Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 417: Halo - Combat Evolved

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Stuart Gipp, Jeremy Parish, and John Linneman of Digital Foundry crash-land on the bizarre structure known as the 20th anniversary of Bungie's Halo: Combat Evolved and immediately set about blowing things to smithereens. Art: Shaan Khan; edits: Greg Leahy. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts!

This week in Retronauts, Halo, is it me you're looking for? I couldn't say it. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Retronauts, episode number, I believe, 417, which is frankly an enormous number of episodes, and if you listen to all of them, we'll try and arrange some sort of prose. Today's episode is about the exciting FPS franchise Halo, specifically the very first one, Halo Combat Evolve. But before we get into that, I need to introduce my guests for,

today's exercise. First of all, gosh, I was about to say, let's go alphabetically. But that's confusing me in the moment. Let's start. Let's begin with you, Jeremy. Oh, hey, it's Jeremy. Do you need a full intro? All right. Yeah. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and I'm here to discuss truth and consequences. Oh, man, I didn't have that noted down. My God, I don't know what that could possibly mean. They were going to find that together. And also, is it, no, it's true. Is that the name of the ship? Actually, truth or consequences is a town. New Mexico. It's, um, it's truth and reconciliation. Reconciliation. Okay. I don't kill. I don't want to reconcile. Forget that crap.

Yeah. I mean, that's, it's the tension between us that makes retro not so compelling. Exactly. Exactly. And also, only kiss, won't they? No one knows. We probably won't. Um, also, unless, you know, you want to, we should make that. I mean, with one of the Patreon goals. Let's throw it out there. Um, and also joining us in this now awkward podcast, uh, we have additional foundries, uh, John Lenneman. Hello. Hello, fellows. Well, it's very good to be here, of course.

I brought my library cart to discuss why that's actually a good stage, among other things. Oh, that's not going to be a very interesting discussion, because I think we're all in agreement. Yeah. I don't know. Well, if you want, I could just play, I could play devil's advocate if you want just to make things interesting. Okay. Spice it up. The library, more like the bad brie.

How's that? The library. Yeah, that's way better than mine. Yeah, we're on fire today. Yeah. This is, so far, this, I'm going to say it, this is the best episode ever. And it's going to say that way. And I guess the best place to start.

Oh, yeah, I'm Stuart Jip, by the way. Hello. I'm hosting this episode for the second time ever. Right. And what I've done is I've replaced... Actually, this is really just your first time hosting this episode. Oh, yeah, you're right. Okay, I'm hosting a episode for the second time ever, Jeremy.

And I've replaced my form of nervousness with being unwell. So if I sound unwell, well... What it's given me is it's given me a sort of malaise that means that I'm just not anxious at all. I feel fantastic. So that's great, isn't it? Yeah, they have great cold medicines over in the UK, I'm sure. Just like, you know, 150 proof. Yeah, yeah.

Or just, you know, some leeches on your throat, whatever. That's what I've gone with. But we should probably get started by discussing our respective histories with this so halo-y of games, Halo Kombat evolved. So I'll go in reverse order this time. John, how did you come to discover and appreciate Halo Combat Evolved? Well, it's one of those. So I got an Xbox not initially at launch, but about, I think it was when the E3 happened where they dropped the price.

I bought it that day along with Halo. But I first played it in a kiosk. And I was impressed, but I didn't fully see everything because it was just the first level. But then fast forward about a month or two at a friend's house, he has a lot. large screen television, which at the time was kind of an amazing thing to see. We loaded up Halo and played co-op for several hours, and that that kind of sold me on it. Because, you know, first of all, it was a first-person shooter that actually worked well on a console.

And secondly, just having like a co-op experience like that also on a console was kind of insane at the time. I loved it. I've been trying to think if there is a precedent for split screen, was it split screen or was it just land back on the original? It was absolutely split screen. I think there's two-player split-screen for co-op, and then four, of course, for the normal multiplayer.

Yeah, a co-op campaign was really unique and awesome at the time. I mean, if there is something, another FPS on console that has that I'm not thinking of, by all means, let me know in the comments along with various insults. But, I mean, even if that is the case, this has to be, like, the game changer. Like, it is basically the one that, I say, codifies what sort of the modern FPS became. Although it does still stand apart from stuff like Call of Duty, but we'll get to that. But first, yeah, but first, I'd like to hear from Mr. Jeremy Parrish about his history with HALO Combat Evolved. So this is a very dramatic tale full of a trail and sadness that, you know, kind of spoils some things we're going to talk about later in this episode.

But when I was a wee lad in college, I grew up playing bunchy games because I owned a Macintosh. because I wanted to be a graphic designer and every graphic designer had to use a Mac. And Bungy was the only company making games for Macintosh. It's true. And they were certainly the only company making interesting, unique games, original games, specifically for the Mac and also the Pippin, but that doesn't count. And so I really, really liked the Marathon trilogy.

And so I was looking forward to whatever they did next. And what they did next was Myth, which was RTS and not really my thing. But I was positive that something would come along soon. And then I saw Steve Jobs get up at Macworld and say, hey, everyone, here's something insanely great and lots of hyperbole. And he showed an early build of Halo. And I was like, oh, Steve Jobs is correct. This looks amazing and it's bungee. So I know it's going to be good.

And then it became an Xbox exclusive for Microsoft. That was the ultimate betrayal. Microsoft came and took the one good thing. Mac owners had... Well, hold on. You still have bugged him and Nanosol. They were Mac games, weren't they?

Oh, yeah. Okay. We had Jared, the butcher of song. He was great. But that was really pretty much it. So I was very put out. And on top of that, you know, there was kind of this underdirtone of resentment

because Microsoft had, as discussed in the Xbox episode, which I think immediately precedes this episode in the chronology of episodes that we are publishing. Beautiful. Microsoft kind of helped out Sega with Dreamcast by providing the WinCe development environment. And then mysteriously, Sega went away.

And in their place, they're stepped Microsoft ready to step into the vacuum that nature and Microsoft depore. So, you know, there was a little bit of suspicion there. Like, did Microsoft do shenanigans to push Sega out? Did they provide the WinCE in development environments? Everyone would be like, oh, this is garbage. I hate Dreamcast. I don't know. It was, you know, the suspicions were just thick, like a really, really bad gravy.

And so, you know, I felt like I couldn't get behind Xbox. I felt like I couldn't support it. And that meant very sadly I had to not play Halo. And then, you know, like all the magazines were talking about how good. great it was. But they had these, they had these, they were talking about how they were like playing land matches with eight people in their office. I'm like, who the hell actually can experience that in real life? Who has eight Xboxes and televisions in the same physical space? This is nonsense. This is all trash. Anyway, they finally released Halo for Mac a few years later and I played

it and I thought it was awesome. There was a happy ending. We actually did have all those Xboxes at the college dormitory back then. See, I was in that awkward play. place. I was in that awkward place between college and working in the games press when when Xbox came out. So it was like by myself and didn't have any friends or anyone to play video games with period. So it was rough. It was dark. It was dark time. I feel that and Bungi were your friends and then they turned away from you certainly. Right? They were like, oh, mate, we like that. We like that more than you, Jeremy Parrish. And it's true they do. That's got a sting because not only would it, was it initially a Mac, a temple, but it got

taken away by the biggest rival for new hardware. That's just, that's got to hurt, man. It's like when Sonic was on Nintendo and I just threw all of my Nintendo stuff into a massive burning bin. It was furious. Yeah, yeah. It was very similar, except, you know, Sega only did that because Microsoft stabbed them in the back with Windows CE for Dreamcast.

I'm pretty sure of it. Yeah, it's true. So that sort of covers in a way that the history of the game to an extent, but let's dig into it a little bit more because... Yes, please. I didn't mean to, like, destroy this podcast and make it 10 minutes long. No, it's great because what it does is it means that we can repeat things, but we can also link it back to what you said. therefore lending the anecdote more credence even oh so i was like i was like the the fun enticing forward yeah now we're going to develop the story more fully you know when you see you know when you see a movie trailer these days there's like a trailer for the trailer before the trailer right yeah it was

like that's what you did i wouldn't say very well this is like the part in final fantasy 10 where titus is like listen to my story and then there's like 30 hours of video game and you finally get to the story and everyone's like okay yeah we were there for it it's just like that. They should use that structure in all video games. That's how Halo should end. Just, yeah, that happened. Yes, Chief.

We were there. It certainly did happen, Master Chief. Very well observed. Thank you, Totana. Yes, Bungee, well-known Mac developers for, like you mentioned, the Marathon series, which I want to say Marathon, Durandall and Infinity. I don't know if I've missed one there. That's correct.

There's also Super Marathon, but that was just Marathon and Marathon 2 for the Pippin Atmark. And therefore, it does not count. We're not actually sure if they actually released that game to retail. It's super expensive. The few copies it seemed to exist. So I'm not confident that it actually officially came out. Right. Because who the hell bought a Pippin?

No one. The only reason I know that Pippin exists is because I had, inexplicably, I had an EGM buyer's guide from 1995 that mentioned the Pippin, like, in the, one paragraph. Like, please don't buy this. Yeah, yeah. It was like, we don't know what this is. Apple's pretty big, but this thing seems kind of weird. They're going to put all the classic Mac games on it, like Happy Weed and Scarab of Rar and Dark Castle.

No, you've got a Messiah Matsura game, which is cool, but also, like, that game was just sent to die. Yep. Did it have glider? I don't believe so. I don't actually know what was on Pippen besides. Super Marathon and whatever Messiah Matsura game that was. Protoparaparar. Wait, was that Masa Matsura? Okay, good. I haven't outed myself as a fall. Moving on.

Yeah, so after Durandau, which is the second marathon game, which, by the way, I believe you can play now with LF1, which is like a free version of Marathon trilogy, which is pretty good. I don't do the American Thon sequels work on LF1? I thought LF1 was designed specifically for the first marathon. No, it's possible. Yeah. I'm almost certain I've played all three of them on it.

Okay. I think you can buy the first one and two on Xbox as well. I think it's still supported. Just Durandle. Just too, yeah. Oh, really? Well, that was a weird one, because that was the Mac exclusive, right? Because Durandle and everything, I think, Infinity.

Durandle came to Windows. Marathon Infinity did not. Oh, you're right. It didn't. We could do a full episode on Marathon now if you really want me to. I love that. But yeah, the first Marathon used a different engine. Durandall and Infinity.

So it was a little weirder. I know that when Freeverse brought, I was just talking about this at work the other day, because my coworkers love to hear me talk about things they don't care about. When Freeverse brought Durandall to Xbox Live, I know that they built hooks for the other games as like future DLC, but then all the reviews of Durandall were like, oh, this has Head Bob.

And I don't like that. all right first person shooters shouldn't be allowed to have that so it just got panned and no one bought it and so they didn't release that dLC which is very unfortunate because it was cool to play marathon too with twin sticks i liked it it was good i liked it I was going to say that again, I liked it. Yes. So you liked it, Jerry. Is that where you were? It was good. Yeah.

