on PC, but I was quickly won over by its unique aesthetic, mysterious science fiction storyline, slick, polished execution, and almost perfect early implementation of dual analog stick FPS controls. I found the less linear, more open world sections (complete with crazy vehicles and more advanced AI than I’d seen up to that point) particularly compelling. As much as I had enjoyed some of the previous console FPS games, it was Halo that finally really sold the concept. To me, and to millions of others, it seems.

My enjoyment of Halo wasn’t isolated to consoles though – I preordered Gearbox’s PC port of Halo: CE mostly for the promise of at last being able to play multiplayer online, but I ended up being quite underwhelmed by it. The netcode in particular wasn’t quite as well suited for those of us pitiful enough to still be rocking dial-up Internet in 2002 as a lot of the other games I’d been playing on PC were. In more recent years that PC port of Halo: CE became the multiplayer game of choice for me and a couple of my co-workers during our breaks, and we still occasionally get together for online multiplayer sessions using the Xbox One’s Halo: The Master Chief Collection to dust off our old favorite maps to this very day. While multiplayer really isn’t in the scope of Halo Fest 2020, I can’t go without at least mentioning it since it’s such a huge part of Halo: CE (and the rest of the franchise’s) success, and there’s definitely still a ton of fun to be had there.

“Alright, tutorial time!”

On to this playthrough of Halo: Combat Evolved! I should note that I’m playing through the version of the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary included with the aforementioned Xbox One MCC. This was my first time playing the Anniversary edition remaster, and given that I’ve played through Halo: CE’s single player levels more times than I can recall, I’m going to spend much of my time here discussing that release more than the game overall.

The first thing that I noticed upon loading into the first level of Halo: CE Anniversary was the lack of the short tutorial section based around Master Chief waking up out of cryo-sleep. This immediately left a sour taste in my mouth. I mean, what the fuck? They removed the tutorial? What else did they remove? ARGH! Later I realized that this was because I started the campaign in “Heroic” difficutly, which skips the tutorial just as it’s always done – nothing to do with the new version. Oops. Okay, well, of course, my attention then snapped back to the presentation.

“While beautiful, 343 Guilty Spark feels quite different from the original.”

All of the graphics in the Anniversary edition have been lovingly and painstakingly remastered to make the game look a little bit more suitable to newer generations of consoles. The remaster also makes efforts to bring Halo: CE in-line stylistically with the latter games in the series, particularly Halo: Reach. For the most part, I think this was a rather successful effort. The new artwork is mostly great and overall the game looks how most people would likely remember it looking after not having played it for years. Still, the change in style also means it is often quite a departure from Halo: CE’s original graphics, which were of course Bungie’s first stab at what would eventually evolve into what we got in Reach. The dark purples of the covenant forces have been replaced by lighter hues, the architecture of the buildings on Installation 04 now have a lot more detail, but losing much of their cold, stark character as a result. The dense foggy swamp of “343 Guilty Spark” is now a much more lush, and much less creepy, jungle. The list goes on and on.

This might have all been less obvious if 343 didn’t include the fantastic addition of being able to instantly toggle between new and old graphics with the press of a button. I found myself doing this quite often to really take in the differences. Surprisingly, sometimes the original graphics “up-resed” still looked quite acceptable, even rivaling the new ones, and it took me a few seconds to realize I was accidentally still on the old graphics on more than one occasion. They would have been even better if they weren’t based on the aforementioned flawed PC port. That said, the outdoors sections of the game are where the remastered graphics clearly blow the old ones out of the water. The lighting on the indoor sections is quite a bit different too, and while some might protest a loss in tension, some sections are much easier to navigate as a result. “The Library” is the prime example; while still being a Flood infested, repetitive slog, you can probably remove getting turned around and lost multiple times from your list of its aggravations now.

“Ugh. The Library…”

While discussing potentially unpopular changes, let’s talk sound. The music has been completely rerecorded for the Anniversary edition, and it’s mostly great. The biggest issue I have here is with mixing – there were definitely many points where the music was drowning out the in-game dialog, which is an issue I don’t remember having with the original game. They did eventually add the option to toggle between soundtracks to keep the purists happy, which is probably a good thing given how beloved the Halo: CE soundtrack is. The sound effects have also been completely redone. Again, they did a great job here, and most people probably won’t even notice, but some of the effects do indeed sound radically different which I’m sure irks quite a lot of the more hardcore Halo fan-base. While I believe they’ve included an option to use classic sound effects when starting a single player session in a recent patch, it’s still not instantly toggleable like the graphics are, unfortunately.

As I mentioned, I went through the campaign in “Heroic” difficulty, which is way more of a pain in the ass than I remembered it being. There were definitely a few sections where I had to bash my head against the scenario I found my last checkpoint throwing me into over and over until I managed to work out a strategy to survive, or at least had a rare bit of good luck with. Honestly, this didn’t feel much better than “save scumming” through the difficulty, and was seriously frustrating. Maybe this is just a case of me getting older and my l33t FPS skillz withering away though. Finally, as if Heroic didn’t make me hate myself enough, Anniversary added the “skull” system found in later Halo games, and while I did go out of my way to collect all of the skulls, I certainly didn’t activate any of them as part of my normal playthrough. Searching for them was a fun diversion, at least!

“As annoying as the later levels can be, they have their moments.”

Throwing back to a complaint I’ve always had about Halo: CE, I hate how goddamn repetitive and long some of the levels in its campaign are. I’m looking at you “Assault on the Control Room”! At least the checkpoints come frequently enough to subdivide the levels into more bite-sized chunks pretty well. The infamous fact that you then have to backtrack through a few of them in later levels on top of that still almost feels like a direct middle finger from the developers to the player though. These rehashed areas tend to play out just differently enough to just barely work. The saving grace here is that, despite all of this, the campaign overall is fairly short. Again, this just barely works for me, and thankfully Bungie never really repeated these mistakes again in later entries.

Halo: CE’s story has always been a little odd. The overall plot, which I’ll recap in my next entry, is easy enough to understand, sure, but there are so many vaugeries in its details and its backstory that only later get fleshed out as the series progresses, and even then, I’m guessing (having never read them) those are mostly only truly explained in the novels. The Anniversary edition adds a hidden terminal to each level that can be triggered for a short animated cutscene that goes a long way to help explain flesh out the origins of Installation 04, Guilty Spark 343, and the Flood. I have to imagine that some of these would be utterly bewildering to new players, but to a Halo veteran like me they’re pretty damn cool and very much appreciated.

“I never get sick of The Silent Cartographer, especially in co-op!”

You know, Halo: CE still managed to be a fun ride despite its old age and more well-known shortcomings. The first time you load up a Warthog with marines and go tearing down the beaches in “The Silent Cartographer”, out maneuver a charging Hunter to land that final shotgun blast to the small of its back, or perfectly stick a plasma grenade to a rampaging Banshee as it dives down from high above you, you’ll forget all about this game being almost 20 years old. To me, it remains a reasonably timeless game, and the Anniversary enhancements should only help it to feel that way a little longer.

Now onto a game whose campaign I’ve somehow only completed once, Halo 2!

Screenshots taken from the Steam community for the PC version of Halo: The Master Chief Collection.