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	Message: : Assault on the Control Room : I would have been your daddy : What's this level name supposed to mean? Some guy at bungie wanted to get : into my mom's pants? : Anyway. it's a snow level! Yay, because this is Mario and we need the : standard Ice World. Here we get introduced to tank play, which makes you : feel hilariously overpowered, but (go figure) slow as a tank. There's the : marine Scorpion tank, but there's also the covenant tanks to make your : life hell. Are they called Wraiths? The manual doesn't mention them, but I : read some conversation about non-PID wraiths here, so that's the name I'm : assigning them, because Cortana calls them "covenant tanks." : Cortana somehow deduces that whoever built the control room designed this : sector of the ring to have a freezing climate to keep out intruders. Okay, : you can get this information by yourself, but we need to have a covenant : guard blab in front of Keyes to know the control room even exists? : I get confused trying to find where to unlock the door wandering around : outside, but it turns out the button was right in front of the door. Well : played trolling, Halo, well played. : Rolling Thunder : There's a big giant tower I thought was important, but it turns out there's : nothing necessary inside it and you're supposed to go around it to a path : on the other side. I like things like this. Not everything in a map has to : be mandatory or exist only for a game purpose. All that's in there is an : invisibility cloak that's useless because it doesn't make your giant : scorpion tank invisible. : If I had a super weapon... : ...I'd make somebody pay =) : If you're fast, you can steal a banshee and take a shortcut to the pyramid : that is neither Aztec or Mayan (slick design, I must say). The door on the : bottom is locked, so just for fun I flew back up to take the long way : because I really need health and rocket ammo to be rewarded with... : nothing. Cortana has a voice clip telling you to steal a ghost you could : have missed, so there's that. I guess the door was locked on the outer : side so it wouldn't sound weird for cortana to say that if you were going : in! : Holy Cow! Some extra hunters appeared outside the pyramid, too. I guess the : long way is rewarding for the masochists. But sleeping grunts appear that : weren't there before... what? They just decided to walk all the way to the : middle of the pyramid and take a nap within the last five minutes? Okay. : Inside the pyramid (the control room is the only room there. No big labyrinth : with multiple floors, unfortunately) Cortana goes a bit rampanty when she : creepily talks about the ring the way Durandal gushes about pfhor : technology. It's not just a weapon; it's much more than that, and it was : built by someone called the forerunners. The covenant found something : dangerous under the ring, and for some reason Captain Keyes is off : somewhere else looking for a weapons cache. When did he say he was going : to do that? I thought we were all looking for the control room, here. : Something fishy's going on, 'cause they kept me and the MC out of the : loop, here, which I know because the MC is just as confused as I am. : Almost makes me wish we could have seen the SO's reactions to Thoth's : dialect... almost. I'm also confused during this cutscene because the MC : is somehow holding an AR when I walked in holding a Rocket Launcher and a : needler. : Cortana says that Keyes is going to uncover the dangerous thing instead of : the weapons he wants, so we have to go stop him. Yep, it's one of those : "no time to explain" contrivances for the sake of suspense. : 343 Guilty Spark : Well Enough Alone : I'm doing two chapters in one writeup! They took my rocket launcher away, so : I'll make them pay! Except I can't, because I don't have it =( : So, this area is cool. There's some interesting plant life that really looks : alien here and we get to wade around in shallow water. The curious thing : is there's several crashed ships, both marine and covenant, and we see : explosions coming from something offscreen killing some covenants. We find : the covenants running from a building, but they didn't see me yet, so what : are they running from? We go in and go down a long elevator, and other : than a few jackals here and there, this place feels eerily empty. : We find a marine! But instead of explaining what's going on, he shoots at us : and raves like a madman. "You won't turn me into one of those things! : Stay back, stay away! Just play dead, that's what I did. Leave me : alone..." : So. Something is wrong here. : We're shown via cutscene that the automatic doors are a game abstraction, as : MC has to press a button on a panel to open it. : We get a well executed piece of exposition via some poor guy named Jenkins : helmet video feed. Leroy? We are shown that the marines installed that : panel on the door to force the lock open, and the lights were already : green so I'm a little confused about how the doors work, but the covenant : tried really hard to keep that one locked. Leroy Jenkins gets the whole : party killed by a horde of tentacled monsters. : The Flood : The Cthuhlhu Spawn break through a door, and it looks like the door locked : behind us, so we just have to stand and fight! And... it's easy. Did the : marines really have a tough time with these guys? They kindly left their : ARs for us to use, so why not? : The door they came from is just an empty room, and when we kill them all, : more blast through another door from an empty room. So they're all stuffed : in these empty rooms? I doubt bungie wasn't expecting us to peek inside. : When the door we came from finally blasts open... Zombies! Covenant Elite : Zombies! Yikes! It's the s'pht engineered virus! Our