Me ‘n Halo 2
Monday November 15, 2004 at 10:45 pm | Filed under Gaming
My pal, Halo 2. Somehow I don’t feel alone in thinking that this game is just plain great.
Arlen, you asked if I got it. Here’s the story on that. I pre-ordered a long time ago through overstock.com. I got an email on Monday the 8th that said it had shipped (regular mail, no tracking). Still nothin’ by Wednesday, and with Thursday being a postal Holiday (God Bless our Veterans), so that afternoon I made a deal with Dan to sell him the one that would come in the mail at a discounted price. That night I went out and bought a copy of the Halo 2 Collector’s Edition (comes with an extra DVD with a bunch of video footage on it) locally, although it took me 3 stores to find one that had it in stock. I played it that night until pretty late. I’m glad I made that deal with Dan too because it’s Monday, a week after it supposedly shipped, and I STILL don’t have it. Punks.
I can’t do the cool posting of videos as Jon did for Burnout 3, at least not easily. I don’t have a VCR downstairs where the Xbox is, and I ain’t bringin’ it up here to play on the itty bitty TV I have in the office. So go look at another site that has some clips if you’re interested, here’s one that is a review and ranked Halo a 10 out of 10. I can however introduce you to the wonderful world of Halo stats. Bungie got this way right. Click here to see the list of games that I’ve played on Xbox live. There are a ton of game types, and Xbox live has been upgraded again to include even more features. I’ve never enjoyed online play as much as I have with Xbox live, it makes things so easy, and I’m not sure how I ever played a team oriented FPS game online without voice chat. I’m still discovering all the ins and outs of Halo 2′s online presence, but it seems pretty versatile, including personalization of your character, free clan web sites for you and your buddies, an easy way to play with people at your skill level, stats galore, and a really simple way to communicate with your friends online.
Last night, a buddy from work and I got together online and joined a few games. One in particular stood out. The game type was 1 Flag Capture the Flag. This means that you have one flag on the map, and 2 teams take turns on offense (trying to get the flag and bring it back to your base) and defense (trying to stop the offense for a certain amount of time). The first team to capture the flag twice wins. The map we played on was awesome. It’s called Zanzibar, which is described here:
Zanzibar. In the year 2552, it’s a small East African industrial town, 20 clicks north east of New Mombassa. At its center is the fan assembly of a giant wind powered generation facility. It fronts a long, rocky beach, strewn with debris from the initial Covenant assault. Inside its fortified sea walls are a large empty courtyard, abandoned control facilities and plenty of battle damage. The main base, where the flag is located, is a twisty maze of ramps and corridors. Rooftop turret emplacements help defend it from attack, and the creaking groan of the fans and the sound of heavy industrial equipment gives the place a menacing air.
In this particular game, my buddy and I were on the same team and we shut the other team out. For some reason I enjoy playing defense. I found a perch at the left entrance to the base and manned a gun turret up there for awhile. We played against a team made up of 4 people, one guy that had 3 friends over, and they were all playing on the same Xbox (another cool feature since you don’t need 4 Xbox live accounts, you just need the one). The Guests take on the main account holder’s name, just with a number after it. Hi name happened to be “pjsandwich”. So we were playing a team comprised of a nice lunch treat. It’s such a thrill, and often times pretty funny, to jump into a warthog (keep) and have someone jump in the back to man the gun and someone else jump in the passenger seat. Then someone says “hit it!” and you drive off looking for some butt to kick. Then, if you’re me at this particular time, you crash into the giant fan blade at the Zanzibar installation and the warthog goes flippin’ barrel rolling out of control all as the guy in the back is shooting the gun trying to hit anything he can. I can imagine the sandwich crew were laughing pretty hard if any of them saw that. But then we got our act together, and took over.
So need to stop writing this and go play some more. I’m probably about half way through the single player campaign mode, and it’s awesome so far. I can’t say anything about it because there are quite a few plot twists, but it’s great. I do plan on having a night of multi-Xbox Halo 2 goodness, I just have to find the right night. Stay tuned.
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Arlen Says:
November 16th, 2004 at 7:21 amSounds fantastic–looking forward to it!