Halo

Halo General campaign spoilers, including the Flood and Halo 2's playable Arbiter. All right, Halo. This is going to be a lot, because there’s so much in this series that deserves its own conversation. I want to get into the games individually, but I have to start with Cortana. She’s probably my favorite character in almost any series ever. I love her relationship with Master Chief. I could spend a very long time just talking about those two and still have things left to say. But look at everything else around them. The worlds, the weapons, the vehicles, the enemies, the music. There’s so much that gives Halo its own feel before you even start getting into all the story details. The ring itself is such a good idea. You land somewhere with trees and mountains and water, and then look up and the landscape keeps going into the sky. You’re standing on this enormous thing that somebody built, and you have no idea what you’ve actually gotten yourself into yet. Then you start finding out. The Covenant are already enough to deal with, and the Flood comes along and makes everything worse. Suddenly there’s another reason to be afraid of this place. That whole change in Combat Evolved gives us plenty to talk about on its own. And the fights have so much going on in them. You’ve got the weapon you brought with you, whatever you can pick up, grenades, vehicles, enemies coming at you in different ways. Sometimes you’ve got room to work out an approach. Sometimes everything falls apart and you’re trying to find something that will keep you alive for another few seconds. A Warthog adds a completely different kind of problem. Now somebody has to drive, somebody has to shoot, and ideally you’d like everybody to arrive at the same destination alive. Halo has all these opportunities for things to go beautifully or go completely wrong, sometimes in the same encounter. Then you look at the individual games, and there’s so much variety within the series. Halo 2 brings the Arbiter into it and lets you see the Covenant from another side. ODST puts you in the boots of human soldiers in a city that feels very different from the places Chief is usually charging through. Reach gives Noble Team its own story. The Halo Wars games let you command the armies and vehicles instead of being the one person trying to get through the battlefield. I want to give those games proper attention. The main series is a big enough job already, but leaving out the strategy games and the smaller releases would miss a lot. Spartan Assault, Spartan Strike, Fireteam Raven. Even the different versions of the older games need a little explaining now. Combat Evolved, Anniversary and Campaign Evolved aren’t names you can just swap around in a guide. The Master Chief Collection has its own versions and achievement lists to consider. Someone should be able to look at a guide and immediately know whether it applies to the game they’re playing. That’s a big part of what I want to put together alongside these posts. Walkthroughs, collectibles, achievements, the things you can miss, the things that are different between releases. Something useful to have open while you’re playing, without having to stop and work out why the instructions don’t match what’s on your screen. But I also want plenty of room for the characters and the story. Chief and Cortana are getting separate posts. Their relationship deserves one too. There’s so much trust between them, and so much that happens to them over the course of the games. I love what there is to talk about there. And the music needs attention. So does the design of these places. You can explain the plot of a game and still leave out half of what makes spending time in it interesting. The way a level looks, what you hear as you move through it, what changes when the fighting starts. All of those things belong in the discussion. So there’s a lot coming with Halo. A proper breakdown of each game, some very long conversations about the characters, and guides to go along with it. I’m looking forward to getting into all of it. Especially Cortana. There was no chance I was going to keep that one short.