Halo: Combat Evolved

Again, I must assure you that I love playing games out of order, it makes me feel big. Having played Halo 2 and Halo 3: ODST, I was now finally able to beat the original, Halo: Combat Evolved. Stan has assured me that the original Halo beats out the two I've played by a lot, and I suppose I agree with him, but we'll get to my complaints later. Halo: Combat Evolved is a pretty basic sci-fi FPS, but not the point of being generic- a flaw Halo 2 suffered from. Even though the levels are similarly linear, they were wide open and creative enough to not feel like a jaunt from point A to point B while shooting whatever tries to stop you. While the missions aren't varied as much as a Call of Duty, they at least remained fresh for the entirety of my playthrough. The plot was also much better than Halo 2 or ODST- it was engaging enough without getting either too cluttered or too vague. I liked it. I suppose my real gripe with Halo was its poor implementation of checkpoints. It seemed like there were far too many times when I had to redo a few minutes of a level over and over again because a checkpoint was needlessly held off. This was especially noticeable in the final drive away from the exploding Halo ring (yeah I'm going crazy with these spoilers)- I completed a 5 minute driving segment, but then had to do another 90 second segment that was much tougher, causing me to die several times. And guess what, there's no checkpoint, so I had to keep on playing a boring driving part that I had already proven I could beat. Lame. Oh well, Halo: Combat Evolved was still better than the other two in the series that I have played, unfortunately it didn't give me a great impression of the franchise either. The good news remains- no more original X-Box games are left on my backlog. Wahoo!