Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Having enjoyed Halo 1 and 2 on my PC it has long been my desire to find a way to play the Xbox exclusive remainder of the series. The only question was whether emulation would provide a route before the price of an Xbox 360 console itself fell below my threshold of pain. Well it turns out that emulation loses this time because this weekend I realised I could pick up an Xbox 360 console and a few games for around €50. Even if I do no more than play the few Halo Titles (3, 4, ODST and Reach) I will consider this a reasonable investment. I was actually offered a console for €35 but on investigation it was a version without hard disk so I opted to pay an extra €15 for a Xbox 360 "Slim" with  250Gb hard disk. We already own a Wii and a PS3 so that now makes a full house of seventh generation consoles for us. I bought the PS 3 a couple of years ago hoping to play a few exclusives but in the end I only finished "The Last of Us"(excellent game). The PS3 itself is still used...

Halo Single Player Version 3 (SPV3) is a rather wonderful fan made re-imagination of the original Halo Combat evolved. The mod is free but does require a valid key code from an original game to install. Sadly only the first two Halo shooters made it to the PC along with a more recent RTS game called Halo Wars but I still love the series. SPV3 replicates all of the missions of the original game and extends them with extra sections, extra enemies,  new weapons, new vehicles and new abilities. Did I mention the extra enemies? There are a lot of new enemies.  Happily they game supplies you with a lot of extra firepower to deal with these enhanced threats. The mod is incredibly polished and feels like a professional game. If you are interested you can grab the latest version from this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/halospv3/

The iconic Halo series has had a poor relationship with the PC. Halo 2 didn't come out for PC until two full years after the Xbox 2006 release and even then it was artificially restricted to those who had upgraded to Microsoft's unpopular Vista operating system. If all that wasn't enough to annoy PC gamers the port was badly optimised and buggy. The game has never been made available as a digital download so it has pretty much been forgotten by the PC community. Yet Halo 2 remains an important milestone in gaming history and I have long intended to play it so I finally bit the bullet last week and did so. The original Halo (Combat Evolved) was important because it showed that first person shooters could work well on consoles and introduced a number of innovations that have become standard to this day (the game pad control scheme, the two weapon carry limit and the recharging health/shield scheme). Halo 2 introduced on-line multi-player with automatic matchmaking  and its ...