Awesome. I liked it. Okay. Well, I liked it too. And you can't have Halo without Durandall without Marathon. So I think it was worth discussing. But after Durandale, Fungi were working on a tank combat title, which was codenamed the giant bloody war game,

which I choose to take as a sort of English way of saying it, rather than like bloody as in actually blood and guts. It was just a big bloody war game. but then they were having some trouble getting the vehicle physics working the way they wanted so they pivoted into making myth the fallen lords

which was the RTS that you mentioned earlier Jeremy I believe which did all right for them so when they were getting started on the sequel the studio co-founder whose name was Jason Jones decided to go back to the giant bloody war game which then

became an RTS called Monkey Nuts which is amazing and then became a third person shooter that was just called blam because it was sort of picked up in the office that it was really fun and sort of tactile to drive the vehicles in the game directly rather than just click and say please go here Mr. Carr, which is what all RTSs are to me, basically. Pretty much. Yeah.

Now, like what if God had a mouse? That's basically it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so an early version of that game was shown to Steve Jobs and he was impressed enough to demo it at Mac World in 1999, which was a big Mac. Expo, I watched that demo just a short while before the podcast. And while it is different and third person, I thought there were quite a lot of the building blocks of Halo that were already

there, like some of the music from the game is there. The characters all look pretty much the way that they... Similar designs. Yeah. It has that open terrain feeling with the ward hog and, you know, that kind of focus on that visual style. You could see it there in the early phases, I think. Yeah, I mean, if you are someone who kind of absorbed that demo and anticipation, as I may have, when you, when you sat down and finally played Halo for the first time, you could definitely see how basically they took that, especially in like the, you know, the first stage where you, beyond kind of the opening, once you, once you actually land on Halo and meet up with your crew and you get into a ward hog and stuff. And it's, you know, kind of these big vistas and

you're going through caves and then back into open spaces, you can really see how they just sort of took that game and said, okay, we're doing this, but we're restricting it to a single character point of view. So they just kind of took that team-based tactical combat slash action with vehicles and we're like, okay, instead of having kind of like the third person perspective, we're going to lock you inside this dude's helmet. There's going to be a lady in your ear at all times and that's how you're going to play and it's you know it wasn't it wasn't i think a radical reinvention of what they had it was just sort of a refocusing and um you know i i i think it worked for the better even though halo the third person shooter is more unique in in kind of retrospect

from uh the other action games of the era um i i think you know ultimately halo did more for game design and for kind of influencing uh the other action games of the era um i i i think you know ultimately halo did more for game design and for kind of influencing the, just the, the science of bringing the FPS to the console space, which was very challenging and had a lot of difficulties before this, as Stewart mentioned. I think, I think, you know, it ultimately worked out for the best for everyone this way. So before we move on, though, I did want to at least briefly touch on the fact that Bungie had also published games. And I'm wondering if you'd played any of the strange Bungy published games that they released for

the mask. such as abuse by crack.com. Abuse is great. They also put out, and I actually played this on my friend's Mac back in the day, but Weekend Warrior. Has anybody played that? No,

that was built on like the Marathon 2 engine, right? No, that one was a true 3D game that sort of supported 3D acceleration, which was very rare at the time in 1996, on the Mac especially. And it was, you essentially picked one of eight characters

and you're running around competing in these, like, game shows, uh, basically, it's, it's very, very, very strange. The one I think you're thinking of is ZPC zero pocketification count, which that, a strange, uh, comic book like art style. That was, yeah, that was like, that was like a croft work, uh, album cover brought to life. Exactly. It was wild to see.

Yeah, it wasn't actually much fun to play because you had almost no ammo. So you ended up just like having to punch things, which is not a great mechanic for, you know, first-person shooters, but it sure looked cool. They released a few others. They also developed games that were then published. You know, actually, ZPC was not actually Bungy developed, and it wasn't, I don't think it was published by them. I think that was GT interactive.

But then they had Oni that was published by Rockstar. That was when they did the split, right? Like the one branch of Bungee worked on Oni and the other worked on Halo, I think. Yep. One of these you remember and one of them, you'd, don't. Well, I remember only from the PS2. I mean, you have to, there's a lot of crates

in that game that you break. It's like a Crash Bandicoot game almost. Yeah, you know, except with like an elf quest character who wants to be from Ghost in the Shell. Yeah, that was a strange one. I think we just recently mentioned this on an episode of Retronauts that we recorded not too long ago, but

one of the big quote-unquote innovations for Oni was that the environments you traveled through and fought in were designed to be like real world spaces. So they had like real industrial architects come in and design the offices and stuff. And it turns out that's actually really boring. So yeah, so that didn't work out too well for them. But, but they did have high hopes for that. And it didn't really do anything. Whereas, you know, Halo ended up kind of establishing the console first person shooter paradigm. So, you know, I guess it's good to have like

the division of labor because one team could do something. something revolutionary and the other team could do something that was a lot of good ideas that needed more time in the oven. Yeah. The thing about Oni is that that kind of arrive when Western developers are trying to do the anime thing, right? Yeah. Shogo is it?

Yep. That comes immediately to my idea. Sopteracore as well. And then, of course, this one, Oni. And it was just like- Anachronachronachs, yeah. Exactly. It was that time and place where Western developers were trying to do that.

And I do think that in some ways, I bet Bungee thought that O'Ne could have been a big deal. but obviously. But it does live on in Halo through the Office of Naval Intelligence. So you hear them talk about Oni sometimes and you're like, oh, I remember that game. Go on. Well, only, yes, I just want to make it clear at this point that if you're planning on cutting the audio when we said abuse is great, we're talking about the video game abuse, and I'm not going to be impressed if anyone makes that a thing, okay? Oh, no, that's right. I'm not going to be impressed at all.

Did Kotaku in action. Yeah. Yeah, I also saw the promo video that's been mentioned in the notes here where, uh, Bungi teamed up with Nvidia to promote the G4-2 GTS. Very goofy, very silly kind of Machinema-style video, which I rather enjoyed. Yeah, and that's interesting because the GTS was like early 2001 or something maybe, or 2000, I guess it was. It was not long before Microsoft would acquire Bungi that the whole partnership was shown. So it was kind of a strange thing in terms of timing, and that actually showed that that was

based on the most recent trailer, I guess, which kind of showed the closest they got to the end vision of Halo visually, even though obviously it still changed a lot. So it's a hard thing. I mean, have you seen that, Jeremy? I don't think I have, but I mean, you know, the idea of Halo and Machinima together, like, there's definitely precedent for that. No, it's basically like, you know, they're saying we're fighting the war against the covenant. And then good thing I have this G-Force 2, GTS, and he holds up a video card that, like, spouts out fire and it burns the enemies back. And he's like, whoa, nice frame rate.

And it's complete craziness. And it's got like, fantastic. It's got like Homer Simpson in the land of chocolate music in the background. Exactly the whole time. It's one of it's the funniest thing I've ever seen. No. But we're talking about how the teams were split with working on only and the sequel to myth. And it was the sequel to myth soul blighter.

Oh, yeah. Apparently, apparently led to the Xbox acquisition because there was a bug in Myth2's uninstall program, which accidentally uninstalled your entire C directory, I believe. It just wiped it. Yeah. Which is, with hindsight, hilarious. If it had happened to you, it would not be hilarious. It would be genuinely awful. I bought the game, by the way. Oh, wow. When it had happened, but I did not uninstall it that way. Oh, thank God. Thank God that you loved the game. I remember that was quite a tempest in a tea kettle at the time. That made a lot of headlines.

I'm pretty sure Penny Arcade reamed them for it. But, yeah, there was a lot of ill will. I didn't realize that was the direct cause of Bungee, basically, saying, We sell our souls and bodies, please take us. But it totally makes sense. Yeah, they lost about $800,000. I mean, they lost $800,000 on the recall, basically. So the vice president at the time

whose name is Peter Tanty, if I've got that wrong, I apologize Peter, approached Microsoft to suggest that the acquisition, which of course led to Halo being positioned as Microsoft's flagship game for their sort of invasion of the gaming space with the Xbox

and the purchase went through that was June 2000. So this big Mac Hope, Jeremy's little hope there, got smashed to pieces right in front of his crying face it was terrible. I was just a lad. It's just a small, small little guy. The thing is, though, is, like, Halo had been promised for everything at that point.

Like, if you go back to the magazines from the era, you'll see it was, oh, Halo's coming to Dreamcast, now Halo's coming to PlayStation 2. And it just felt like it was going to show up on every platform. So when this actually happened, it was like, no, it's only coming to Xbox. Very slight. That was the surprise. A very slight tangent. I'm sure I remember Halo being preview for the Nintendo DS as well. Well, but maybe I'm imagining that. No, there was some talk about that, yeah. But sadly, that didn't happen because it would have been a phenomenal game, I imagine. No, but you know, Microsoft is buddy, buddy with Nintendo these days.

And I don't know, maybe it's not outside the realm of possibility that at some point they may be like, yeah, we could put like the first Halo on Switch. Why not? We're not making that much money off that anymore. And that'll drive kids to buying, you know, an Xbox series X on a Halo Infinite. Master Chief Collection. Oh, God. If they put the Master Chief Collection on the Switch, even if it was just the campaigns, I would be all over that.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That'd be great. Totally feasible, too, I'd think. Mm-hmm. Though it's noted here that Halo didn't exactly set the world on fire leading up to its, to the Xbox release. It wasn't, though it was considered sort of the killer app from Microsoft's perspective,

It wasn't necessarily the one that had the most hype behind it. I mean, you guys remember this? Because like, you know, back then, of course, checking out all the E3 coverage, they showed Halo at the press conference and the frame rate was lousy. It just didn't, it wasn't presented in a way that made it look great and people didn't, like the expectations were kind of like, hmm, especially because, again, everything that all the hype had been built on the old footage, right? So everybody remembered what it looked like on the Mac and then those pre-release. demos. And then they show this area that looks more constrained. It runs terrible. There was a lot of disappointment around Halo at E3 that year. And actually, it's Dead or Alive 3, I think, that had the most hype. You saw that on all the magazine covers. Everybody's talking about it.

It looked great. And then I think, you know, Halo was still considered an important title, but it wasn't like the important title. But I think Microsoft reacted pretty quickly once the launch had passed and they started to realize like, oh, okay, people really like Halo. I mean, what was considered the big game? Was it, was it fusion frenzy? No, it was Dead or Life 3. And, um, I, you know, maybe also like Project Gotham racing. Munches Odyssey. Also, Munches Odyssey was considered a big deal as well, obviously. I remember a really interminable demo where they were like showing, hey, we can change the level of water. I was like, wow, I've played Ocarina of time. No thanks.

