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| My Life and Halo *L-L-LONG!* | |
| Posted By: Urban Reflex | Date: 11/15/08 7:38 p.m. |
In Response To: Halo - a look back over seven years (Louis Wu) Where do I even start to summarise my experience of Halo. It all started in the second half of 2003. I had gotten my Xbox for my birthday in January of that year, and Halo was the fourth game I picked up. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and with Halo 2 on the horizon I knew it was going to be big and I wanted to see if it was worth all the hype. I'm sorry Marty, but I purchased the game via eBay :( However, I like to think that I've more than made up for it since. I was blown away by it. It was fun to play, the visuals and storytelling were of the like I'd never seen before. The icing on the cake for me was the voice acting - it was just so serious and realistic. It was like watching a film. Halo 1 was amazing. One of my fondest memories in video gaming was sitting up late one night, playing campaign for the first time while talking over AIM to a friend of mine who had already beaten it. I was going through Guilty Spark, and the tension was building. She knew what was coming, and it freaked me out! The introduction of the Flood had me climbing up the walls in shock. I finished the game, and it quickly lodged itself into my top 5 of all time. The journey wasn't over though, and I started to journey into multiplayer with my friends. I co-oped the campaign with my best friend, convincing him to get an Xbox along the way. Then another of my friends heard about what an awesome time we had and he got one to (I swear, MS owes me so much money in referral fees!). Ultimately, every week or so the three of us would gather at my house with a random fourth person to play slayer or sometimes CTF. We used to always do 2v2 on Blood Gulch or Sidewinder. It'd take about an hour to finish the match but it was healthily epic. This continued into 2004, and I discovered XBConnect early on that year. I spent a lot of time on there (when it would work) playing with all kinds of people from across Europe. I was even scouted for a Dutch clan called "Last Man Standing", though it died shortly after (Nothing to do with me, honestly!). My time on XBC with Halo was what really gave me what skill I have with the game today. I'm not great at Halo 1, so had to work extra hard to stay competitive. But it was fun, despite the "don't rush the timer!" brigade on there. Simply put, Halo 2 was (and still is) for me the most anticipated game ever. Halo 1 had taken me places and let me experience things I didn't even know were possible in gaming. And Halo 2... was just everything I could ever want in a sequel, on crack. I pre-ordered my Limited Edition as soon as it was announced. The retailer (GAME) consequently forgot about my pre-order, leading to me having to re-pre-order it (good thing I asked if I'd need to put a deposit down when they changed their pre-order system). Before release, I read through The Fall of Reach, played Halo 1 and read The Flood, read First Strike, and was all glued up on the story and ready for it to continue in Halo 2. Eventually, the evening of November 10th arrived and my best mate and I attended the midnight opening, purchased the game at 9 minutes past midnight, and both rushed home to play it. Nov 11th for me is still the day I really celebrate, as opposed to Nov 15th. Sure Halo 1 was awesome, but Halo 2 went beyond gaming for me and because a social platform. After beating the campaign inside 24 hours, and again with 48, and again with 96, I started to wonder how I could improve the multiplayer experience. That 2 month free trial card was itching to be used. So I hooked my 360 up to the modem (yes modem, not router!), input all the settings and Urban Reflex was born unto Live. This was November 19th, another day I celebrate :) My first Live game: http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo2.aspx?gameid=9006387&player=Urban%20Reflex I spent many happy hours on Xbox Live in the next 3 months, made some really close friends. I calculate that 30% of the friends on my list are people I met within that first honey moon period. Not to drop any names or anything but n3wbster would be the one person who I've known the best for the longest. Its funny how you can be closer to people you've never met before than people you know in real life. Toward the end of the year I joined my beloved HBO Helljumpers (http://www.bungie.net/Stats/ClanStats.aspx?clan=HBO+Helljumpers). To this day, the happiest times I ever had on XBL were Helljumper related. I would revisit these times in an instant, despite imposter A of T, mopey Mopey, angry Andz and afk BOLL. Oh, and some kid who cracked a few jokes (http://nikon.bungie.org/misc/stuntmutt.html?type=main&month=12&year=2004ℑ=299). It was during this time I ran a few H2 tournaments for people I knew. There was a local 5 player one for my friends from the Halo 1 days, and two online. One for a Panzer Dragoon fansite I go to, and another for the Helljumpers. The results for the Helljumper one are still online (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/matt.odonnell/hcc/), and that marks the biggest and best tournament I've run to date. Though it did take about five months to complete. As you can see, my web design skills were the shizzle. I kept playing an unhealthy amount of Halo 2 throughout 2005. Several of my other friends picked up Xboxes, Halo 2 and Live along the way and it became an extremely social game, rather than a play-to-win scenario. We would go and mess around on Coag, Containment, and all the other maps for hours each day. Just talking, tricking, and messing around. We played several tournaments between ourselves, had matchmaking parties etc. It was all brilliant fun. We played every day. Would you believe the game even helped me to find love? I didn't meet my former sweetheart through Halo, but it certainly helped us get a lot closer. She was one of those who played with me in 2005, and just before Christmas that year we got together. I don't know if this makes me sad or pathetic, or whatever. But we spent just under three years together, only breaking up recently. She never got a 360, I think this is why it ended :) The beginning of 2006 was much the same as the end of 2005. Up until about March 9th at E3. Excitement reached fever pitch once more. We all know what happened that day, and I think it marked the beginning of the end. This is something I'll touch on later though. Everyone was hyper excited about Halo 3. There seemed to be renewed interested in Halo 2, with people I'd not seen for a month or two reappearing. I don't know if anyone else felt the same way, but I think it added zeal to the community to play Halo 