Welcome to Live Love Play and this Livestream Highlight from Halo: The Master Chief Collection. In this highlight, featuring Halo 3, I attempt to break the Covenant lines and reach the shield control tower. It doesn’t go well. Keep reading for my thoughts and impressions of the Halo series.
Halo has a very prominent place in my memory. The original Xbox was the first i purchased on my own and Halo was one of the first games I bought for it. I probably spent too many hours playing the game, both campaign and multiplayer. I fondly remember many a 16 player system linked multiplayer games in the barracks lounge. There are few experiences like an entire room packed with players, cheering, yelling, and jeering at each other to the sound of weapons fire and explosions. I was called a tank whore often.
Playing Halo with friends was a staple for much of my social life for years reaching past my occupational schools and into my early years on the Los Angeles. My friends and crewmates would gather at the liberty center for matches and tournaments almost every night in between time at sea. I was deployed when Halo 2 was released but that didn’t stop us. On our final port visit to South Korea, thanks to limitations on where we could go due to incidents caused by the crew of the USS Kitty Hawk, we spent most of our time playing Halo 2 at the base’s bar. There was a nice setup with linked consoles and small TVs. The only downside to the location was the fiberglass moose head mounted over one of the consoles that I would often bump into when rising. My friend Eric and I split the cost of an Xbox and portable 10″ screen to play at sea.
By the time Halo 3 was released duting my second deployment but the enthusiasm and excitement for the game ebbed among my friends. Other titles such as Call of Duty were becoming popular and the Nazi Zombie mode was the popular game to play on and off the ship. Regardless, I was happy with the game and managed to hold a few games with friends, but by then I moved out of the barracks and into my own apartment so gatherings like that became difficult.
Halo 4 released in a very different time of my life. For the most part I was alone and in a career transition. My network of friends was smaller and our interests did not sync in the same ways. However, this was offset by online multiplayer. Xbox life was introduced with Halo 2 and refined by Halo 3 but I never really payed much attention to it until Halo 4, specifically Spartan Ops. Spartan Ops was the Co Op campaign included in Halo 4. It followed an episodic story taking place after the main campaign and followed one of the UNSC Infinity’s Spartan Fireteams. I was enthralled by the mode and played it often during the extended downtime I had during that transitional period.
Halo 5 and the Master Chief Collection came out toward the end of my Naval Career. Halo 5 felt lackluster to me, the campaign has uninteresting aside from John being reunited with his team of Spartan 2 and seeing former ODST Buck as a Spartan. This Halo was focused on Multiplayer, and it had it all. Unfortunately the disappointing campaign left me with a bad taste and I set the game aside before diving too deeply into the multiplayer.
Halo’s impact on me goes beyond the game itself. It spans a large expanded universe expressed in books, comics, and web series. The web series Red vs Blue was one of the first Machinima productions on the web and used Halo as their setting. RvB’s production house, Rooster Teeth has grown since them into a full professional studio producing animated and live action content. Rooster Teeth is one of my primary inspirations for creating this site and the content I create.
Halo will always be a great inspiration for me and I look forward to seeing what comes next in the series.
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