Greetings Friends, I've had a comical interest in FPS's lately for whatever reason. Usually when I'm binging a genre it'll be 16 bit or PS1 JRPGs for a month or two but this time it was shooters. This will be a pretty lengthy pre-amble so fair warning. I played the original Halo quite a bit from 2001-2003 or so including LAN parties and so on; I had already played Doom, Doom 2, Duke 3D, Rise of the Triad, Quake 3, and a lot of Unreal Tournament as well as Goldeneye so I was never Mr. Halo but the game was fun and the campaigns in particular are quite good relative to something like Call of Duty's average campaign (though some CoD campaigns are good too). Side note: while Doom 2 is probably the best FPS still RE4 is a lot better than any FPS and anything that isn't Super Metroid, Vagrant Story, or a Link to the Past. RE4 has the best pistol in any game and also the best shotgun in any game and I guess ultimately that's what you want in a shooter. My first experiences with Halo 2 were in like 2005-2006ish, some random Freshman kept bugging me to play it so I eventually did; I guess I did know him from years prior but it was pretty impromptu on the whole; I also played Republic Commando and Crimson Skies High Road to Revenge thanks to this kid which are both fantastic games. I think we beat most of the game on legendary at that point (Halo 1 I've beaten the campaign like a dozen times across every difficulty) but possibly not the entire thing.....................................................................................................................................................................................................Enter first large gap of time here, at some point my brother (who is now a Lawyer) sent me Halo 2 and possibly Halo 1 as well in the mail because his roommate in the Coastguard left it over at his house; so I just had it spontaneously; I don't think I did anything with it for like 3 years but eventually I had some free time and no one in the house so I set out to beat Vanquish Tactical Challenge 6 for the Platinum Trophy which is still the hardest singleplayer thing to do in any shooter as far as skill required and also Halo 2 on legendary solo which was quite a fun experience, Halo 2 was much easier than Vanquish but it still took some doing and I just generally have a fondness for Halo 2 because of how it coalesced at that exact moment in time (now 14 or 15 years ago) I guess there's some random disdain for Halo 2's campaign because the ending is a cliffhanger and you had to play as Keith David (the horror!) but it seems pretty good to me still; also unlike Halo 1 Halo 2 did sort of birth the console shooter online experience even though COD4 is sort of the one that matters in that regard so Halo 2 would have a mark in the influential category (so Goldeneye, then Halo 2, then COD4 for console shooter influence; COD4 is more influential than Doom or Doom 2 though those games are a lot better; its sort of influential because of the moment in time moreso than the actual innovation). .................................................................................................................................................................................................................Enter second large gap of time, so at this point we've played Halo and Halo 2; surely enough to rank the entire series; well now I played Halo 5 with a friend without ever playing anything in between; we only played the campaign in co-op on legendary so I don't have any opinion on Halo multiplayer beyond 2 (other than a few firefight sessions in the past few days). Halo 5 is a pretty decent game but you do fight the same boss like 4 times in a row for some reason, as far as I can remember it did have the feel of a Halo game and the ability to like skip large portions of firefights if you could just get to the next checkpoint instead which we'll get to that issue later vis-a-vis Halo 4. Running past enemies is the essence of Halo, the key component of the experience regardless of the difficulty you play on, it must be present except for stuff that doesn't progress until you kill all enemies which is typically like one fight in an entire mission.........................................................................................................................................................................................................Enter Largest gap of time in this exercise, the Halo 5 run was in 2016 or 2017 and every other Halo was played in the past two weeks or so, a little bit of infinite like a year ago but the rest of it just now. Full disclosure I got Game Pass for free from Microsoft for about 2 years due to being a Youtubist; that period is shortly to run out though it will probably be back at some point to hazard a guess. Things not going so great for Phil Spencer and co presently but actually last year up until the last few months was quite a good one for game pass; Expedition 33, Oblivion remake, Avowed, Outer Worlds 2, Ninja Gaiden 4, etc. I'm happy with the money I didn't spend to get it. But since it was on the verge of running out I was suddenly motivated to actually use game pass for something aside from new releases, Lo! a Halo spree. I played 3 on Normal and 4, Reach, and ODST on Easy despite playing every prior game on Legendary; this was mostly a time consideration, Infinite I'm not even sure how the difficulty works but I guess its on Normal right