Collection essentials #582 & #583: Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox) and Halo 2 (Xbox)

Here are, unequivocally, the most successful iconic games on the original Xbox. Probably no other games at any time were ever more closely associated with the Xbox brand than the Halo games in their early days. The original Halo was a launch title, and was most definitely the game that truly put Xbox on the map.

The Halo games are first-person shooters. They were far from the first games in the genre, or even the first successful FPS games on consoles (as opposed to PC). But they advanced the genre very significantly and set a new standard for what fans expected from a console FPS.

The first game’s story places you in control of Master Chief, the dude on the cover who wears a green suit. He fights in a war against a dangerous legion of aliens known as the Covenant. The good guys discover a very large, mysterious, inhabitable ring-shaped entity known as Halo, which is where the series gets its name. 

I’m not going to talk any more about the story, because the single-player campaign is not the main reason why most people play these games. The bread and butter of Halo by far is the multiplayer. With a variety of maps, weapons, polished gameplay, compatibility with the Xbox system link for large local parties and then online play for the second game, Halo is something you play to try and shoot down friends and strangers. The main story does also include two-player cooperative play, so even the main story implements multiplayer. 

One of the most notable things Halo did that was different at the time was give the player a few different moves they could perform at any given time. You can shoot your gun, perform a melee attack and throw a grenade. Other FPS games required players to switch to a melee attack or grenade weapon as completely separate attack modes, so using those attacks right in the middle of a shootout wasn’t very practical. Halo also gives players the ability to jump which was not common at the time, allowing for more evasive tactics and mobility. There are vehicles players can ride too, and in team matches one player can get in a vehicle to drive while the other operates a weapon. This wasn’t the first FPS game to use both analog sticks, but it really cemented it as a genre standard. Players can move around with the left analog stick, while independently adjusting their first-person view with the right analog stick. Players can also press down the right analog stick with certain weapons to “zoom in” for long-distance shots, most notable with the sniper rifle.

I can’t stress enough how inescapable Halo was in the gaming world back in the early 2000s. Perhaps because of its multiplayer focus, it was one of the most omnipresent, widely-talked-about and widely-revered games around. Xbox may have sold far fewer units than PS2, but even people who didn’t own an Xbox could get acquainted with Halo by playing with friends. It seemed like a video game juggernaut. 

Truthfully, though, I was never at any time the BIGGEST fan of Halo. It turns out that I’m not all that into FPS games in general, so that’s probably the main reason why. It’s also a game that you get the most enjoyment out of when you’re really good at it, and my Halo skills were always “okay at best” and I rarely won matches. 

I first played Halo at my cousin Kevin and Peter’s house, as they’re the ones who introduced me to Xbox in general. Peter especially went on to become a huge fan of the Halo franchise for many years and was very good at it. I played it a lot with them…but wasn’t really good enough to truly compete. They weren’t the only people I knew who had the game, and I routinely heard various people rave about it.

Nearly two years after debuting along with the Xbox, the first Halo game got a spruced-up PC release which contained some new content as well as online play. I downloaded the demo of the PC version back in the day, which was limited to only one map for online multiplayer without the ability to customize settings. This version added a powerful spaceship vehicle called the Banshee which a lot of players didn’t like. I have to confess that, erm…one of the meaner things I’ve ever done in my life was, just for fun, going into servers where people explicitly said not to use banshees, and disobeying just to be amused at how mad they’d get. I eventually did get the full proper PC version of Halo, but I didn’t keep it for very long as I wasn’t really good enough to compete with people online and the game didn’t hold my interest very long.

I had some fun playing the Halo games and thought they were perfectly fine, but I did think they were overrated. I got a little tired of how incessantly the games got praised as the best games ever. Another thing I’m not really proud of was that I would sometimes be annoying towards people online, preaching to them that the games are overrated, rather than let them have their fun and express their opinion. I even got into an argument with my cousin Josh on an online blog post of mine about it that I got heated up over. I was a young and dumb teenager back then.

When Halo 2 came out, I remember my mom buying it for me because she knew it was something my siblings and cousins wanted to play together, which was pretty cool. While I maintained my “overrated” stance, I did enjoy playing it with family members who weren’t as good at the game as me, and I dabbled in the campaign but never finished it.

Nowadays, that snobby attitude I had towards Halo is long gone. I feel more nostalgia than those types of feelings, as these games to me are iconic fixtures of a past era of gaming that I grew up with. These games aren’t among my all-time favorites to play by any means, but I still respect them for what they meant for gaming in their day. To own the original Xbox without Halo and Halo 2 as a collector, to me, would feel downright sacreligious. If the original Xbox is an essential in my collection, so are the first two Halo games, period.