Skip to main content

Halo Memories


Halo was a watershed game for me when I was a teenager. It was the first time that I was playing a game that was actually a legitimate part of cultural lexicon. Before I had only been playing games that were no longer popular or not as popular as they once were.





But when my step dad bought an x-box and introduced me to Halo, that finally changed. I played it religiously with my step dad after school on the Campaign mode and sometimes by myself and I was blown away by the game. I had never seen anything like it before. The graphics were stunning, the controls were varied but not too complicated, and the story was just as well written as the best sci-fi films.

Halo was also a landmark for me in the sense that it was the first video game I remembered beating and finishing to completion. So many hours of my teenage years were spent playing Halo and it will always have a special place in my heart and it is one of the few games that made me feel a sense of euphoria and elation upon completion and to this day, it still holds up quite nicely.

My memories with Halo though don't stop there. My first ever experience with playing online was also with a Halo game. This time around it was the much anticipated sequel. Halo 2. Playing friends and family online from the comfort of my den was surreal. But despite how cool it was, I did not do it very often because I was not that adept or skilled at multi player matches and I died constantly and rarely ever won a match. This led me to turn to the familiar, the campaign mode. But I am still really glad that I played some online matches though because I was a part of history in that aspect with the revolution that was Halo 2's online multiplayer.

Halo 2 was the last Halo game I beat though or played that often. I did play Halo 3 a few times but I never got around to finishing it and I only recently picked up a XBox 360. One of these days I will give it a run. But I have no desire currently to play it anytime soon. Or the fifty other Halo sequels or spin offs that came out afterward. But despite that playing Halo is one of my favorite and most fondest memories of my youth and is a considerable part of me and my video game identity.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Fun Factor | What Makes Video Games Fun (Part One)

Video Games are usually synonymous with fun , much like any other form of play, video games can be a thrill to the senses and be some of the most rewarding activities out there. But what is it exactly that makes games fun? And are there particular elements in any game that determine how fun a game is and is there a way to take those elements and use them to make the experience of playing a game that is not considered fun enjoyable?  Now in order to really find out the answers to those questions, it is necessary to dig deep and discover what fun is and means, what its correlation is to video games , and how all of this creates the foundation for fun to be tied to video games. The Miriam Webster dictionary describes fun as “what provides amusement or enjoyment”. And also according to Miriam Webster, fun first appeared in the English language in the 1600s in France and the term made its way to the United States when petty criminals from London were carried over to the shores of the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Games On Film: Super Mario Bros.(1993)

Well they ain't lying...It's not a game. It's definitely a motion picture. And a flawed interesting and refreshingly ridiculous one to boot. I am one of the few people out there that actually genuinely likes this movie. Is it a great adaptation of the game? No. But that by itself does not make it a horrible movie. You have to put things into context. Around the time of this film's production and release there weren't really any major bits of storytelling or backstory for Super Mario Bros. There were the cartoons which have aged even worse than the film has if you ask me, some comics and that's about it. So its not like the writers had this wealth of infomration to go off of for the film. All they had was the video games which essentially had one very simple plot line. To rescure the princess. And the film does have a princess and the Mario Bros. do rescue her. So in that particular instance, the film did not fail to adapt the source material. I never underst...
Post a Comment
Read more

Machine Acts

There are two types of Machine Acts in video games. The diagetic and the non-diagetic. Here are a couple examples of the two. The loading screen for any level on Halo: Combat Evolved is an example of a non-diagetic machine act because you cannot skip the loading screen, nor can you interact with it in anyway and it does not change the form of gameplay or the way you play the game. As for a non-diagetic machine act, a prime example of this is the kill animation. There are kill animations in multiple video games. But the one that comes to mind most of the time is the Fatality animation from the Mortal Kombat series. The kill animation forces the player to just sit there and watch the animation as the machine plays the code and the animation to the player.
Post a Comment
Read more