Halo: Combat Evolved (XBox)

Where the hell do you start with this?

I've never played Halo before today. I own all three of them, although I only picked them up fairly recently. Not owning an XBox and not being a big fan of most FPS games, I just didn't bother with it. And my PC at the time wasn't anywhere near powerful enough to cope.

Previously, I'd never considered it a big loss. I suppose it's true that what you haven't had, you don't miss. But now I've had it. And I want more.

I've given this quite a bit of play today, more than most of the games in this blog so far. I've had more time, granted, due to being off sick at the moment. But I have actually wanted to play it, and I thought it only fair that a game of such magnitude should have a reasonable time investment before I even thought of writing about it.

So far, the variety has been welcome. Too many shooters see you cooped up in corridors or miserable looking buildings. Master Chief may start off in the confines of a spaceship, and having to crawl around inside little ducts is a pain, but you don't have to do it so much that it puts you off the game. And then you land (sort of) on the planet and everything opens up.

And it does feel like you're fighting an alien force. Obviously the enemy looks alien, but the sounds are such that they really feel alien. And when you're saving mates from their clutches, you do feel part of a massive struggle against overwhelming odds. The atmosphere is convincingly built here.

I may be late to the party by more than seven years, but the fun is still going on. Halo is now a legendary name in the gaming world, and I'm happy to have finally found myself in its world. I expect it will be a long time before I find my way back out...