So the thing about Munch that was interesting is that it was for PlayStation 2 owners, as Halo was for Mac owners of Jeremy, right? Because Munch's Odyssey was one of the first PlayStation 2 games ever, like, announced and shown from the West. And it had a lot of hype behind it for that reason. And Odd World was huge in PlayStation. And so when it was announced that it was going to Xbox, that is inevitably, that's what caused the Money Hat memes. Well, if they were cold at the time, but it was, you know, Penny Arcade did a thing on The Money Hat with Lorne Lanning, and it was specifically over that game. That's true. That's true. His hat was made of money. Exactly. I remember that. I know it's not cool to like Penny R.K., but that strip still makes me laugh.

No, they were, it's fine. It's a different time. Yeah. Has ever been the Retronauts episode about Odd World? Because if not, I'm putting that on my list. Hmm, actually, I don't think there has. You heard it here first, Retro Nauties. Anyway, Halo, and then, of course, it did come out, and everyone went, what at this game because it was pretty revolutionary for

sort of modern console FPS as we've said I mean what were the big tent pole once before this there was stuff like golden eye and there was perfect dark perfect dark power slave maybe power slave is a alien but alien trilogy what about was time splitters out yet the original oh yeah yeah no launch game for

PlayStation two was it okay I believe it was yeah time spliters two is the win it got really one or more to some unfinished multiplayer game Tyson's one I liked at the time but it is very much it's very compact where Halo is not basically

well PS2 had red faction with the destructible environment if you remember which was I kind of liked it at the time but it's certainly no Halo no and I think this would be a good time to talk about

expand on why Halo is good which it is is recently. I want to make, because I forgot at the beginning of the episode to say what my history with HALO is. So I'm going to very briefly give it if that's all right with everyone. Did you make Halo? I did. I'm, I'm, I'm the guy. Yeah. I can't believe you sold out to Microsoft, you bastard. You really find it that difficult to believe that I took like millions of dollars. Actually, no. Okay. No. Well, for me, really, I actually used to think, like, I used to have this kind of mentality, which was, uh, those know me know that I don't, well, I don't consider myself contrary and I do have a sort of slightly like obnoxious taste, I would say. It's very sincerely held, but I've actually remember getting into arguments with my friends because I was so anti-Halo back then, not because of the actual gameplay, because I mean, you know, I hadn't played it. So how would I know if it was any

good? But because it, for me, represented something I didn't like, which was the faceless space marine kind of game. You know, it represents that kind of, what by that point I thought was quite a boring kind of an archetype. I didn't really get to play the game until I bought a 360 many years later and with the 360 I bought like all the old Halo games

because they were all like basically a pound beach by that point. So I put Halo anniversary on and I was like, oh I see I've been wasting my life not liking this because it's actually tremendous and it feels fantastic and even then and even now today I think that

Halo really hasn't aged that badly simply because it's because of how simple it is in terms of sort of inputs i feel like it's still very very fun to play and if anything the sequels the later three four three industry sequels adding things like aiming down sites and sprinting almost made it worse yeah by taking away that kind of purity um and yeah this was this was one of those games you know the balanced wasn't perfect but the the fundamental um sort of pyramid um of skills between melee and guns and thrown weapons like grenades.

It was just perfect. Like it just flows really well. It's really intuitive to like just switch instantly from one to the other. And because it's just like basically three items, you can only hold two guns at a time even and swap between those. There aren't a lot of buns to fuss with.

So you don't have to over, you know, it's not overly complicated. you don't have to overthink it. You just kind of, you start playing and immediately you're just into it. It's, it's, you know, I guess maybe that's not what kids these days want. They want Fortnite where you're like building a mansion in the space of 20 seconds. And I don't, you know, like I, nothing makes me feel quite as old as watching Fortnite videos where I'm just like, huh, I couldn't do that.

I don't understand what's happening. I mean, Halo doesn't have that. It's just like you shoot a guy if they're far away. and if they have shields, then you throw a sticky grenade at them. And while they're going, you run up behind them and hit them with, you know, cold cocking with your gun. And that's it. It's easy. It's simple.

It's great. The thing about this, though, is I think this is very inherent. This is what Bungy did really well, right? Like, so I guess you guys weren't really into myth much, I kind of gathered. I hear it was good and had neat technology and exploding dwarves. And like the hills would collapse when the dwarves. exploded, but that's really all I know. Real-time strategy is like the last bastion for me caring about the genre.

I'll get there eventually. No, that's totally fair. And I did play these games. I like them a lot. And part of the reason I like it is I've always felt that they did for real-time strategy games, what HALO does for first-person shooters, where they distill it down to these very simple mechanics and focus on that. And they made those mechanics good.

See, I would argue that Pickman did that for the RTS. Pickman does it too, but Myth did it first. Oh, damn. See, I would argue that Command and Conquered it, though, but that was before Myth. So maybe maybe the thing about Command and Conquer, though, in most of the RTS games is that they have things like resource gathering. Yeah, yeah. All this management of an economy, myth has none of that. You command your army and you're working your way almost through like essentially combat puzzles, right?

Yeah. As you play through the game, you actually keep those heroes with you. and, you know, if they fall in battle, you lose them there. And it's essentially working your way with this one army that's like a reg tag bunch of guys making your way through the game. And it's just focused on, on that. Yeah, it's, I'd say it's kind of more like fire emblem in real time. Just in terms of kind of, yeah, how you treat your units and how you don't really have to worry

about building anything. Exactly. And that's, that made it very special and unique in the RTS space at that time. I have to be honest, you're kind of selling it to me. It sounds pretty fun. Yeah, just don't uninstall it from your computer. It's got the soundtrack. Marty O'Donnell in there as well.

I was thinking, maybe I'll go and buy this, and then I realize I don't think that it's actually commercially available anywhere at the moment. I may be wrong. I don't think it's had any kind of remaster or re-release or on Xbox or on Steam or anything like that. I'll have to have a look. Yeah, who published Myth? Was it take two? I think it was Bungi itself published.

Yeah, they did. They published it. In Europe, it was published by IDOS, but it was published in North America. But the disc that came with it was one of the few Mac and PC discs. Oh, wow. Yeah, Blizzard did those also. Exactly. It was a pretty rare thing, I think, especially at the time.

So, it was cool, though. I only had one of those discs. I think it was probably creative writer slash fine artists, which isn't really the same. But it did rule. And one day there'll be a metronauts about creative. writer, even though it's not a game. Well, I think it could be good. Old software, like old creative software you have when you're a kid, kid pigs, things like that. I could enjoy

listening to this. Yeah, it'd be good. Rather on this by Jeremy at some point, if I ever get in touch with him. Going back a bit to the simplicity, I wanted to just add that like, I mean, this is kind of obvious, but the controls, obviously, as a result, are much, more accessible than I would say any, obviously any given kind of console shooter, but the fact that it is just hit the left trigger to throw a grenade, hit the right trigger to fire, jump, and, you know, pick stuff up by holding, I believe, X. That's almost pretty much it. You can, you know, context-sensitive get into vehicles and stuff, but it's really simplistic stuff. Like, you're not,

you can't aim down the site. You can zoom with the weapons, I believe, with the right stick. There's a couple of weapons you can zoom with, yeah. And Zoom, yeah. This game's pistol is infamously quite powerful. I love it. It's so good. It's so much fun. I agree.

I was so sad when they took that away and gave us SMGs for Halo 2. Oh, boy. Why did you make the game not fun, guys? What are you doing? Come on. Now, was this the first, maybe not the first, but was this one of the earliest games to have the modern sort of regenerating health system? Yeah.

Because I would like to posit that Mega Man Legends actually came up with that concept first, with the Life Shield in the original Mega Man Legends that could break if you took too hard a hit, but otherwise would regenerate. All right, I'll agree with that. I'm on board with this. I'll get. I'll be straight up ripped off Mega Man Legends. I'll get some Wikipedia immediately.

Thank you. But because I was thinking about, specifically thinking of FPSs here, about the sort of milestone FPS is. I mean, before this, they only want I can think of as Half-Life. And I think even that has your health points and health packs and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, I mean, even Bungie's own shooter, Marathon had, like, life refills. You either went to, like, charger stations.

Yeah. Or occasionally you could find little, like, keep you alive canisters sting around. Yeah. They looked like iced teas. They had a little circle thing on them that it kind of looked like

you were having a vodka and tonic or something. So, see, that's really interesting. I think the shield system ties into all the other mechanics and it all comes down to essentially solving some core.

I don't want to call them problems per se, but there's things about first person shooters that needed to be solved on a console. First of all, most games were still created with the PC in mind and that includes things like quick saving. And because of you have this health system, you know, where you save, you often carry with you however much health you had at that exact time, right? What you

did here with the shield system is it essentially allowed each individual section of a stage to become like a mini stage within itself. And because it uses a checkpoint system rather than like quicksaves, you can be sure, or it's more like the designers could be sure, all right, When they get to this room, even if they had, like, low health, because there was still a health bar, they would have a full shield. So they can always assume some level of capability when you arrive there. And I think that allowed them to craft some really interesting combat scenarios. Yeah. Yeah.

Basically, one of the great things about Halo, like really genius things about it, is that it is built around the idea of encounter spaces and the assumption that when you get there, like, you will always. you know, have maximum health or at least maximum shields, even if your health in the first game, you know, has taken a beating. And you may not have a lot in the way of weapons, but you'll be able to forage immediately. And it's not like you can carry, you know, like a full Gordon Freeman arsenal with you and be like, oh, God, where did I put that rocket launcher? You've, you've either got like the pistol and the rocket launcher or you basically have two things at any time. And you may have a favorite weapon, but eventually you have to learn to improvise with without it because there's just not enough ammo for every single weapon around.

And it's actually something, the idea of like picking up alien weapons as you go along and kind of learning to make use of those, even though you can't reload them for the most part. I think the needler has, has ammo. But otherwise, it's basically like you pick up a plasma gun and you fired it until the battery is totally discharged. And then you can't do anything with it, you throw it out. Like, that's actually something they kind of experimented with in the original marathon games where you'd go into an alien vessel,

and sometimes you would pick up this weird alien weapon that didn't interface with your systems right. You'd, like, get an error message and your weapons read out. And you could fire, like, fire beams at people for a while. You could even do, like, a triple spread if you held down the alternate fire weapon or a fire button. But eventually, that would run out of ammo,

and you just have to discard it or unless, you know, pick up a new one. So they kind of took some of those ideas that they'd been experimenting with and really just create, these great little spaces, little combat scenarios where, you know, you might be up against just an army of grunts and maybe an elite, or maybe it would just be like two of the big hulking brute guys. What are those called? Not the brutes. The, I know who you mean, but the

name is temporarily escaping. Yes, the extremely large men who are actually like colony of worms that you can kill by hitting one worm and its lower back. So every, you know, like every space has its own kind of setup and you might have different weapons, different tools, different vehicles available, but it really allowed them to put a lot of thought into each space without having to worry like, hey, will the player be able to beat this if they've only got two points of health left and that's how they quick save? It just takes all that away. It is really ingenious and it does allow for that kind of, the kind of open-ended level design that it has, it wouldn't work if you could get just quick sniped and killed in one shot from almost anywhere.

