Release Date: November 11, 2014, November 15, 2011, November 15, 2001
So then I finally started Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. And I felt, kinda meh. Again.
But first.
I turned off HD textures and turned on the original soundtrack and sound design because why not. Since I am playing on PC, I used mouse/keyboard controls and obviously, I inverted the Y-axis on the mouse. Once I actually started, maybe because I was not playing on a CRTV, I had a better idea of what I was shooting at, but I still felt lost and confused by the layout of the Pillar of Autumn, and apparently, it has been a question for some time as to what is supposed to go where in terms of geography. The second stage, Halo, has you primarily driving the Warthog around hilly regions rescuing space marine survivors of the Pillar of Autumn, but the levels felt ill-designed for a vehicle, often requiring me to drive so slow so that the vehicle would not tip end-over-end any time I drive over a ledge. In the third stage, The Truth and Reconciliation, I had to start over after getting, maybe, 2/3rds of the way through after a recent patch somehow erased my save/quit file; but honestly, I was down to a single bar of life anyway, so maybe it was a good thing. But this stage is more of what I did not like about the first stage: a lot of spaceship corridors that felt more maze-like than actually functional.
Since this is a nine-year-old collection of games where I play a particular version of a 12-year-old game which is an HDification of a 22-year-old game, let us keep things semi-brief.
Stage 1: Pillar of Autumn
I enjoyed the introduction to Master Chief, although plenty of questions still exist about the character, which will (maybe?) be revealed in time. The layout and getting lost is something that I think will stick in my mind about this opening level. There were a couple times when I backtracked through rooms of Covenant corpses just to make sure that I had not missed something. And then there was the area where you are running through service ducts and I ended up doing some backtracking there as well. I did like that at times there were other soldiers who were also firing back with varying degrees of accuracy and effectiveness, but I understand the feeling that Bungie was going for with allowing the player to feel like they were the ones to (kind of) save the day.
I was a little distracted by the vocalizations of the Grunts, with their high-pitched exclamations of surprise any time I shot at them. The only thing I can think of is that they were there for comedic effect which did not really feel to fit in with the rest of the level design. I also could not tell how/why they were speaking English and I am not sure if that will ever be explained.
Stage 2: Halo
For the most part, I enjoyed this stage going from the confined feeling of the Pillar of Autumn to the open sky/atmosphere of the Halo. The stage itself was varied enough in locations through having Master Chief explore/defend outside and underground environments. I did feel that I bumbled my way through again, getting lost a couple of times and not knowing where to find a particular switch/button to extend a subterranean bridge. I was a little annoyed to discover that Master Chief is susceptible to fall damage after jumping off of a battlement to avoid enemy fire so that I could approach from the ground up. But no, when I landed I apparently landed hard and took a significant amount of damage, but thankfully I knew where there was a health pack that I had intentionally avoided earlier.
I feel like the Warthog was supposed to be the showcase for this level with its open rocky fields and bounding hills, just asked for this military jeep to be driven at full speed, launching yourself into the air and landing amongst a platoon of grunts and elites. Except I did not like this level as much because of the Warthog. Trying to drive anywhere quickly often resulted in the Warthog tipping over, or just barreling into boulders because I was going too fast and the turning radius was probably more realistic than I wanted it to be. Because the Warthog is used heavily here, the level felt very sprawled out, in that you could run from one objective to the next, but it would take you an obscenely long time. I did appreciate that you could pick up two additional marines, again with varying degrees of effectiveness. In the end though, not being able to drive the Warthog how I felt it was supposed to be driven, in the right environment, hampered how I view the entire stage when I look back at it all.
Stage 3: The Truth and Reconciliation
As previously mentioned, I ended up having to replay about 2/3 of this stage because something happened after an update and I could no longer continue the game from where I had previously saved and quit. So I restarted with the assault on the landing pad so that I could access the Covenant ship to rescue Captain Keyes who had apparently gotten captured at some point off-screen. My biggest issue with this stage was nearly identical to the Pillar of Autumn, in that the layout and the reasoning behind the layout of the ship was confusing. I know that I could easily chalk it all up to being of alien design so there are going to be aspects of the floorplan and construction that were not intended for the human mind to comprehend. I just found the countless rooms and corridors to be very uninspiring and I might as well have been shooting enemies in a series of connected warehouses on Earth.
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I probably could have finished this stage about 10 minutes faster because I could not, again, figure out the button/switch situation to unlock the brig cells towards the end of the stage. Because this is the future, the button/panel was a holographic image projected into the air above a console that you could only access from one side, which was not the side that I tried multiple times to do anything with. It was only after I had backtracked about 1/3 of the way through the stage and then doubled back again that I realized I could be on top of the dias that the computer panel was on and then click the button that unlocked the cells in the brig.
It is interesting playing this game, kind of. During the first three levels, playing as a super soldier military juggernaut singlehandedly taking on the waves of Covenant footsoldiers while blaring futuristic military jargon was belted out through your radio gave me a little bit of PTSD with the state of the US in 2001 and the following eight years of George Bush's Gulf War Part II. I think this might be the first military first-person-shooter I have played (I did play through two SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo games on the PSP but that was 3rd person, and I did start Spec Ops: The Line but only played about 15 minutes in before my previous laptop kept crashing in the same place multiple times), albeit a futuristic science fiction military. But, I cannot say that I am overly excited about playing as a character who is woken up out of cryogenic cold storage and within minutes, is shooting creatures left and right. I know that that is literally the same thing that happens in DOOM (2016), but for some reason, I can wrap my head around being excited about shooting demonic creatures with a tongue-in-cheek approach compared to these aliens in this futuristic hyper-militaristic vision in Halo. I genuinely think that some of these feelings of anxiety around my perception of the people who were gung-ho first-person military shooters in the early 2000s have biased my feelings about playing this first Halo game. This is something that I will be working through during this entire playthrough (and likely the series).
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S. The screenshot from inside The Truth and Reconciliation about the button, I grabbed from the IGN Halo YouTube walkthrough of the stage (you can see it at 27:37) because I wasn't about to go back through the entire level just to get a picture to show what I meant about not recognizing the button as a button.
P.P.S. I will also not be surprised if either this game or future games in the series turns this overarching story into essentially what Titan A.E. was about, which I still feel is a lot better movie than many people gave it credit for.
P.P.P.S. And no, I am not going to actively hunt for achievements in this collection of games as there are 700 across all five games, with a decent amount having to do with multiplayer goals. I am not about to try and get the "Win 100 Multiplayer Matches" or the "Earn a Total of 250 Double Kill Medals in Matchmade Games." I know the multiplayer in the Halo series is a fan-favorite feature, but ain't nobody who writes for Stage Select Start got time for that. That also sounds like a chore.
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