2 when perhaps interest was waning a little. The next big thing for me was easily the beta. Glorious, glorious, Halo 3 beta. In so many ways funner than the finished product, though obviously not better. I got into the beta via msxbox-world.com, who ran a competition. I was one of I think 20 lucky people to get in through this website, and as you can imagine being one of the first entrants to the beta was insane. I still have MS' confirmation email, in fact. I wasn't interested in Crackdown at all so I was so pleased I didn't have to make the decision of whether to slam down forty notes for a beta key. I download the beta as soon as it became available. I remember my first game pretty well. It was on Snowbound (In fact, my first three were. Weren't everyone's?), and in the pregame lobby before hand one of the other players said simply "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Halo 3". I set up a blog to chronicle my experiences, named Ordained Insight. Again, I still have a copy of that hanging around. Looking back, I wrote some pretty cool articles. But unfortunately I had the worst luck, and lost my internet for a good few months (long story). I missed the final two weeks of the beta, and had no net connection through the build up to the big launch day. I played what I consider my last proper Halo 2 game in the evening hours of March 20th, 2007. On Gemini. Up until that point I would play with my friends every day or so, doing the socialising thing. Then my net went down, and that was the end of the Halo 2 experience for me really. Whenever I go back and play it now the maps echo of a past full of history and good times, and I can never play it religiously again. I'll never forget Sam failing to superbounce that one night on Lockout, or Will getting destroyed by the train again and again in one game on Terminal. That's all it is now when I go back to Halo 2; memories. And it makes me both happy and sad at the same time. Sad because I can never relive those former glories, happy because I was fortunate enough to have them. It's funny; I've played 71 H2 games since then, split over 16 months. The 71 games prior to that match? Split over just over one. I think that says it better than anything else could. It wasn't so bad though. I had time for other things, obviously, and I saw the adverts on TV and took in what news I could. Whenever I saw the Believe commercial, it sent shivers down my spine. That marketing campaign set such an impenetrable scale of hope and despair in one lone heroic figure... it's a shame the game wasn't more like the adverts! I read through the books again, the first time since just before Halo 2 that I had gone through them all. Adding in Ghost of Onyx this time, as well as the HGN and ILB. It was my first time listening to the audio play, and it's beyond anything I've ever had the pleasure to listen to in my life. Just epically good all around. What was also epic, was the Legendary Edition. I queued at midnight once more, in the closing stages of September 25th, at a different shop in town. After what happened to my last Halo pre-order, I wasn't about to risk this one being messed around. They did take about 6 minutes more to serve me though, the cheek! Seriously though, the Legendary helmet is just such an awesome idea. Yes, it's large and pointless (though not as silly as the Gears of War Lancer), but it looks cool, and shows off your Halo worship like nothing else. I remember unpacking the game, exploring the contents before finally settling in for the night and at long last, playing Halo 3. It took me about 12 hours to beat it (though not all in one sitting!) if I recall. I saved my original run through films so that if I want to I can relieve the game as if it's fresh again. I still have yet to watch them, but I think I will soon. I have the urge. I just wish other games had this feature. It would make capturing those special memories and lolworthy moments so much easier than my current method of hooking my 360 through my capture card. I took part in the inaugural (and seemingly only) HBO League this year, and losing in the semi finals to level 50 and eventual champion Ghost Faction probably ranks as one of my personal highlights in gaming. My friends and I played our first Halo 3 tournament in the spring, and have just now finished our second one. We don't play as much as we used to, and that isn't going to change. This has been my life in Halo, and it's coming to a close. So where do we go from here? As you can probably tell by the shortness of text I wrote about Halo 3 compared to Halo 1 and 2, I don't find it as appealing. The campaign is brilliant; it's the multiplayer that is the problem. Most of the maps are just pure garbage compared to Halo 2, and the fact that you only get two maps in some matchmaking playlists (Snowbound and The Pit in Social Slayer for example) is not the formula for an interesting game. I think it's also to do with the fact that having played Halo 2 to death, Halo 3 can in no way be as fresh and interesting as it could have been if it was not Halo THREE, y'know? This is of course something completely out of Bungie's hands. I do sometimes worry about the community, and wonder if it's not just winding down. Stuntmutt has stopped 117ing, Mythica has closed its doors... staples of the community that I thought would be around for ever have just gone. New content like Ascendant Justice is doing a fantastic job of keeping interest levels high for me at least, but at the end of the day I just don't think Halo 2 is as much fun as Halo 3. I don't know why I think this at all. I mean, in 2200ish games of Halo 3 I've already surpassed the 25,000 kill record I set in 7500 games of Halo 2, so it's definitely a FUN game. Maybe it's the maps. Maybe it's the lack of people online nowadays. But I think I'm now in the closing stages of life in the Haloverse. Just by reading this, you can see just how big an effect Halo has had on me in the 5 years I've been playing, so its not something I am happy to say. I've thoroughly enjoyed the books, comics and HGN; ARGs and all the fan content out there on the internet. I'd like to thank everyone who has made my time in the community and indeed the game so amazing. Obviously that has to start with the good folks at Bungie, through to Mr. Wu and his dedication to HBO. My Helljumpers deserve a big shout too, and all my other friends I've played with over the years. I'm not going to stop playing Halo any time soon, of course. Halo Wars and Recon both look awesome, and Chronicles is really intriguing. But I might not get another chance, so thank you all. And if I ever write another 13000+ post on HBO then you'll know I've rekindled some of that Halo 2 flame :)
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