But as it is, you can get hit. You'll know what's hit you because you'll be in that kind of critical state if your shield's been destroyed. And then you can take cover and you can regroup in it. And, you know, it makes it challenging, but it makes it always fair. I can't think of a time when I'd been killed in Halo and thought, well, that was ridiculous. How was I possibly supposed to get past that? Yeah, that doesn't mean, if you're playing in legendary, the jackals can take you out in one hit. But, I mean, if you're playing legendary, you kind of expect that.

And you've learned, you've learned kind of where, how the game works and where the ambush spots are. Because if you're just jumping straight into legendary, you're creating your own problems. The thing is, though, that I think it's really important here is that the two weapons system, I don't think it was really done before, or at least it wasn't common. And that, I think, was done. That was one of the key things to solve the console problem, right? you have the PC, you have all the number keys on the top, switch instantly, but on the console, as we saw in that prior generation, to switch weapons, you're just like tapping two buttons to sort of cycle through a large list, which was not great. And by switching to this two weapon system, it really forced the player to sort of rethink how they treat weapons. It also made it possible to switch between just the two weapons you had instantly, while also providing things like the instant grenades that you mentioned, Stu, or like the melee attack.

which was actually effective. And you take all this together. And then there's this whole rock paper scissors element to it that I found really interesting, where certain weapons impact either other players in multiplayer or enemies in single player differently.

Like one of my favorite ones that always confused people was like use a plasma weapon on somebody. It slows down their turn rate. So they actually cannot turn around fast enough to shoot you. And it's just about learning which weapons have which impact on which enemies and then sort of building your strategies around that.

And I think that's just really, really smart design that we just had not seen before. Yeah, I agree. Like it kind of creates this rhythm, too, when you go up against, say, an elite, which is basically the equivalent of your character. It's, you know, a very smart enemy, a very agile, very powerful, very aggressive and intelligent, but also, you know, someone who will take cover when you knock down their shield. And so, you know, once you learn that a charged plasma shot will take down their shield in one shot, then that makes it much easier to kind of hit them. And, you know, there's this kind of jolt as their shield goes down and it stuns them very briefly. And that gives you time to either bring up your projectile weapons, you know, like a hit scan type weapon or to rush up and give them a fatal strike to the head or something with your melee attack.

So, you know, it really, it kind of rewards these different approaches and tactics and it gives you reason to want to switch your weapons around because, you know, you can't have every kind of weapon in your inventory at all time. So you have to kind of say, like, what's the best balance for this particular scenario? And I think that's where the checkpoint stuff also feeds into it because when you die, you essentially have to repeat the section. And I actually think this repetition is what makes it so engaging, right? Because each time you try a room, you learn a little bit.

more about the strategy or you come up with a new strategy and it's very satisfying to pull it all off and get through it it's you know it's almost like imagine if you were playing like a mario game or something and every time you fell in a pit or got hit killed you just immediately respawn right there uh and then the enemy's back and you just continue from there that wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable i think right because you're yeah it's almost like quarter spamming your way through an arcade game and maim you just like lose the nuance of learning the game well this is something, FPS games, I think for a while, they were kind of dealing with, and Halo really, really solved that.

If you speak to the gamers that you get these days, they want to skip bosses and all sorts and all can't be doing with it. No. Oh, yeah. Hey, guys, difficulty discourse. That's fun for everyone. No, no difficulty discourse. No, you're absolutely right.

And I find that, again, the way that the levels have been designed here as more discrete areas than, obviously, you know, corridor-based levels in, say, I guess, even in something like the original Quake, there's only so many ways you're going to get through a particular encounter. But here, if you die in... Quake's pretty awesome, dude, but I love Quake, but yeah, it's more like an obstacle course than Halo. A little bit, yeah. Halo is just like, here's the entire surface of a planet, more or less.

And, you know, if you can get the Warthog over that mountain, then, you know, go for it. We're not going to stop you. we'll try i i would argue that the game really feels that way when you first play especially you know at the time where you just didn't see that kind of broad open design i mean you know when halo came out like kind of the the big shooter was half life and that is very much a scripted sort of here's your corridor here's your hallway here's your little cave that only opens out onto a tiny little platform that would have a helicopter can snipe you yeah yeah and it feels very very limited especially once you kind of have replayed a while and learned the scripting and kind of started to see the seams.

Halo definitely feels like, whoa, I'm just, you know, I've just landed on this installation and there's all these huge spaces, but it's not really that big when you look back at it. It's really good at creating that illusion. That's the secret to its design, I think. And this is something I've been talking a lot about recently is I think these carefully designed perceptively large spaces. are most interesting, where it's like freedom within a linear path versus like, say, a modern open world game, or it's just a gigantic open space that you never really learn and never really enjoy that much because it's just, it's just a space. These missions are very well crafted and paced, so they do look big, but they're not so big that it's like aimless, right? You know,

I'm going to . You know, I'm going to be. I'm going to be able to be. Speaking of the mission, about some of them specifically like what of our sort of favorite missions are or should we go briefly through all of them because there aren't really that many i think we can kind of go through the

whole game there yeah i think so i mean yeah it's worth noting before we even do that while each mission is named each there are little subsections of each mission which are also named as well which are often quite sort of witty and i thought was quite enjoyable helps to create a sense of tangible progress even if you have been on the same mission essentially for about 90 minutes which is very possible. The humor and personality of this game lean heavily on the marine dialogue from aliens, which, you know, was like 15 years old when this came out,

but still, you didn't have in 2001 the idea quite so much of, like, media that just consisted of other media references. So it felt kind of fresh and different. It was like, oh, that's witty. Like, hey, I remember when Apoen said that. And you had, you know, even the Sarge, who basically is Apone from aliens.

Yeah. Like kind of shamelessly. But, you know, like turning that into, you know, taking that kind of cinematic element, you know, from a familiar film and turning it into a video game experience. That was pretty new for this space, especially. Like, you kind of got that referentialism and sort of shameless lifting from Hollywood in a lot of, like, Japanese arcade games in the 80s.

Yeah. But you didn't see as much of it here. And especially not. and is focused away. Yeah, I mean, you could argue Duke Newcomb 3D in a weird way. He parrots a lot of 80s action movie lines, but that's not really the same sort of thing. No, not the same. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of his entire schick.

Like, that's sort of what you're, you know, you know you're getting into that when you pick up Duke Newcomb. He also likes women to shake it. That's true. Aspect as well. They have money makers that need to be shaken. You know, I didn't, I didn't watch aliens until last year, and then I watched it. And I was like, oh, that's where everything I've ever seen is from. Great.

Good movie. First mission in Halo Combat Evolved is pretty sort of standards. The Pillar of Autumn, which is your sort of base ship, I believe. It has been a while. I apologize if I get details wrong here. And it does something immediately, which I love, and I didn't even realize it was doing it, which is when you do your initial kind of calibrations, when Masterchief's taken out of stasis, and it tells you to look up, no matter what you press,

it will look up. it will look like that's how it knows what you what inversion you like although I think that if you don't tilt the stick up to look up then that is honestly bonkers I can't even begin to fathom that no I if I ever no I just played it this morning yeah and what actually goes happens there is that it does um ask you well it might do that but it asks you if that felt good basically oh and he's like does that feel good or do we need to adjust this chief and you can like press a button to do it again yeah it's and It's a really seamless options system, basically.

It's within the, diagetic, basically. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, that is a more familiar kind of stage because it sort of eases you in with more traditional, almost sort of corridor-based, not particularly demanding and quite sure if memory serves. Yeah, it's pretty brief. And it's very scripted. Like, this is very much sort of half-life-derived. Like, it's that kind of dynamic where it's like you go to this one space and certain enemies are going to appear and, like,

do certain things and your space marines are going to do another thing and you can sometimes you can kind of change and influence the outcome of events but sometimes you're sort of cut off from things and so you watch them happening in the distance so it's creating this sense of like oh everything's going to hell all around me and i've just got to keep going keep going keep going but it introduces pretty much all of your skills you know it gives you an introduction to your headlamp system so you can get through the target and It introduces you to stealth kills, sneaking up on unaware enemies. It introduces you to, obviously, your health system and regeneration and to guns and grenades and picking up ammo or weapons that are dropped by fallen enemies. Like, it basically gives you everything that you need to know to play the game. And then the rest of it is basically like saying, hey, all that stuff you did in the first stage, here are, you know, opportunities for you to use those in. creative ways. Like it does everything except vehicles basically. Yeah. It's, it's really a smart introduction. I love it for that because it also kind of feels familiar. You're like, okay, like you said, this is almost like half-life kind of game, but they're really just teaching you

the mechanics. And then they unleash you on Halo itself. Yeah, the next mission arriving on Halo, which is just like, I would say, honestly, again, even today, I find it impressive just how much space there is to play with once you walk out of that. Even before you explore that map, the first thing that hits you. There's two things actually. One, of course, the music from Marty O'Donnell was superb there, right? And that's something that we'll talk about more, I'm sure. But throughout the music usage is incredible.

But also, Bungy has an incredible skill for creating gorgeous skyboxes. Nobody doesn't like Bungy. And, I mean, they really flex in this because the whole point of the halo is that it is this unusual, we haven't even talked about that, but it's like this, it's basically, you know, a torus or donut in space. It's just a, like someone took a, an artificial planet where the surface is on the inside, like a Dyson sphere or something and just sliced one like, you know, like when you, uh, slice up a lemon or a lime to put in a, in a drink, uh, you know, just that, that thin little slice. And so when you look along the, I guess the, the, the, axes of halo, you see, you know, kind of the background receding and then it rises and tapers into a distance and then you see the ring above you. And you can, you know, do the full 360 degrees and turn around and see it descending and widening from the taper back behind you. It's, yeah, it's a really cool kind of concept, you know, I'm sure Larry Niven deserves a royalty for it for

we'll see the one who Ring World or? I think so. I want to say, yeah. But anyway, not the most totally original concept. And it ultimately, it's like, hey, we created the Death Star with, you know, with zombies and aliens. But, you know, even if it's super derivative, it does it in an interesting creative way. And there's a lot of discovery as you play.

And just, you know, this first level begins with a cutscene where basically you're in an aliens drop ship. And, you know, Lambert gets killed because. you know, pilots always got to get killed. I don't know what they call the pilot in this one. I can't remember, but it's basically Lambert from aliens. They die. You crash. Everyone in the drop ship is killed, except

you, the master chief, because you are basically a man wearing like, you know, the refrigerator that Harrison Ford climbs into to survive the nuke. Like you basically wear that refrigerator everywhere you go, plus with an energy shield. So you're kind of indestructible.

