Gaming

Blog 804: Master Chief Collection: Halo: Reach

I realise now that the name “Master Chief Collection” was a poor choice for this compilation, because the two best games out of the five Halo titles that I have now played are ones in which the titular Chef is nowhere in sight.

Halo: Reach is the game they wanted me to play first; a notion which I rejected in favour of playing the games in their original release order (with their original potato graphics where appropriate). While Reach‘s narrative may take place seconds before the original Halo, like all prequels, it wouldn’t make a lick of sense if you were just dropped straight into it. You really do need to have played the others first.

It would also be hella jarring to go from one of the best games in the series right back to its… uhhhh… roots.

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Gaming

Blog 796: Master Chief Collection: Halo 3

Considering that Halo 2 just stopped rather than ending, I had to start Halo 3 immediately. Just think, though — imagine you’d played Halo and Halo 2 on PC the first time around, and then they just… didn’t release Halo 3 on PC at all. That would have been truly awful, and right here lies the vindication of my decision to avoid all contact with Halo until I could play the lot. At least if the Master Chief Collection had never come, I wouldn’t have been cut off mid-swing.

And after all that… Will Halo 3 be even more of the same?

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Gaming

Blog 794: Master Chief Collection: Halo 2

Remember when sequels were just “more of the same”? When there weren’t seismic shifts in tone and mechanics or … pretty much everything… between entries in a franchise?

Of course I can only be talking about one thing — it’s time to continue exploring the Master Chief Collection and dive into Halo 2. Which is very much more of the same.

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Gaming

Blog 791: Master Chief Collection: Halo

Halo is a franchise that utterly passed me by. I’ve never owned a console and I guess I never knew that its first entry was also out on PC. I’ve always been curious, though; it’s had a lot pop-culture influence through the ages, and hell, I like sci-fi shooters anyway.

So when I heard they were finally (re)porting the full series to PC, I must admit I was a little bit excited to finally see what all the fuss was about. Fast-forward long enough that the porting is complete and has had plenty of time to stabilise and… here we are.

So let’s begin, in release order, with Halo: Combat Evolved.

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