A belated update here, due to the fact that I've been playing games instead of posting. A lot of games in fact... well, at lot of Halo games to be more specific. I finished up both Halo 2 & Halo 3 and started getting my feet wet with the ODST remaster. Looks like I'm finally getting my money's worth out of the Master Chief Collection.
When it first debuted in 2004, I was utterly disappointed in Halo 2's campaign the first time. Everything about the campaign struck me as lackluster, and I haven't revisited it since.
11 years later, and remastered for modern consoles, I had a much better go of Master Chief's sophomore effort, but it still remains the low-light of his military career in my opinion. The extra cutscenes were nice, along with the updated visuals but I still have no idea why the plant from Little Shop of Horrors is in this game, and what the hell it was up to.
I know the original Halo got a lot of flack for retreading areas, but I felt the pain more in Halo 2. While some levels may not have been retreads, I felt the game just dragged on and on. I eventually turned to just speedrunning the levels in an effort to get through them as quickly as possible.
I think the difficulty also hurt my enjoyment of the game. In my younger days, I preferred to play through games on their highest difficulty. I played Halo 2 on 'Heroic' and even that proved to be more frustrating than fun.
Halo 3 was a much better ride for me, and though it didn't get the remaster love of Halo 2, I had a really good time with it. I set the difficulty to 'Normal' and was able to plow through the game with no opposition or pain points. I can't put my finger on it specifically, but Halo 3 was a nice recovery for Chief after his stumbles with Halo 2.
After Halo 3, I kept the momentum going and dropped in as an Orbital Drop Shock Troopper, in ODST. Despite being vastly different from previous Halo titles, I really enjoyed ODST my first time around. Like Halo 3 though, I'm playing on 'normal' difficulty to minimize any aggravation and expedite my playthrough. . Though remastered, there is no option to switch back and forth from the old graphics to the new, which is something I found myself doing frequently in the Halo 1 & 2 remasters.
I also picked up a few cheap games this week - Alien Isolation used from Gamefly for $13 and Wolfenstein, The New Order from Microsoft Store for $16.
Good to be back playing games.