Either, which is great. Right. So, yeah, so basically you're kind of stuck there on this unfamiliar alien landscape that seems very familiar, very earthlike, and just kind of, you know, you have to sort of meet up with your team and survive the enemies that are, you know, on the patrol looking for you and trying to clean up the survivors, the escapees from the ship, which also crashes on the halo. and you're ultimately trying to get back to that to reunite with the captain. So, you know, it kind of, yeah, it's just a great introduction. It just kind of throws you into the thick of things. It's interesting how you mention that because you're right. One of the best parts about it is that you basically land first.

And then as you're already on the planet, well, on the halo, you start to see enemies like come looking for you from above. You actually see the pillar of autumn itself, like go by through the sky and crash land somewhere. and you know, okay, we got to go find it. Like, there's a lot happening above you that's sort of, it's basically storytelling through just in-game events in a very smart way. But, yeah, I mean, I guess the other big thing that they introduce in the state is the Wardhog, right? Yeah, for sure. This was also kind of an innovation in that the controls for the Wardhog were really unique at the time, rather than directly steering it by pressing left or right or whatever you typically would in a video game.

It was all driven by where you pointed the camera. and then this was combined with the robust physics system, and you just had this vehicle that just hopped around the terrain in a way that just felt absolutely amazing. It does feel fantastic driving that thing, and it does also lead into the sense that you're not completely alone. It's not just you against the world. You have got these Marines, and they are skilled,

unless you run them over, obviously, and then die instantly. Why would you do that, Chief? Have you gone rampant? You know, it does, it introduces, both vehicles and your kind of AI squad companions who appear throughout the game. And one of the kind of fun things about the whart hog and a lot of the vehicles is that they're designed

for use in multiplayer, first and foremost, I think. So they're designed to be used by multiple people, like a driver, a gunner, you know, someone in the passenger seat if you want. And you can, in the single player campaign, you can hop into any one of those positions. And the Marines are terrible drivers, and they're going to get,

you killed. I don't think the Marines could drive in Halo 1. I think they added that for Halo 2. I don't know. I have to double check that, but I'm positive they can drive in Halo 1. Because you can hop into the gunner's seat in the back and like shoot things and you know

you're very powerful and blow things up until the Marines kill you with their terrible driving. I remember parking. I would just park that thing so that the gun was facing whatever I was having to go after. I just get in the I can use it to take him out without having to exert any further effort. It was great.

That was part of the fun of playing in co-op, actually, is that you would have, like, your friend basically take the gunner's position, and they have infinite ammo on that thing. So you'd have moments where you could kind of, like, pull the warthog up to, like, a bottleneck. You hop out, the dude stays on the turret and just blast everything while you sort of go around the side and take them out from over there. And it's just, it makes for a lot of fun strategy. I like that you can sort of swap roles also,

by hopping out and then running up to that position and being like, I'm taking over and the Marine will just, you know, trade places with you. There's a lot of just kind of low fuss design built into this. And, you know, that was something that was kind of a new concept in games that had only really recently started to come into vogue, thanks to games like Akrona of Time. And they really did a great job with it here. It leads into the next mention of truth and reconciliation, which is a mission that begins in a similar area

to the previous, but in the dark so that you're, you feel a lot more like you're on a stealth mission at this point. Of course, you can botch that immediately and go loud like I always do. But now, is this the mission where you do descend into the base and you can

take the water down there as well? No, I don't think so. You're, you kind of go up into like up a long kind of cliffs. But yeah, this one's at night. And so you're sneaking around under cover of darkness and there's really great music like the the soundtrack in this just like i can immediately hear it in my head even though it's been years since i played this and yeah you do have the option of

like silently sniping enemies uh and uh i got really good at head shots in halo and um you know that'll that'll take out enemies in one hit but you can also blow it like you said and then have to fight your way through uh sometimes your marines will blow it for you because they're they're really smart actually that real quick that's part of the that's something that makes these missions so darn good, is that every time you go through it, even when you make a mistake, you feel like, oh, I could have done that better, right? Which pushes you to want to replay it again, to do it better. And also, the game may, like, make things more difficult for you if you go the wrong route

and, you know, don't kind of, like, take the optimal path through a stage or optimal approach. But even so, it doesn't feel impossible. Like, if you blow the stealth in this, it's fine. You're just going to shoot a bunch of grunts and some elites and then get inside the But, you know, if you can sneak your way in, it's very satisfying. And it's that sense, I mean, the previous level has this to an extent as well, but it's such a huge space that you go through such different kind of, I don't like using this word, but like kind of biomes,

when you go from outside to fully inside immersed in this, in this base, in this ship, or whatever it is that you're entering. And there's no, there's no loading. Like, it's just like a strict, almost a kind of constant. absorbing immersive and totally different space, which is not something that I can remember seeing before in an FPS that even on PC, to be honest, it showcases to me that sort of very similitude of the whole thing.

Like even though it is a very gamey kind of game, I find this game more immersive than most FPS is simply because it doesn't ever really pull you out of it. And this is a good example for me, although probably not as good as the next level, the silent cartographer. Well, the one thing I do want to mention about the truth and reconciliation stage, I'm pretty sure that's the first stage that introduces you to the hunters,

the extremely large guys. That's the native. You have to fight kind of, I think, two of them for the first time in an indoor space, and there's kind of these environmental objects placed around. So you can you can sort of kite them around and use the environment to protect you because otherwise they're just going to like charge straight at you and they have these energy beams that cut, you know, they slice across the room. So you have to really be careful about how you attack them, but, you know, and how you fight them.

But it gives you kind of the opportunity to explore and, you know, a chance to just kind of face off against them before things get really heavy. And, you know, you have much more challenging encounters with them. Also, that shows off the physics in the game because a lot of the objects in the environment actually do have physics applied to them. So you'll see the hunter can charge through what you may have used as cover to Dodge's blast. right yeah throws it out of the way and it was kind of always changing the the landscape for your battle actually but before we get the silent cartographer actually one of the quick things i want to touch on this is really important this for years people would complain about halo's level design being uh boring and repetitive oh oh um and i think

this is as good a place as any to sort of mention this because i've always the way i've looked at it is I would say it's more like it does sometimes lack visual variety, but it makes up for that with gameplay variety. Oh, absolutely, yeah. So even when you're inside this ship here, and it does look relatively samey, each individual chunk of that mission is extremely unique and interesting to fight. And it's the encounter that was specially crafted, even if it doesn't always visually differ that much.

And I think that kind of confused some people for a while. Or is it more like some folks were looking for the wrong thing in terms of, or a different thing, I guess I should say. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's not a complaint I heard at the time. It seems to be more of a hindsight sort of thing. I remember even at the time. Oh, really? Yeah.

I definitely heard some of that. And I think a lot of that comes from the back half of the game. Yeah. Where they're like, oh, they didn't bother to finish the game. It's just the first half the game copy and paste it backward. The thing is, that is like, there is like a germ of. truth in that, in that they did reuse those stages to save time because they needed the game to get done.

But I would argue that having to do that makes the game even more immersive because there's no easy way out. There's no warping back to where you need to be. You've got to go back through hell. I think that I love that they did that so well. Yeah, they did. Interesting ways, right? Yeah.

And I think it adds to there's something about the first time I played this game, not that long ago, as I said, when I played through assault on the conclusion, control room. I remember thinking, damn, this is long. This is really long and arduous and difficult, but it's awesome and I have loads of options. I don't hate this. And then when you go back through assault and the control room, it brings you back to that stage and you know it's going to be even tougher. And it's almost like, it's almost, that in itself is kind of a form of storytelling and a form of characterization. It's like you are, it's that hard that you can go through this twice. I really, I really liked that personally. I thought it was good. I

wish more games would do, would have more confidence in their own environments, to be honest. Yeah, and, you know, midway through the game, they introduced the third faction. Yes. And that does a lot to totally change the dynamic of the spaces that you have to traverse and reverse. Yes. Because, you know, not only are you dealing with smarter, you know, covenant enemies, the main faction, there's also the additional faction. And they're kind of a wild card because they can, uh,

help you at times, but they can also cause a lot of impediments. And sometimes they help you in ways that quickly becomes an impediment when they, like, you know, take over a tough enemy or something. You're like, ha, ha, yeah, take that bad. Oh, God, now I have to fight it. It's a zombie. Well, we will get to it. But, I mean, that is actually. I apologize for the spoilers.

No, no. Well, I mean, I'm personally very upset by that. But we'll see. The letters you're going to get, how to make up? I do want to mention cartographer because we sort of come to the flood because I don't think you cannot talk about that level because it's one of the levels that's talked about with reverence and it was it was a stage that was used during development to test out different scenarios, different enemy patterns, different weapons. And then I guess they just thought, well, this rules. We should just put this in the game more or less as is. Because even today, I remember getting dropped into that and

thinking, this is so free form. Like, I know there is a destination to go. I don't know what it is. And this space just feels huge. The fact that you can take the Warhawk and drive around the entire exterior of this island and still think now I haven't even ventured into this yet and there's been so much like you can spend like two hours three hours on that level I think if you really wanted to dig into it and it's basically brings everything that makes halo great into a single level yeah it's so well done and well almost everything because you still haven't met the flood yet so it's like kind of it's kind of the um like the initial sandbox of the game, like the initial scenarios, like everything you can do with what you're sort of

presented with at the outset of the game, you know, in the first two stages, it all culminates here before things take a huge swerve and the dynamic of the change game really changes. We talked about assault on the control of a bit, so I won't linger on it, but that, I mean, that's another change of pace because that is a more linear stage. There's a lot to it. It has still got plenty of scope, but it is more go from. may to be, then I would say most of the rest of the game is. Well, you're right. And that's where they introduced the Banshee, though, which I guess is that where the tank is

also introduced? Yeah, I believe so, yeah. You use a lot of vehicles in that. And it has this incredible sense of scale. It feels epic. It feels absolutely epic. Like these bridges, when you cross those bridges the first time and you look down and then you realize that you're going down there, you look back up.

And it's just, it's this fantastic sense of just awe as you're explored at stage. yeah that was that was something you really didn't see very often especially in the console space was the ability to kind of change the scale of an experience because when you're you're fighting through an encounter space on foot like every little rock feels important it's you know like wow this is a cover point i'm going to hide over there and you know try to like sneak around and get behind the elites that are they're kind of sniping at me uh hopefully their little underlings won't spot me and give me away but then you know you get into the tank and everything seems a little smaller and you can just kind of grind over the bad guys and then you get into the banshee and you pull back and you know you're you're a hundred meters above the ground and they're all they all look like ants they're also tiny it just it just kind of gives you a different perspective on these things and something that was so hard fought on foot is like you know just incidental like this little blip that you fly over in two seconds in a band it's almost like a little victory lap once you've reached that point which is how I feel about the

second half of the game in general, to be honest. But first, we've got to get through, uh, I'm going to roll these ones together because I feel like they do go together quite well, uh, 3-4-3 guilty spark and the library, which I think are two halves of a coin, uh, now 343 guilty spark is the, is the spooky level. It's the spook-em-up level, um, because you don't know what's going on when you get to that stage. So real quick, though, yeah. Did any of you guys know about the flood when you first played this?

