Halo Series Complete
I read Halo: The fall of Reach as well as Halo: First Strike a few weeks ago. I went back and replayed the first Halo game inbetween those books to make the story fit in, my intention was to then go on and play Halo 2. All I had at the time was a PC, so I got a copy of Halo 2 for the PC and tried to play through the first person campaign to get the next chapters in the story. Unfortunately Halo 2 was unplayable on the PC. It was atrocious, simply terrible. There was no support for widescreen resolutions. Movement was slow like I was moving through peanut butter at sub-zero temperatures. The aiming reticle wasn’t even centered in the screen! It was incredibly un-fun to play. I don’t know what Microsoft/Bungie did to that game when they ported it to the PC but they did an awful job of it, I cannot believe anybody would have actually payed money for that game. So I abandoned the game after the first chapter/level which is when it demands you activate the game with Microsoft. I tried to read up on the story line of Halo 2 online to get an idea of what I was missing.
Last weekend I recieved an XBOX 360 from Becca for Christmas (score!) and a copy of Halo 3. I started up Halo 3 and started playing. I realized that the sluggishness and difficulty with aiming that I experienced on the PC version of Halo 2 was probably and attempt to hobble PC users to bring them down to the level of console gamers. I still don’t understand what happened to the aiming reticle, but whatever. Playing with the XBOX 360 controller I was eventually able to get used to playing a first person shooter with those feeble and imprecise input methods, and started really having fun. I wonder if HALO 2 might actually be fun if you play it on a console, but I don’t know if I’ll bother going back now.
Anyways, the story of HALO was really quite compelling. Right up the very end.
SPOILER ALERT
What the crap was up with how they killed Master Chief? So was the explosion somehow able to kill him in the hanger, but not able to reach all the way up the Arbiter in the cockpit? I don’t get it. He escaped… but he didn’t?