- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Halo 2, released on November 9th, 2004, started one of my most fond experiences with gaming. The online experience was breathtaking, and will live on as memories for the rest of my life. As I retire from Halo 2 with over 70,000 kills and over 8500 games played, I’d like to look back all the awesome and not-so-awesome times I and many others have had with Halo2.
I remember back when every other game someone used some type of network manipulation – there was standby when you were host and secondary standby when you weren’t host. Both sucked, I remember cussing out every stupid cheater I ended up facing against. And even back then there was modding, though it didn’t really become widespread until later in Halo 2’s life. Some of the mods in the game were cool, until modders started spawn killing the entire round. Modding is non-existent now (other than the few who still mod in custom matches), since all the 2 month free trials on the Original Xbox have expired. But it sure was funny, but damn, we had to go through a lot of -blam!-. Another exploit that was fun was grabbing the flag through walls.
I also remember back when meleeing someone took like six hits, and was basically not used unless you had a sword or bruteshot. The SMG combos were actually useful back then, and the pistols weren’t toned down. Plasma grenades also took forever to explode as well. Remember when you could bounce the flag off the conveyer belts on Colossus and score a flag in less than a minute? How about wondering why the -blam!- the flag never returned? I also remember sudden death in “arm the bomb” games where people decided to be “funny” and hide the bomb, making the match last a lot longer than it should have. Also, I loved some of the old match making games like Rumble Hardcore, Team Action Sack (Team Showers FTW!!), and the oh-so-missed Clan battles.
The custom matches were fun too! Zombies? How about KoTH on Midship with overshields and swords? Team fiesta on Lockout with 16 players? Maxing out the scoreboard on never-ending games? Warthog wars? Tremors? All those other times where everyone was just messing around on any-given-map? Too many good times.
Now that Halo 3 is coming out, most will migrate over to it. But that’s ok, as it’ll always live on in my head as one of the most fun online games of all time. Hopefully I’ll have more good times on Halo 3, with less cheating this time around. Something tells me there are too many weapons in Halo 3, but I’ll save my final comments until I actually play the game. I’m going at midnight tonight to pick up my copy of Halo 3, even though my 360 is still at the repair center. My buddies and I are going to be playing all night, starting with campaign and then right after hopping into multi-player.
And for everyone else, post your good memories of Halo 2 online, and I hope to see you guys on Halo 3!