I Accidentally Finished Halo 2 & Halo 3
I’ve mentioned before that I didn’t play any console games at all from about 1998 to 2019, so I missed out on the entire HALO series. But in 2022 I got an Xbox, and after I used it to beat SKYRIM, I started on the HALO series. I beat the original HALO single-player campaign in October 2022.
This year I fired up HALO 2 and started playing through the main campaign. I sort of got distracted for a while in May, but I came back to it August and picked it up again.
I kept plugging away at the main campaign, and to my surprise, I suddenly beat it. HALO 2 ends on a cliffhanger, so I can see why HALO 3 was such a big deal back in 2007.
Naturally, I had to keep going, and since HALO 3 is included in the MASTER CHIEF COLLECTION anyway, I started up on HALO 3. Apparently in its first week of sales back in 2007, the game made more than $300 million dollars, and it totally deserves it. There are some amazing levels in that game. Like the bit where Master Chief has to take down two giant enemy mechs simultaneously, or the final level when Master Chief and the Arbiter have to escape the collapsing Halo, with Master Chief driving the Warthog and the Arbiter running the machine gun in the back. It’s like Mario Kart, but with firearms!
I think the original HALO remains my favorite because of its relative simplicity – there are only so many weapons and enemy types, but the game puts them to good use.
Console gaming is a very different experience than PC gaming. I said I didn’t play any console games at all from about 1998 to 2019, but that isn’t to say I played no games. I spent a lot of time PC gaming in the 90s, which meant fiddling with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and making sure EMM386.EXE was configured properly. Oh, and making sure that the sound card was configured to use a different IRQ than the other devices on the system. Granted, if you were born in the 1990s, you probably have no idea what I was talking about, but if you know, you know.
Whereas with a console, you just download the game, and it almost always works! Very different experience.
Though my favorite part of any HALO has to remain the parts where you get a tank and start blasting away at the enemy. Very satisfying. 🙂
-JM