PixlBit

I finished Halo Reach, number 2 on the chrono list, on Sunday in about 7 hours. First off, the opening minutes reminded me how much I love the O'Donnell/Salvatore music. It adds such majesty to the game. It has just the right amount of melodramatic emphasis. Music for Halo should be a little bit over-the-top. Then, I saw the environments in Reach and remembered how much I like the design of this game. It still looks amazing. Most of the game takes place in natural environments dotted with a few buildings. I just like the look of the game very much. There is a lot of variety of gameplay: you go to space, fight within a Covenant ship, fly a Falcon helicopter, and drive a tank. The story is a downer but it's still a heroic story. I love the way it dovetails into Halo: Combat Evolved. Your last task in Reach is to deliver Cortana to Captain Keyes' ship, The Pillar of Autumn. There is a spartan with green armor near the end, but I could have sworn the voice work for him wasn't Master Chief, but I could be wrong. Maybe that was him as you link up with the Pillar of Autumn's crew. It would make sense. Anyway, the next day Mark and I ran through Halo: C.E., co-op, via The Master Chief Collection. 

Halo: C.E. begins exactly as Halo Reach ends before the credits. The Pillar of Autumn appears out of slipspace and Keyes asks Cortana, "All I need to know is, did we lose them?", meaning the Covenant from Reach. So cool! I set some skulls on for this playthrough of Halo: C.E. with Mark: birthday celebrations when you headshot a Grunt, unlimited ammo, Grunts that explode with plasma when they die, melee attacks drop more grenades, and 2x explosion damage. We had to turn off 2x explosion damage after a while because it was really hard to not get killed by it. The best part was unlimited ammo. I didn't realize it at first, but it also includes grenades. So we both used nothing but grenades for most of the game, or until we got our hands on some rocket launchers. Super fun! We chucked a huge amount of grenades and made quite a mess of the place. We finished the game in about 6 hours. 

Next up is Halo 2 within The Master Chief Collection. That'll have to wait until we have enough time to run the whole game in one sitting. Also, I've got Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 and 2.5 coming as a rental from Gamefly. So I'll be tackling that first. 

And that's a couple of days. Toodles!