I did not. But, I mean, as soon as I saw what was happening, I was like, oh, I know what's happening. Yeah. I mean, you kind of know it's something. You're like, okay, so this is where it really goes aliens on us. But I really, I love for the way they presented that because it felt like such a shift in tone where it's this dark, swampy environment. And you go down to this abandoned facility. And then when they share like the cam footage from one of the Marines and very aliens, of course.

but that whole reveal was really cool. And, like, I can't think of any other game at that point. Maybe you guys can think of something, but where essentially they introduce an entirely new type of enemy and gameplay halfway through the game. The only thing I can think of that's comparable, and I think it's after this, is the Crimson Head's in Resident Evil.

In terms of changing up the way that you see, yeah, that's the following year, so it doesn't count. There probably is an example, but it's not coming to mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure this is done before. Yeah, I mean, I feel like, you know, you have something like the legend of Zelda,

a link to the past where you're like, oh, I'm going to fight, you know, this wizard's agonim and take him out. I'm going to, you know, beat the three temples that Sarashala wants me to find, and then I'll go fight the wizard. And then you go fight him and it's like, oh, actually, here's the rest of the game.

Here's the whole thing that you really have to beat. There's eight temples now, buddy. this is this is on par with that like just this massive game changing twist that you know kind of comes out of nowhere like they don't hint at it really like through you know you meet three four three guilty spark and he says some stuff yeah if I'm recalling correctly but it's all kind of opaque and it's not until you see the camp footage and you hear you know you're given control and there's like the chittery sounds and the weird music and violins and stuff you're like okay now I'm in it yeah And then following that is one of the most, is it fair to say, one of the most broadly hated levels in any... I would say divisive. Devisive. Some people really hate it, but some people also are like, this is just, you know, phenomenal. I, when I played it, I hadn't been dreading it because I know me and I know what I'm like.

And I thought, I'm going to like this, even if I don't like it, I'm going to like it on purpose. but it just so happens that the complete change of pace by giving you like a shotgun with like God knows how many shells and just wave after wave of flood to just go absolutely kill crazy on it turns out it's really fun

it's almost like serious Sam or something when you're backpedaling away from this onslaught and emptying your gun into this crowd to try and carve a path through it's really it's like Smash TV it feels like a completely different it's great you know this the stage okay so the library is basically just like wave after wave of you kind of standing in place and defending yourself while this robot like opens up doors

for you to lead you to safety and as as you're waiting for the doors to open and the robot to do its thing just like waves of zombies the flood which are like vegetable uh parasite thing that'll take over the bodies of the dead and turn them into, you know, soldiers and its army. And then it has like these little, uh, basically, you know, alien head crabs, um, that'll, that'll chase after you and explode and try to stun you so that the, uh, the big guys can get you. Um, you're basically just, it's a holding, uh, effort, you know, uh, and you're all by yourself. And it's just you and guns, pretty much. And you'll, there's lots of corpses around with, with weapons that you can pick up. but it's really great

and this to me like coming into this as a marathon fan I was like okay there is a stage in Durandall where it's pretty much this like you're

you're basically holding out to defend the AI Durandle in its computer core and the enemy is just beaming in wave after wave of like every enemy type and there's doors

that you have to wait to open up and you're trying to get to the computer cores and it's just like this desperation and it's really great but it works so much better here in my opinion

because the Halo combat scheme is so good and you said it's basically you and a shotgun but I got really good at precision shooting so it was me in a pistol and I would just like take out each flood especially the little guys as they came at me and there's a little bit of auto aim

like aim correction in this and also just enough precision with a pistol and enough control that it's you know it's pretty easy to pick off most of the enemies And then it's, you know, just some of the larger guys, like the big bloaty guys who explode that can't just be taken out with a quick headshot or, you know, whatever the hell you're shooting. Those are fun, though, because it's almost, they're almost like a power up. As long as they don't surprise you, you can kind of, you can kind of kite them towards other enemies. That's true.

Yeah. Yeah, you can take out a whole patch of enemies by detonating. On a very baseline, like, almost primeval level, I just get a real kick out of the fact of firing the shotgun into a crowd of flood turns them into essentially flood. fete. It's just very appealing. Flofetti. It's like the most, the world's most disturbing wedding. I love it. But yeah, I'm a big fan of the library and feel like it's an interesting change of pace,

you know, from the more measured approach of the game. This is just everything being thrown at you all at once. It's relentless. And there's, there are a little bits of breather between waves, but there's no opportunity to explore. It's very linear. And it's just like, how long can you survive this onslaught of enemies? And I can see where some people think it goes on a little too long, maybe, I don't know, but I feel like for me it ends just at the right time. I'm starting to get worn out and I'm like, okay, I need to do something other than shoot Flood.

And then, you know, you're doing something other than shooting Flood. I think there needs to be that little bit of attrition for it to work because, you know, Master Chief is probably pretty tired at this point as well. But I find it odd when it's said that it goes on too long because, like, assault of the control room is probably like four times long. the library. Yeah, but there's more variety in, and it's true. It is true. Whereas this is just shooting flood in a corridor. Yeah, I mean, as long as you enjoy shooting the flood, I could see if, you know, I think

I've always wondered if there's a little bit of the riding syndrome to this where, you know, a sudden unexpected change occurs and some people just don't react well to it. You know what I mean? Where it's like, oh, I wanted to fight the covenant. And then all of a sudden, you're fighting this very different enemy. And naturally, some people just don't enjoy that as much. Yeah, I feel like they really embraced Ryden syndrome with Halo 2, where they're like... They sure did.

Now you are the enemy. Have fun. Oh, I was about to ask what the hell is Ryden syndrome. And I was like, Ryden, like the schmup? Ryden, like the character from Moral Kombat? And I'm like, oh, no, you mean the Metal Gasolid guy? Yeah. Okay, we're there. Exactly, which is just released a year prior.

Yeah. It was still fresh for a lot of people. Yeah, and considering how the crazy timeline Halo 2 was created under and reworked, definitely, like, that had to have been front of mind for them. And we just talked about Metal Gear Solid 2 two episodes ago in episode 415, so please check that out so you have more context about what we're talking about. And what we're talking about now, I guess, is the end game, the final three missions, which are all essentially reduxers of previous missions. You've got two betrayals, which is assault on the control room backwards, almost literally, if not completely literally.

It's really interesting, though, because I said at night, first of all, so it's like darker out, and you have more access to the Banshee, I felt. Yeah. And so there's just like a, it does have this like, we've got to get out of here vibe to it that I found really engaging. It totally works. Yeah, I agree. And it's also where this is the part where you're seeing a lot of the covenant in flood interactions. So it's not just the same mission. It's, you're going through a familiar area, but the encounters play out very differently.

I find here and in the next mission keys, there are encounters that are so difficult if you don't let the flood help you to some extent that I just wasn't able to get through rooms. I was having to manipulate. And I'm thinking to myself at the time, oh, I've broke, I've cheated. I've found a way to sort of break the game. And no, of course I hadn't. It was entirely intentional that you would figure that out and that you would do that. Yeah. And Bungee had kind of explored this faction.

fighting system. You know, obviously that was something in doom. You could make the different types of enemies attack each other. But they didn't necessarily hate each other until you kind of cause them to get into a kerfuffle. But in the marathon games, especially Marathon Infinity, there were multiple factions that just by default hated each other. And so you would beam into a space and there would be a fight going on. And, you know, you could either jump into the thick of it, but you ran the risk of like shooting an enemy who might have been your ally and then they get pissed off at you and kill you. You also ran the risk of like later in the game, the enemies that were your allies, you know, kind of end up on another footing. And now all of a

sudden these extremely powerful aliens who were clearing out the room for you before, now you're like siding with the weak guys and you have to deal with these enemies that are like just spewing plasma death and extremely difficult to destroy. So, So, you know, it's a kind of gameplay concept that had been, like a lot of things, kind of percolating in Marathon and then realized to their full extent in Halo. Yes, absolutely. And also, you know, by this point, I feel like the storytelling really had ramped up. Yeah. It was really trying to, you know, figuring out what the heck's going on.

There was all this mystery behind it. And, I mean, we haven't really talked about it, but Cortana is a big part of this, right? Yeah. And she's with you throughout most of the game. until you get to the library, which was something, you know, where she's essentially in the computer at the end of assault in the control room, I believe it is. And so during those initial couple, or 343 Guilty Spark in the library, she's not with you, but then she's back with you in two betrayals.

And now everything's kind of changed and you're discovering the nature of what Halo actually is. And it really sets up a pretty cool narrative hook there. though they continue with the sort of narrative hooks in Keys which is the penultimate level which is a truth and reconciliation again basically but with many many times more enemies in there and that introduces I believe the idea of the the flood grave mine which I don't think they really actually pay off until payload two which quite a lot later even that's kind of question yeah to be really pay it off if even then yeah if even then but you know

had to finish the fight. But, yeah, I don't have a huge amount to say about Keyes personally, because for me, really, by this point, the game is so confident in what it's doing that even to say it's just another level isn't really an insult, because it is a really fun level. It's a really difficult level that, as I mentioned, I was only really able to beat by manipulating the factions, which still feels quite unique in a lot. shooter and to put you in that same space that you've already been in but really ramp things up at the same time as being much more challenging it also makes you feel like you've come a long

way like you i've not you've not been there for a long time and you've learned how to deal with a lot of scenarios that you really didn't have to the first time i mean i think the first time you're in truth and reconciliation there really isn't that much more above the level of the standard sort of covenant and the grunts that you fight i think there i mean there's you know there's the uh the 200s basically but that's as crazy as it gets. And those are kind of, you know, isolated. Like you take out a bunch of enemies and then those guys bust into the space and it's just you and them. And I think you might even have some Marines alive with you still if you've been, you know, kind of good at covering them.

Whereas here, it's just like, here's everything. Have fun. Chaos. Yeah. And it works. It's an enormous fun. It's a really great, like, showcase for everything that you've learned up to this point. I mean, and that's where it gets into why the mission's called Keys, because you're essentially going.

back to try to rescue him. Yeah. And you fail at that. Yeah, spoilers. You don't manage that. Yeah, it's a made part of the... They clearly had watched the cut content from the

original alien where Ridley, Ripley has to kill Dallas. Oh, man. That's such a bummer. Okay, well, sorry to make you sad. Yeah, I'm really sad. Oh, it's such a shame.

I mean, I thought Alien was so clear cut. They'd get rid of this stupid alien and just have a great time. Nice. Now, what it's making me thunk of is when I watched Alien 3 in the opening of Alien 3, it's like, hey, you know those characters that you loved? Yeah. Sorry. We're just going to write them out with a computer screen.

Yeah, I mean, Alien, you know, that Alien ends with the main character just in her underwear singing. That's how it ends. That's the end of the whole franchise. Yes. It's not how this ended, though. No, sadly. Master Chief does not sing at the end of this game. He should.

