Halo: Combat Evolved (CE) was a launch title for the original XBOX system. Originally planned as an RTS style game for the Mac, Halo CE saw platform changes, genre changes, and all kinds of other changes from concept to completion. How exactly did this happy mistake change gaming? Lets see!
First off, the opening sequence of the single player campaign was ridiculous! Up to that point I had never quite seen anything like it in a game. The whole story was great and delivered in a way that was fresh for the time.
Local multiplayer is really what the allure of Halo CE was though. It was pretty much the first console game to make gamers pack up their XBOX, TV, and go to a friends house to play. You could host 16 player matches with a switch and 4 XBOX consoles and 4 TVs. My friends and I did this all the time, often times doing a tourney that resulted in the winner getting a bottle of liquor. Good times, pizza, alcohol, trash talk, and high fives were the results of these get togethers. I really miss those days. With a handful of game modes to choose from, a Halo CE lan party could easily go until the break of dawn.
The game of the series that REALLY changed how we play is Halo 2. There was a time when Bungie was unsure if they were going to be able to deliver Halo 2 at all. But due to the commitment of Microsoft, the game was released. There was a lot of controversy surrounding the gaming with gamers claiming that the campaign was incomplete due to the fact that it ended abruptly. Lets face it though, the campaign is not the primary reason for buying a Halo title.
Halo 2 was the first game in the series to offer online multiplayer. There were many players (myself included) that logged THOUSANDS of online games in Halo 2. The game also was among the first console shooters to offer a 1-50 multiplayer level system. At a glance, you knew who you were up against, and how good yourself and other players were. Getting to level 50 was a huge deal to most players, some even paying other players to level their account up to that coveted 50.
I never understood that thought process behind that because I was a level 35 in Halo 2 and I would often get matched with people ranked between 35 and 50. I would get crushed a lot, so I actually didn't have as much fun because the way that the ranks were divided up/ I was basically at the bottom echelon of great players resulting in me never standing a chance against the opposition. This was further frustrating when some of my friends that weren't as high a level as I was got together to play. The matchmaking always seemed to match us with people based on my skill rather than taking the skill of the whole team into account.
Lucky for us we could play online in custom games. I think the whole last year of the life of Halo 2 was spent by my friends and I in custom games. One of our favorite modes was a FFA variant with random weapons. Every time you respawned you had a random 2 weapons. We had many laughs because of this mode, which we ultimately dubbed "Shite". We also had a team version which we called, you guessed it, "Team Shite". Same rules but with teams instead of FFA.
All of the Halo games that have released (minus ODST) followed this formula for online multiplayer. There is some argument as to which in the series has been the best so far, often times resulting in flame wars (my personal pick is Halo 4 gameplay wise, but Halo 2 will be my all time favorite because of the many many many hours my friends and I shared in it).
Bungie raised the bar over and over again on consoles by delivering fantastic stories, gameplay, and graphics. Halo has always been on the cutting edge of graphics.
Another thing that I always appreciated about the Halo series is Bungie (and now 343i) commitment to keeping the game free of cheaters. They developed a system (dubbed the "BanHammer") that could detect players that were cheating at the game with mods and other means of cheating (remember "standby"?).
Many games have copied Halo in certain aspects. There are currently games out there that are more popular than Halo, and that is fine because things change, things evolve. Halo still to this day (12 years later) is my shooter of choice. We do have to say thanks to Halo because without their innovation in the genre we may not have quite the quality of shooters we have today.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. Stay tuned to Big Ups Gaming for all your gaming news. Thanks for reading!
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