Nintendo Okie

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m hooked on Halo.  You can thank my friends list for that, and more importantly you can thank fellow Nintendo Okie member Daniel Teasley for making it such a fun experience.

Before this week my total experience with the Halo franchise was playing the demo of Halo: CE on the PC, and not completing the first level of Halo 3.  I just didn’t really care about Halo.  I had played too much Call of Duty to really enjoy the different style of play that Halo offered.  It was too slow and the buttons did different things.  My fingers had gotten so used to playing with a CoD style control scheme.  That’s why I liked Borderlands so much.  It felt like Call of Duty.

My friends list on the 360 has been completely filled by people playing Halo reach.  It got to where I had double digit numbers of friends all playing Halo at the same time and I felt kinda left out.  So I used my Gamestop Power up rewards points to get $10 off of Halo Reach and picked it up used because I wanted to be able to return it if I didn’t like it and get my money back.  Well, tomorrow is the one week return limit and I have no intention of returning the game because I’ve been having so much fun playing the game with Daniel and his wife.

I just want to talk about some of the experiences I’ve had with the game.  So far the single player campaign has been pretty good.  I never finished the first level of Halo 3, which tells you how much I enjoyed that game.  With Halo Reach the experience has been a bit different.  I think the way the story has been told and been interspersed with cut scenes has get me wanting to move forward.  From the very beginning I’ve wanted to find out what happened on Reach for the game to start with the image of a destroyed Spartan helmet.  The characters have been entertaining to watch and see how they interact with each other and the missions have kept me moving forward.

I picked up the controls pretty quickly despite my affinity for the Call of Duty layout.  It’s been amazing how much I enjoy wading through laser fire to sneak up on some alien and hit them with the butt of my pistol or use the missile launcher like a baseball bat.  I’ve found myself doing that at every opportunity.  I’ve managed to get through about 2 hours of the campaign and have enjoyed it, but that’s not why I’ve enjoyed my experience with Halo so much.  It’s been the multi-player, which is something, like I said at the beginning; I never thought I would say.  I don’t like online competitive multi-player.  I didn’t play Call of Duty for multi-player.  I played those games for the story.  I spend more time dying online than I do anything else and it just hasn’t been fun.  I held off on multi-player for Halo this week until I was able to play with friends.  I didn’t want to have any potential fun spoiled by 14 year olds talking about their demon dogs (more on that later).

Daniel, Brandy, and I have spent the last three nights playing multi-player together, mostly firefight.  We’ve not been taking things too seriously.  We laugh it off if we betray each other.  Daniel boldly defends his wife if I shoot her when we’re playing.  One of the funniest experiences happened during a firefight where I accidentally shot a team mate with a missile launcher.  I don’t know who this person was, but I got booted from the game for betraying him one time.  Daniel decided to stick up for his friend by punching the other guy in the face because of it.  I didn’t see any of this happen, but the exchange over the chat lines was quite hilarious with Daniel talking about paying him back for kicking his team mate.

The other came during a firefight where we got matched up with another random person, who happens to be from Oklahoma.  I’d never met him before and don’t have any idea where he comes from.  The match started off well enough, but highlights the reasons I, and many others, don’t like playing with random people online.  The three of us had spent the better part of two hours having fun, generally chatting about random stuff while playing.  When we got matched up with this person none of us could get in a word because he spent the entire time talking.  Mostly about his demon dog who bit him, and cursing at everything going on in the game.  We ended up finding out he was the 14 year old player we don’t like playing with.  Needless to say there were a bunch of private messages going back and forth with laughter ensuing because of the messages.

I’m not a great Halo player.  I don’t play competitively, and don’t want to.  I just want to get in and have fun with friends.  I’m going to finish the campaign, and trick out my character to look as close to Darth Vader as I possibly can.  I’ve been a rather ambivalent gamer when it came to the Halo franchise in the past, but I can honestly say that after the past week of playing online with friends and having fun while doing it I’m now a fan of Halo and will be playing the game for a long time to come.  If you want to play Halo online with me and you’re a reader of the site hit me up.  My gamertag is SmileyRyder34.