Or just strip down to his underwear either. He should do that, too. you leave the helmet on that would be funny um the more the final stage yeah the final stage the more uh which takes place on the pillar of autumn uh this time obviously under enormous amount of duress but the thing that is most prominent about this stage that everyone remembers and loves is the fact that it ends with what has come to be known as the war hog rug well before you get to that i mean going through the pillar of autumn this time though it's all kind of in ruins crashed on the halo all the metal is charred the powers off like it has a very different feel that's

more terrifying than in the original stage when it's yeah i mean parts of the stage are just straight up broken so it becomes like platforming challenges and really like you have to make more effort to navigate the environment than you did you know the first time through and then there's that part where you're essentially having to throw explosives down into those uh whatever you want to call them to blow up the level blow up the ship because what you've decided to do is to set the ship

to explode and take out the halo I remember getting stuck there for the ages because I couldn't figure out what the game really wanted me to do even though I think it directly tells you I somehow I just didn't miss it

but after you do that that's where you get to what you were just about to talk about the coolest thing in the world the Warhog run my goodness yeah it's the escape sequence from Super Metroid

if Sabas had a car basically yeah Pretty much, yes. It's very satisfying. It really is. It's a lot of fun. I would say it's challenging.

It's a nice bit of sort of trickery because I don't think, maybe I'm misremembering this, but I don't think realistically you're going to be running out of time doing that. The way that they put so many different obstacles in your path to create the stress that you might run out of time, I think is a very beautiful set piece. I think that the one in Halo 3 is cooler, but we're not talking about Halo. to me it always felt like a hydra thunder map or something you know or it's just like stuff's exploding everywhere and you're just ramping off things and it's just it's completely craziness and

it's great yeah unless you're playing you know on the highest difficulty level it's pretty difficult to actually fail the wardhog run yeah so it's um it's very just kind of this you know almost cinematic experience where everything is exploding around you but you're going to get out safely but i feel like this was something that video games mimicked enthusiastically in the coming years and often to their detriment. Like, I'm trying to think, I think it was the Thief reboot for PS4 and Xbox One, where there's like a scene where you're, I did, I reviewed it. You're the guy.

I'm the guy. It was okay. I also played it. But there was a scene where you're like doing this run along a rooftop. And it's really easy to die, to fail, because of just like things that you didn't see and couldn't predict and aren't telegraphed very well. And that's not enjoyable. I don't like that. I think the Tomb Raider games have done that too.

Maybe it's a square. A lot of games try to do this. I didn't get what made it so fun. Which is that it's basically just like, you know, as Stewart would say, a victory lap. It's kind of like you beat the game. Here's some cool explosions for you to drive. through on your way to the ending credits. Well, absolutely.

Boss music plays in the background. That's superb, and just a brilliantly-paced campaign in general, I would say, and still, to me, one of the absolute top-tier first-person shooter campaigns I've ever played. It still holds up just as fun today as it was at the time of release, I feel. Of the halos I've played, I still probably rank it up there. I mean, I loved Halo 3, but I honestly think I rank one over it in terms of campaign. I mean, for me, ODST is top tier, just because it... It kind of takes away some of your strength and it makes you more vulnerable.

And it also was the first to really, really embrace co-op play. And it's excellent. I also really like the structure of it, too. Yeah, the original Halo is up there. If only because of the pistol. And I got to say, playing through this campaign and co-op, I did that not so long ago with my son, who's a bit younger. but, you know, Halo is relatively safe, I think. And we had an absolute blast playing through the game.

It's just a wonderful moment. I'm glad your son can enjoy boomer shooters. Well, you know. The thing that makes playing Halo, if you, I guess we'll have to talk about the Master Sheave collection later, but playing through it that in co-op, that's extremely good now. Yeah. They've treated this series extremely well, ultimately, I would say. Yeah, when Master Chief Collection came out, it had some issues.

Yeah, but it's a good place now. Yeah, they have supported it very gamely, I would say. We haven't talked about the, sorry, what were you saying, John? I wanted to talk a little bit about the visuals. Yes, I was going to say, we haven't discussed the way, the sort of aesthetics of this game or the tech behind this game at all. We don't need to go all digital foundry here, but, you know, basically, you know, one of the big selling points of the Xbox was that it was was the most powerful console at the time. And this game really showcased a lot of what was possible.

And in fact, this is one of the first games to really make use of programmable pixel shaders and a lot of per pixel lighting. Like this stuff was not even really common or it was super new in the PC space as well. And most games didn't offer support for this yet. And so Halo had things like, you know, bump mapping everywhere.

Like we're talking about going into the truth and reconciliation. I mean, I don't know about you guys, But for me, I was always enamored with the floor textures and, like, everything there. It had this, like, depth and realism to it that was just sort of unprecedented. And just the way, like, your flashlight, the per pixel flashlight beam would sort of interact with the environment and shine off of these metal surfaces. When you shine directly at the wall, it almost blinds you in an interesting way. And all of that was done with, like, these massive maps, detailed textures, the water effects.

you'd have the crepuscular rays of the sun piercing through the pine trees in that first stage that was awesome it had advanced physics simulation they used the hard drive to allow these huge levels so you'd have an initial load when you start

a map and then you're just kind of in they have these little mini loading points so you'd walk through like a tunnel or something and get to the next area but it was all very seamless in a way that I don't think would have been possible on the other consoles of that time no And on top of all that, Xbox also offered Dolby Digital 5.1.

So this game had surround sound. Yeah, and you'd want it for that soundtrack as well. And yeah, hearing that for the first time with the soundtrack and everything around you, I mean, it really did feel like a top class, like audio visual presentation. That was really, really impressive, I'd say. We should discuss as well, because I'm going to, you know, hand on heart, I did not really play this game in multiplayer at the time. I did a bit in split screen, but I thought, I, yeah, because I thought this was one of

the earliest Xbox live games, but no, that was in fact, Halo 2. I was wrong, but it did have support for online, did it not in some, through some. So, okay. So Halo, it actually had land support. Yeah. So you could essentially network together. four Xboxes and play them. So if you had like four TVs, four Xboxes, you can link them all together.

And each Xbox could support four players in split screen. Wow. A total of 16 people playing the game. But early on in the life of the Xbox, some people developed, I think it was called XB Connect. And essentially it was like a service that allowed you to sort of create like a virtual land and you would connect your Xbox through the internet. Oh, wow.

So it was basically a way to do online multiplayer on the Xbox before Xbox Live was even a thing. And that's not to be confused. And I did do that at the time. Yeah. No. Not to be confused with the Xbox Kinnacht, which is a different thing. No, no, no. And it's not an official thing, that's for sure.

Okay. But the thing is, is like, so I'm not really a big multiplayer guy these days, but Halo is just such an exceptionally well-made game. I mean, for all the reasons of the single-player campaign. as well. Just the core mechanics were very satisfying. And especially in multiplayer, there was that rock paper scissors sort of designed to the weapons that you could really learn how to utilize each one to take out people. And it was never about how fast can you aim and how quickly can you take somebody out. Like the shield plus the health bar meant that it actually required a lot more strategy. And the maps also kind of rewarded this in a fun way. Like I remember in, uh,

One of the maps, there's like this huge drop-off where there's like three pillars suspended over water, and the water itself, if you fall down there, you're dead. And there's a high ledge. And Inhaler 1, if you fall too far, you take fall damage and you die. So if you drop down from the upper area, you normally die, except for that there's an overshield there. And if you get the overshield, when you first collect the overshield for the first second or two, you're invincible. So I would often use the trick of basically jump off the lid. land on the over shield and you're invincible and either somebody would follow you and die or well you got the over shield and now you can basically fight back against whatever they have and

almost assuredly win there was a ton of this stuff throughout there and just learning all these tricks and playing all these maps was something uh it also had like capture the flag and had the ability to customize your game type like you could set very special conditions and very specific weapons and objects and basically make and name all these custom game types. Yeah. And we got so into this back in college that we had like some of these crazy Haler nights where we would have the whole auditorium sort of like rented out for a night, so to speak.

And we have upwards of like eight Xboxes. So it was like, you know, four and four. And they're doing their own games. And we'd have like VHS recorders hooked up to them and capturing all the highlights. Oh, wow. Go through these big tournaments and everything. And it was just, it was really fun. It was really, really good.

Would this be one of the very last gasps for that kind of split screen play? I know. That's the thing, right? It's like, I feel like after that point, the rise of online play kind of killed that. Because all I can just weren't into it. All I can think of is ties for this too, but that didn't actually sell brilliantly if memory serves. It's very fondly remembered, but it didn't have the attachment rate that Halo did, which I think was something like 50% of all Xbox owners at the very released in this game.

And that's the, so that's, yeah, I always lament that actually, because I really feel like there is something to this split screen local play that you just don't get playing online. Oh, I love split screen. That's one of my absolute favorite things to do is play local, uh, co-op. It's the best. I love it. So, yeah, I mean, it's fair to say that HALO multiplayer was a huge part of that game. But it's changed so much, and you look at what HALO multiplayer is now.

it's pretty different, especially since 3-4-3 took it over. And, you know, they've got to modernize it. I get it. But, you know, there's definitely something. There's a purity to the original Halo that I really miss. When they made the Master Chief Collection, they ported the Halo multiplayer online. Am I wrong? They actually didn't put that online, didn't they?

Because in the anniversary version, it was Reaches multiplayer, I believe, that they included. Yeah. weird decision to be honest but I'm glad that they've finally brought it back so in the Masterchief collection can you still do that kind of split screen obviously you can't you probably can't do land anymore but would you still be able to get that

splits I know you can play in co-op but you can still do split screen multiplayer thankfully that's pretty sweet the land stuff I don't think land is in there anymore that's a bummer well I mean it makes sense in a weird way but they've kind of moved away from that but yeah and I call we should in the notes and mentions

we should talk about the PC version quickly. So I guess technically this is the PC and Mac version, as Jeremy knows. But this one was done by Gearbox Software, which is kind of... They were weird, like at the time, like they had been known for making the first ad-on pack for Half-Life, actually both of them. Opposing forces and Blue Shift as well. So I'm not sure how that deal happened, but they did an all-right

job, but there's a lot of visual issues because PCs of that era were not like not all of them could support the type of visuals that the Xbox had and so there was weird modes to allow for like fixed function shading which got rid of all like

the per pixel stuff and even at its best it never looked quite the same as the PC or sorry as the Xbox original and that ended up becoming a problem because all future versions for a while were inflicted with some of the limitations of this version.

Yeah. Did the PC port have online? I think it did. Yeah, I would say, I'd be surprised if it didn't. I feel like I should be able to answer this, but since I don't like other people or playing video games with them, I unfortunately cannot. But I will say that, you know, to

John's point about systems not really being able to recreate a lot of the same effects as the Xbox at the time, my first Halo experience was playing on a laptop. It was a, you know, a, I guess they were called Power Books at that point still. It was very beefy, but still, I'm sure that was not the way God intended.

