Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Halo 3 ODST: Like visiting an old friend


Two games are etched permanently in my gamer memories. The first is Diablo 2, the game that got me into PC gaming. The other is Halo. I remember that fateful night when a buddy of mine and I rented an XBOX and a couple of games including Halo at our local Rogers Video, and headed home to see what this game was all about. Five or six hours later, and a phone call for his desperate wife worrying where the hell he was, Halo had forever changed who we were as gamers.

Since then, the Halo franchise has seen new iterations, some better then others. With the soon to be released Halo Reach, Bungie is again pulling millions of gamers into its addictive time warp. Over the last few nights, I've popped Halo 3 ODST in my trusty Xbox 360 (don't laugh, since coming back from Microsoft the white knight of consoles has performed flawlessly!) and had fun blasting through the dreaded Covenant.

This will sound corny, but Halo has this familiarity that few other games have, besides EVE Online of course. I can't put my finger on it, but everything seems familiar; it's has if I've spent so much time in these games that the environments, the sounds, the HUD, they all seem second nature to me.



So the guys at Bungie may rest assured, they'll yet again see my money when Halo Reach comes out.

Do you have a game or game setting that has that same effect on you? I'd be curious to know!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Everquest 1 had that effect on me. Back when the viewable area was tiny and all the buttons were up on the left and right sides.

To this day, I enjoy games where there is a "death" penalty.

Hell, I still play Nethack/Slash'em. I think I just like pain.

Anonymous said...

I'm a bit of a tool for the first two Call of Duty games. There was just something really satisfying about shooting nazi's. I still play both of them often.

David said...

I have to agree with you on this one. I already have my copy pre-ordered, and my brother and I have set aside some time to play through it.

I think Halo was one of the first games I had a great time playing with other people. I was in University when the first game came out and we had 16-player games nearly every night.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy playing as much as I will!

Stephen McMurtry said...

I think this will be the single best console game ever. The Zelda series is the closest runner-up that I can think of, but it doesn't even hold a candle to Halo.

CrazyKinux said...

Weird how some game devs just have that ability to create passion and devotion out of nothing... nothing but pixels and a great storyline!