Halo

We played the shit out of Halo growing up. My tiny circle of nerds where eager for Xbox since middle school when it first came out. All of us ended up acquiring an Xbox eventually. I bought mine in the summer of 2003 right before entering high school. Once we all had our Xboxes, we would endlessly play Halo on multiplayer using system link. Those where the days of LAN parties. They don't exist anymore because they are unecessary. Actually, they only existed for a brief period of time in the early 2000s. Once Xbox Live and online gaming became the standard, there was simply no need for system link. I am getting old.

Story Summary

We played through the campaign in co-op and had a blast. The story is really interesting. It involves humans warring against an extra terrestrial race known as "The Covenant". They both discover a strange and enourmous space ring they would both call "Halo". One views Halo as a weapon of galactic destruction, the other as a sacred entity that will deliver salvation. The fight for the control of Halo ensues. There's no shortage of action, and at one point there's a bit of a surprise when the discovery of the Flood occurs and the Halo's true purpose is revealed. It all works really well. What works really well is the smooth and instant transitions between chapters that keep the player engaged and ready for more.

Twin Stick Perfection

What works most well is the action. This generation of console gaming featured use of dual analog sticks. Sure, the dual analogs first arrived on the first Playstation, but nobody really used them to their full potential. Prior to Halo, the standard of first person shooters on consoles was Goldeneye. Those controls aged terribly. It's almost impossible to go back and play it on the N64. I even tried playing MDK2 on the Dreamcast, which has only one analog stick. It cleverly uses the analog stick for aiming and the face buttons for directional movement. Ingenious, but it's still awkward and aged terribly, too. There may have been a small handful of games that made use of dual analog sticks, with one for movement and the other for aiming, but Halo was the first one to catapult it into the mainstream. It set the standard to the point where it's unthinkable to play first-person shooters and many other genres any other way. Hell, there's games such as Jet Set Radio Future where the right analog stick doesn't control the camera as you're zipping around. It doesn't feel natural anymore.

Non-Stop Action

Aside from these slick controls, the action is non-stop. It's the ultimate power fantasy. You're a super enhanced space Marine cleaving wave after wave of enemny space aliens. You must defeat them in order to seize control of Halo and rescue humanity from annihilation. Aside from the influential twin-sticks, every button on the original Xbox controller is put to good use. The buttons-to-action map can easily be intuited and only enhances the combat in the game. All-in-all, the games(both Combat Evolved and 2) aged like fine wine. It's only the graphics that didn't quite keep up. They where amazing at the time, but the constant one-upping of graphical fidelity means they where inevitably surpassed. But graphics will always be secondary to gameplay and the gameplay of Halo on the original hardware is king.

Legacy

Halo was the best reason to buy an Xbox. The Playstation 2 won this generation of console gaming by an enourmous margin, but the Xbox came in at a distant second. What's important for Microsoft at the time is to simply cement itself in the console gaming market. Halo is perhaps the biggest reason why Microsoft stuck around. It's a game that wears its influences on its sleeves, mainly Doom and Half-Life, but carves its own identity that can stand powerfully on its own. We played the hell out it, especially the multiplayer. We created countless memories blowing each other up in the Slayer mode and teabagging each other after every kill. Hahaha.