That's interesting then. Wow. I think we have sort of touched on them, but I think we should wrap up by talking about the current or the anniversary release and the Master Chief Collection to extent. I think it's important people know how you can play these games now and if they are necessarily the best way to play these games. I played Halo anniversary, which came out. I'm going to say, well, it was 10 years after, so it was 2011. Yeah, I think that's right. I played this version first, and I very quickly, even though I wasn't familiar with the original Halo,

because you can hit a button to switch from the new graphics, the old ones. I noted very quickly that the new graphics are quite garish in places. They're almost over-designed. They're too colourful. When the original game had this kind of minimalist, like, kind of creepy alien look to it, which always felt desolate in places. But it worked. I agree

with you. This is something I never liked the anniversary graphics for Halo 1. They just don't look right. It doesn't capture the look. Playing the silent cartographer on Halo anniversary is like going on vacation to like the Bahamas

or something. It's ridiculous. They've made it into like this blue, beamy blue, beautiful sunny place and it doesn't feel particularly war-torn in the slightest. But there's something, I actually think there's a purity to the colors of original Halo, like a photographer, it's not blasting with color, but like the combination of the blue sky against the water, it almost feels like going outside on a cool fall morning

with a bit of dew on the grass. There's an atmosphere to it. And I feel like it's just gone in the anniversary one. And it feels, it feels like they really didn't understand the art direction. and you see this right away like if you look at the very first stage of the game when you're on the pillar of autumn

when you play with the original visuals like there's there's areas that are completely like bathed in shadow it's very dark and eerie looking you switch to the new graphics and it's completely bright and fully lit it looks so different that it just feels like all the

the atmosphere is sucked right out of it yeah it's like halo on the dunce floor it's really weird I didn't really know why they did it that way. I mean, this is kind of a universal problem with remakes, remasters, you know, attempts to enhance games. I think there's an idea that if we make everything brighter, shinier, it looks better. It's more vivid. It's more, you know, visceral or whatever.

But that's not always the case. I mean, you know, they just showed off, Rockstar just showed off screens yesterday of Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas. the new remasters. And that, it definitely misses something. It's lacking something. Everything, like the characters look like they're out of a DreamWorks cartoon. Yes. You know, it just doesn't quite look right.

I think I saw Caroline Petty talking about how she missed the colors, the saturated oranges of the original San Andreas, the sky. Because it really captured, it was really redolent of, you know, what it was like in L.A. at the time in the 90s. when the game was set, just so smog enshrouded and so polluted. And they've kind of taken that away. And now it's more like today's L.A., where it's cleaner and, you know, it's prettier and the skies are bluer, which, you know, good for L.A., but it's, it kind of misses something about the originals. And that's, it's actually something that, you know, I've heard complaints going back to the, like the VGA ports of Monkey Island, Escape for Monkey Island, or Secret of Monkey Island. or secret of Monkey Island, the artist whose name, unfortunately, just totally escapes me at the moment, who created the original EGA graphics was like, you know, I made these graphics in the most minimal way possible.

Because I had to. I had like eight colors to work with. So every pixel counted and was really designed to create contours and shapes with, you know, colors that weren't actually right in the environment. but when they're together, it works out. But, you know, when they remade that, when their artists took that and remade it for higher resolution systems and had, you know, 256 colors to work with, a lot of that was kind of lost and you lose that abstraction that I was working with.

And, you know, it looks nice, but that's not how I was working. That's not what I was creating. And so I think that's just something that is probably inevitable with Master Chief Collection. And as someone who doesn't play multiplayer, I was okay with Master Chief Collection from the start. I was like, hey, it's the Halo games I like. That's how I felt too. They have sharper graphics now if I want and I can also go back to the really

kind of smeary pushing the system too hard visuals of Halo 2 if I want. Yeah, plus the in the Master Chief Collection in particular, there are so many modifiers and ways to change the game up or make it different or more interesting. I think that that in its state that it's in now is pretty much

a gold standard for compilations. I agree. I would also say that they did a much better job with Halo 2 anniversary The visuals and that actually look great. So I feel like they did learn something from this original one. But yeah, I mean, this original 360 version, though, of anniversary, the one thing it had that was not brought to Master Chief Collection, it supported 3D. Yes. Now, you remember that was a thing for a bit, 3D TVs, and it is no longer a thing.

But around the time this came out, I had actually purchased, this is, it's crazy. It's a headset. It looks like a VR. headset, but it's not. It's from Sony. It's the HMZT1, and it's a head-mounted display that you wear, and it presents two OLED screens, one for each eye. It was basically made for 3D viewing, or 2D, if you want, and it gives you the impression of a huge screen. And I actually did play a lot of Halo anniversary in this mode, because this is before VR was really a thing again, and it just had the sense of scale that was just awesome. I really enjoyed playing through

it in 3D via that headset but I'd imagine most people did not experience it in 3D Is it worth mentioning that this I believe this also had connect support so you could wang your arm forward to throw a grenade Oh my gosh That's right

Connect stuff Yeah You know I've played I've played one Connect game that I liked And it was the Gunstringer Which was Twisted Pixels puppet based game Simply because all you did was pretend You were manipulating a puppet

It worked very well I thought But yeah actually work less set about connect the better to be honest but so we've we've keep mentioning the master chief collection that was obviously i think it was 2014 that that came out it was xbox one shortly after the xbox one wasn't it yeah it was a year after the launch of xbox one i believe and it was notorious for launching in a really bad state like it had a lot of technical problems uh the online was basically broken i mean there was so many issues with it but i would say halo one specifically managed to get through relatively unscathed.

Like it was pretty good even from the start. And that is a proper full-hd, 60 French per second of each game. It is, and now it's 4K. Yes, to 120. I was just playing it today at 4K-120. That's spectacular. Nice. They actually didn't, when that first launched, and for most of the time,

literally until this year, the visuals were still based on that original PC release. So there was a lot of things that didn't look right. I think the example that's kind of the big go-to is in assault on the control room, in the original form, you look up out of that valley and you sort of see this thick white clouds and fog that gives you the impression that it just extends way above where you can see. But on the PC version and every other version, essentially, you'd see the fog and then after a certain point, it just stops and it's just stark black. It looked completely broken and they just left it that way. And there was a ton of visual bugs like that throughout the game. And all of those things were present in the Master Chief Collection until this year. They actually went back.

They cared enough to go back and change that. They finally went back and they fixed all of those problems. That's fantastic. And now it's, they did it. It's great. It looks awesome. All the visual glitches are gone. It runs like a dream.

I mean, it's the best way to play Halo 1. I think, I mean, for the Master Chief Collection, I know when it got ported to BC, I know that I've seen it for say, on Steam for something like £8, which is the most ridiculous value I've ever seen, I think, for almost anything, considering that that includes ODSTN reach as well now. So if there's a series that's been treated better ultimately in terms of its legacy, than Halo, I'd like you to point it out to me, to be honest. I mean, they could have abandoned it after that initial launch, right?

Because it wasn't in great shape. And I think a lot of companies might have done that. So I really have to commend them for sticking with it, even now. Like, it launched for Xbox 1, but now it's got full native Series X and Series S support and all those new fixes and changes. It's, and they've added entire new games to it. So pick up Halo 1 today, press the back key to turn off the anniversary visuals and have a blast. It's still, it's still absolutely excellent.

And is there anything else anyone wants to add about Halo before we wrap things up? I think it's good and I like it. Interesting. I think it just, it makes me realize how much I miss classic bungee games. I mean, I've had some enjoyment with destiny. But I think fundamentally that shift to online kind of limited it to some degree. And I'm just, I'm not there anymore with it. The strength of the gunplay was carried over, but the structure of destiny is a bit much for me, I think.

Yeah, the structure takes it down because everything else about it is really well done. But replaying Halo 1 again, it really takes you back and realizes, you realize just how good the game is at its core. and it's, I think it holds up alongside many other seminal console gaming classics. I think it's pretty much ever green, honestly. I think it's one of the best console FPSs ever, period, and it will remain that way. It will remain that way. And on that note, I think this has been a very thorough digging into Halo. I think we've done a good job, and we should give ourselves a little warm pat on the back there.

Just going to, yeah, feels nice. So, John, if I may ask, where can people find you and your work on? this vast tapestry of the internet. I'm over on Twitter at Dark1X, and you can find me at YouTube.com slash digital foundry or Eurogamer.net slash digital foundry, where we're doing all kinds of good stuff. We also have a Patreon now,

which helps fund the DF Retro series, which I've been doing more and more of lately again. So I'm very happy to be doing that. And that's, yeah, so it's a mix of tech and old games. and yep and that's all good stuff I'm a fan of digital foundry as well and DF Retro Jeremy I'm not sure if this has come up before

but where can people find you on the internet Oh geez I don't really do that much these days You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and sometimes I post stuff to YouTube under my own name Jeremy Parrish You know I'm still moonlighting

at limited run games Occasionally they let me do stuff there And I've been on a few retronauts episodes lately So you can poke around the back catalogue and see if you hear me there. But that's that's pretty much it. You know, I'm kind of keeping a low profile. Just a real sparse, like, sprinkling of occasional goods. Basically, yeah.

Yeah. As for me, you can find me on Twitter as Tupacabra being extremely aggressive and rude. Or you can read in my comic, Maryhill at Maryhillcom. But it has nothing to do with video games at all. As for Retronauts, it's a podcast that is completely patron. and funded. Thanks very much. Thanks very much. You can go to patreon.com slash retro-narts and stand up there for $5 a month and you will receive two or three full-length Patreon

exclusive episodes per month. And that's the only place you're going to find those episodes. You know, you're going to get the full experience there. You're going to get early access to the weekly episodes. And you're also going to get access to the Discord, which is full of people who are currently arguing about California, I believe. So that's good. And columns.

Don't forget the column. No, I had not. I was leaving them for the last and best. Last of all, you can get weekly, this week in retro columns from Diamond Flight, which are both in text prose form and also audio form, I mean, sort of

micro podcasts, and they are excellent, and I can't think of the, if there's anything else I should mention about the Patreon. So, again, yeah, thank you very much for listening to this Halo episode of Retronauts and until there'll be another episode coming along very soon.

be just as good, if not better. And I don't know what it's going to be about. Do we know what's coming up next? Next on the schedule, oh, it looks like a Bob episode. I don't want to spoil a surprise. It's a patron exclusive and it's going to be good. My next episode is Pickman, which

got a shout out this episode. So there's continuity. You can see why I think Pickman is the perfect distillation of the RTS into console form. This is very good timing. So I recently bought Pikmin 2 for the Wii, and I'm going to play it to death.

It's a fine game. You'll enjoy it. I also bought Pikmin 3 for the Wii U years ago, and I've never even put the disc in. Oh, that's so good. I know. I want to play it. Is it as good as... Get on that.

It's phenomenal. You should play it. Okay. And if we can take one thing away from this episode, it's that I should play Pikmin 3. And I will. So thanks very much, and see you next episode. Oh! Thank you.