So the main purpose for this blog is mostly just to be an outlet for whatever weekly autism hyperfixation I'm obsessing over this week, and on a larger scale whatever stupid thing I wanna ramble about, and right now I wanna write about Halo instead of going to sleep like a responsible person.

Halo, of course, needs no introduction... apparently. I've heard the tales of old from those who played it back when it came out, how Halo 2 and 3 coming out were practically historical events covered by mainstream news, and it's just kinda hard to believe. Granted, the gaming landscape was very different those 23 years ago, and I was too busy being an infant to have experienced it for myself, so I've just chalked it up to being one of those "you had to have been there" type things. But for those who do need an introduction, Halo is a sci-fi first-person shooter franchise created by Bungie, originally for the Macintosh before being bought by Microsoft and turned into the flagship launch title for the original Xbox. It's a very, very good game, and set a lot of groundwork for the modern first-person shooter genre as a whole, especially playing FPS games with a controller. But it's also just a cool-looking sci-fi shooter that fits right within the 90s/2000s aesthetic I seem to always be drawn towards. (I need to write about that sometime.)

It's had this strange allure to me for a long while now, I was a hardcore Nintendo fan growing up and would make very clear that I didn't care what those lame copycats at PlayStation and Xbox were up to. Thankfully, I've since grown out of that, and have actually grown distant towards Nintendo over the years, mostly due to lack of interest in their games or hardware and increasing disappointment in their business practices and stances on emulation and fan games. (I know I keep going on tangents, but it's my second ever blog post and I feel a need to offer context for pretty much everything, paint a picture of my gaming habits.) I actually credit emulators for getting me into PC gaming, as broke middle school me suddenly had access to all these classic Nintendo games I otherwise wouldn't be able to play, even if Nintendo bothered offering them. And PC is also how I first discovered Halo.

In high school, I would hang out a lot in the computer science teacher's classroom. It wasn't necessarily a computer lab, but every student sat at a computer by default and the coursework was computer-based, stuff like video editing, Java programming, Photoshop, HTML coding, etc. So it was a room with a lot of computers in it, and one day someone brings in a flash drive with a copy of Halo Custom Edition on it. This was a special mod-friendly version of the PC port of the original Halo, with the campaign ripped out and focusing on multiplayer. This game pretty much immediately gets distributed amongst the students, copied from flash drive to flash drive (or just to the computer itself), and before you knew it everyone was playing Team Slayer on Blood Gulch. I also joined in on this and despite doing horribly at the game compared to everyone else, I enjoyed the time I had playing Halo with everyone thoroughly, and actually still have that copy of Custom Edition.

A year or two passes, I'm still a Nintendo nerd but decide to expand my horizons beyond my 3DS. I already had a PlayStation 2 that my dad had gotten me the previous Christmas, but I wanted to also experience what the 7th generation had to offer, so I pooled up my money and bought a used Xbox 360 from my local retro store. I got to pick one game to go with it, and I knew exactly what it was gonna be. My parents got me my first Teen-rated game a few years prior, a copy of The Simpsons Game for the DS. I wasn't interested in it and have never played it, and I wanted to make sure that didn't happen again. I was gonna make sure I picked my first Mature-rated game, and I wanted that game to be Halo. So I paired the Xbox with a copy of Halo CE Anniversary, a 10th-anniversary 360 port of the original Halo that I'd later learn was less than stellar in terms of quality. But it had a mode to switch back to the original graphics, so I left it on that.

I got fairly far into the campaign on the 360, but didn't finish it. I'll summarize the basic plot, so story spoiler warning for this 24-year-old game:

In an ongoing war between the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) Marine Corps and the alien Covenant Empire, the two groups stumble upon a mysterious, ancient ring-like superstructure, referred to as "Halo". The first game takes place almost entirely on this structure, which hosts a full environment and weather cycles, akin to a planet. The Covenant shoot down a UNSC battleship, forcing them to crash land on Halo, and the two groups (including the main character, the Master Chief, an elite supersoldier created by the UNSC) race to figure out what secrets the structure holds, mostly a rumored superweapon that could be used to destroy their opponent and win the war. Eventually, the "weapon" is found- a parasitic species called The Flood, able to infect and mutate victims to create zombified soldiers. They're a threat considered so dangerous and impossible to contain ("A single Flood spore can destroy an entire species") that Halo's true purpose is a failsafe that kills all sentient life in the galaxy in order to ensure all Flood is destroyed. Master Chief must now prevent Halo from firing, while also escaping himself, now up against three opposing forces (the Covenant, the Flood, and Halo's AI security drones).

I think the reason I didn't finish the campaign initially, or on the Master Chief collection later on, is mostly just cause the Flood really creeped me out.