now?............................................................................................................................................................................................................Now for Ranking stuff; 1. Halo: CE it seems like ranking Halo as the best shooter ever has died down but maybe there's still some people that feel that way, the first Halo has some fantastic levels and then a bunch of okay levels and just by virtue of having a LAN Party scene in the first place a sort of inherent legitimacy in the moment of time segment of gaming; that said I don't think it's actually particularly influential beyond regenerating health/shields which isn't something to be proud of. Its just a good game that's fun and replayable, it did come out before RE4 so if you look at before RE4 shooters it's almost certainly top 10 region but maybe not that much higher than like 8th.................................................................................................................................................................................................................2. Halo 2, the most influential game in the series due to online multiplayer on console; I guess in theory I shouldn't have that much nostalgia for Halo 2 since I played it for maybe 40 hours total but it still seems a bit better than everything except Reach and Halo 1, I remember where I was when I played different moments in the campaign in a tactile sense still. If we're looking at all time shooter rankings Halo 2 might barely scrape into the top 20 though we'll have that discussion again shortly.............................................................................................................................................................................................................3. Halo Reach, almost certainly the best game on a technical proficiency level and just the overall strength of the campaign. If you were someone who didn't give a fuck about Halo 1 when it came out I'd recommend Reach as the main game to play in the series; fantastic game but no nostalgia for it here, I do think Halo Reach should rank a little higher than Halo 2 on an all time shooter list..............................................................................................................................................................................................................4. Halo Infinite, the first controvertial choice I suppose; ultimately 3 and Infinite are very close and would both probably get an 8.5/10 from me but Halo 3's beginning and ending suck and Halo Infinite's middle sucks so ultimately I went with stronger ending. The story of both games sucks as well so that's not really a deciding factor. Halo Infinite does let you run past about 2500 enemies and that is peak Halo.............................................................................................................................................................................................................5. Halo 3, as above; I do think the like 5th through 7th level is some of the best Haloing available its just kind of ass after that part. The gunship is pretty cool for the 5 seconds you get to use it..................................................................................................................................................................................................................6. Halo 3: ODST; ODST is a pretty good game its just that Reach is better in every way. Also Nathan Fillion quips might have worked on me in 2009 but not really at this point in my life................................................................................................................................................................................................................7. Halo 5, I confess I don't know that much about Halo 5 other than I beat it on Legendary in Co-op and you fight the same boss 5 times; I'm pretty sure the entire story was discarded in favor of Halo Wars 2/Infinite's story...................................................................................................................................................................................................................8. Halo 4; unlike Halo 5 Halo 4 doesn't let you run past most enemies and just generally doesn't feel like Halo most of the time, the big tank level is cool and the you drive a Pelican level is cool. It's still a pretty good game ignoring the title.................................................................................................................................................................................................................Final thoughts: A lot of people seem to think modern Doom is like an iteration of Halo and also Destiny is from the Halo devs; I think Destiny felt kind of like Halo originally but not really at all anymore so no need to discuss that. I can buy that modern Doom is pretty Halo-ey and Doom 2016 is maybe the best single player console FPS of all time so that's fine. Doom Eternal is not very good on console and I've only played a little bit on PC which is much better and Doom the Dark Ages is like a top 10 game from last year but lower end of the list; only played that one on PC so couldn't speak to the console controls but I imagine they're fine. I did play all the Halos recently on PC with mouse and Keyboard except for Infinite which does read PS4 pads on PC, rest was on consoles though I played some Halo 1 multiplayer on PC (some time between 2005 and 2010?) which is fun.
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