new mission : objective... >>Escape! : Our escape route succeeds, sorta, but Chief Quimby must have been on the : elevator shaft because it self-destructs! : Some boxes were cleverly rearranged below the bridge so I could climb back : up. Running around underneath just leads to more dead ends. Finally, : FINALLY, I got a shotgun, and you ain't got one. How long has it been, six : chapters and we got rocket launchers before the shotgun was introduced? : We find another elevator, but it takes us DOWN, and there's zombie marines : with guns at the bottom! These guys feel worse than the chaingunners from : Doom 2. We finally find an exit and there's a group of marines at the top : to help us through the jungle... and now I really notice they suck at : using the AR, it's like they don't even keep their finger held down on the : trigger. : Some flying machinery shoots lasers at the zombies and we meet a floaty robot : thing, 343 Guilty Spark, who tells us someone released the flood and his : job is to prevent them from leaving this installation. Then he teleports : us to The Library to do... something. : The Library : The Library : Did I say two chapters? Make that three. : Our job is to >>Follow the Monitor to the Index, so I'll do just that. : We see some zombie grunts, which look hilarious, and they took my shotgon! : It mutated into a pistol! What the holy xibalba is going on here! This : made sense when each chapter ended with getting into a marine (or : covenant) dropship, so getting restocked/switching weapons was implicit, : but whatever. 343 Guilty Spark is a wizard. That's the explanation I'm : going with. : If you follow Guilty Sparks like he tells you to and rush it, you'll get : flooded (pun intended) by zombies on all sides and die. Instead, you need : to take your time and clear each area slowly, because guess what? Guilty : Spark is a patient little AI who will hover in one place and wait for you, : so it's cool. : I gotta say, GS sure does have a personality to him, as in he's a sociopath : that's either ignoring my plight or taking pleasure in it. "This : portal is the first of ten. Ahahahaha!" Oh, he enjoys it. He even : said my combat skill less than class 12 and unsuited for this kind of : work, is that a jab at me playing on Heroic? : It gets worse : Eventually get the mission >>Hold Your Position until the Minitor : Returns. That sounds foreboding, but he comes back quickly, actually. I : run into a zombie with a SPNKR! : But I don't want to ride the elevator! : This place was built to contain the flood. 343 Guilty Spark is very happy : that some flood survived to reproduce. : Fourth Floor: Tools, Guns, Keys to Super Weapons : Guilty Spark is a total A$$hole and flies through a partially open door to : make me take the long way. : We grab the Index and almost turn on the defense system to kill the flood, : but Cortana appears and tells us the system starves them to death by : killing their food — it wipes out all life in the galaxy (except the flood : who are immune, I'm presuming). Guilty Spark confirms this is true. Guilty : spark then orders his drones to keep my head and destroy the rest. : Two Betrayals : Four Chapters. Last one on this writeup. : They took away my AR and gave me a plasma pistol. At least they let me keep : my shotgun. The reason they did this is because a charged plasma shot : takes down a drone. I gotta ask... if I came here without a plasma pistol, : shouldn't that be my own fault? Are these things impossible to kill : without it? They feel like it, but that is such immersion breaking design. : This kind of oddness wouldn't happen if I could just keep all the weapons : at once. : The Gun Pointed at the Head of the Universe : Cortana tells us we need to destroy Halo, and her plan is to make the fusion : reactors on the Pillar of Autumn and the Truth and Reconciliation blow it : all up. I wonder if this would be enough to kill the flood? I somehow : think they'll still be a problem after the ring is destroyed. : So... this entire time, the Index was under the control room, and we had to : insert it into the control room's controller. So the pyramid did have a : labyrinth after all, and I just played it! Oh, Guilty Spark, you troll, : you. : Leela tells us there's three towers in this area that amplifies the Halo's : power to send death pulses across the galaxy, and we should destroy them. : Only to buy us some time, though, because "the monitor" (Guilty : Spark, not sure what his name is now) will repair them. I have to destroy : the pulse generators by... walking into them. Yeeeowch. : Breaking Stuff to Look Tough : Cortana Reveals that the "navpoints" are not another game : abstration, but a thing Cortana is putting on my visor to direct me. Yes, : we are going to rerun this entire map backwards. : The Tunnels Below : Cortana tells us we need to find captain keyes and his neural implants to : explode the PoA. : What's really cool is that useless tower I mentioned up at the beginning can : only be accessed again using a banshee, and there's some health inside! : Plus, one of the doors is unlocked, so maybe I just didn't find that. : Final Run : I go crazy with snipers and SPNKRS and blow up the last pulse generator. I : just paraphrased the last hour and a half of my night respawning. : Cortana figures out how teleportation works from the ring's technology and : wire's up the MC's suit to teleport him into the covenant ship, because : that's where Keyes is, and he's alive. The covenant are here trying to : stop the flood from taking the ship and leaving Halo. Hmm... ship control : glanding, still alive, and zombie parasites. This could be bad. : Next is Chapter Keyes, the Subtitle is Under New Management (yeah, I'm : calling them Chapters and Subtitles).
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