Halo: Combat Evolved

Once I finished playing SKYRIM on the Xbox, I decided really needed to branch out and try other games. I mean, I bought SKYRIM (for the first time) back in 2011, and I didn’t beat it until 2020 when the Switch version came along.

I settled on giving the first HALO game, HALO COMBAT EVOLVED a try, and I finished the main campaign recently.

I was surprised at how much I ended up enjoying it. A lot of modern games are very much wide-open sandboxes where you can pretty much do anything. HALO CE is a comparatively simple game since there are only so many weapons, you can only carry two guns at a time, and there are only so many enemy types. But chess is a comparatively simple game with only so many pieces and moves, and it’s still quite enjoyable and complex, and HALO CE is much the same way.

That said, the most fun is when you have a tank and can absolutely blast aliens to bits with the main gun.

Also, encountering the original Cortana was amusing. My first experience with “Cortana” was the ill-fated voice assistant Microsoft tried to add into Windows 10. I installed Windows 10 a lot of times, and for a while the setup wizard automatically had Cortana talk to you. So when playing HALO CE, it was funny to have Windows 10 yelling at me about the tactical situation.

It was also amusing that the final mission of the game is basically Mario Kart with machine guns.

Looking forward to trying HALO 2!

-JM