Halo: Reach Has a Good Idea

Story time! (And I’ve probably told this story on TR, but if I did, whatever, I don’t care.) Back in my ToyFare/Wizard days, we all liked Halo. A lot. Like, we had two TVs, two Xboxes, eight controllers and two copies of the original Halo so people could play 4-on-4 every day after work. Never single player; we only played multiplayer together. Between the release of the first Halo and Halo 2, I played probably an average of two hours of Halo every business day — not to say I played Halo every day, but there were many days I’d play until midnight, drive an hour home, go to bed at 1 am, wake up at 7:30, and drive back into work at 8. And this isn’t counting the Halo parties Editor-in-Chief Pat McCallum had with four TVs, four Xboxes, four copies of Halo and 16 controllers. We were all quite mad. It was awesome.

Naturally, we were all very excited about Halo 2. When it finally game out, Pat bought plenty of copies of the game, and we barely worked that day, in anticipation of finally playing Halo 2.

We played it for maybe an hour. And then we turned off the Xboxes, never to turn them on again.

I’m not saying Halo 2 was the worst game ever — I don’t even know why we reacted to it so adversely as we did — but it actually prevented us from enjoying Halo 1 anymore. Since then, I haven’t given the tiniest shit about the Halo franchise…

…until today, when Microsoft announced that Blood Gulch would be a multiplayer map in Halo: Reach, with a little help from the Red Vs. Blue gents. And now I give a shit again. I’m expecting some grief for this, since I know Halo‘s not held high in respect among many gamers, and the fact of the matter is I’ve never liked the single-player campaigns. But playing multiplayer Halo 1 is very possibly the most fun I’ve ever had playing a videogame, and anything that even has the possibility of allowing me to recapture that joy is 100% awesome by me. (Via Kotaku)