I have played on many consoles over the years. Started with an old Nintendo 64 that was my parents. Then I moved to a PlayStation 2 where I played many hours on. But the one console that became my all-time favorite had to be the Xbox line of consoles, starting with the Xbox 360 and now being the Xbox One. All of this would not have come to be though had it not been for one simple reason: Halo 3.
How it Came to Be
When I was younger, I would go over to a friend’s house for a while after school to hang there till my parents could come get me after work. That was where I was first introduced to the game and liked it ever since. The following Christmas I had asked my parents for both an Xbox 360 and the game and they got both for me. While it was fun at first, it did start to lose its appeal until I had learned of Xbox Live, the online feature of the Xbox that lets you play with others. This is where the true fun of the game flourished and what made it one of my all-time favorite games.
What to Expect in the Game
Halo is a series of first-person shooter games that has you play as a super-soldier named The Master Chief who is trying to save humanity from an alien race known as the Covenant. The Covenant are a bunch of religious aliens made of different races that believe in a “divine” path that will lead them to salvation through the relic of an ancient extinct race. For some reason they believe humanity to be an affront to their “gods” and thus waged war on them trying to annihilate them. The first two games lead right up to the start of Halo 3, but it is possible to play it without playing the other two first.
Halo 3 is divided into different sections that make up its game. First is the main Campaign that follows the story of Master Chief and the final outcome of the long war humanity has been in against the Covenant. You can play it by yourself or with up to three other people both locally and online. Then there is the Multiplayer where you are randomly match against others online, this does require you to have an online account though. Then there is the final to areas that made the game most enjoyable to me. Custom Games and Forge.
The Real Fun of the Game
Custom Games and Forge go hand in hand with each other because of how they work. Forge is a mode where people can use items in the game to rearrange the map how they like it. They can make the map how they like it to change up the gameplay or be more creative and make entire new game modes using the tools they had. Custom Games is where people could either use preexisting maps to play games with just their friends or play the maps others had made.
This is where I found the most enjoyment of the game during the years that I played it. I remember countless nights where after I was done with homework I would get on, join up with some friends, and we would just have a blast playing the various game modes we found over the years. In the current games it is not hard to find game modes like this but back then, if you did not have a map you would need to find someone who did. But even then, we had plenty of fun time play various game modes and laughing at the hijinks that would ensure. Game modes like Jenga where players are on a tower of items and one person on the ground tries to kill them by sending items to know over the tower. Fat Kid where one person is a zombie and is super slow but has a lot of health. The players try to live until the timer runs out and the zombie is trying to kill them all. When someone is converted, they will be fast but easily killed in a few hits.
Various nights of playing various game modes and hundreds of times of laughing at something that happened has left this game as a favorite in my heart. While it is old and there is probably no one on it anymore, the game still lives on in the Master Chief Collection, a game that has all of the maps and stories of the Halo 1-4 along with ODST and Reach. So, if you want to experience the game for yourself, I would recommend getting MCC. To anyone else that has read this post and is familiar with the game, what is you story? How did you come to know the Halo franchise? Do you have any memorable moment in the original Halo 3? If so, tell me about it below!
Gamer Central 