Today’s game is Halo Reach. I bought a friend a copy of the game while it’s on sale so he could join us for the campaign. So now we have a full 8 person roster for the campaign to pick from.

I’ve already talked about this game a lot, and I had a suggestion from someone to talk about things besides mechanics. And so far I don’t believe I’ve talked about the Art, both music and the design. So i chose to focus on that.

I’m a big fan of the art style with its soft and almost muted feel. It helps set it apart from Halo CE-3. The muted tone also really helps set the tone. It feels less bombastic than something like what Halo 3 is.

With Nightfall especially it makes everything kind of have this nice cool and dark tone while still being playable and not abhorrently dark. Plus i love the way things like the Jackal’s shield have a kind of soft glow to them.

Halo’s music is amazing too. It’s the first time a video game made me go “wow. This doesn’t feel like a side piece to a video game. It feels like its own thing”. It really makes it feel unique. Plus the way it’s not constantly playing helps keep it from getting old. Winter Contingency alone with the opening motif has definitely cemented it for me as one of my favorites.

Finally, I didn’t want to end off without talking a little about me messing around with my friends. This is Halo after all.

The entirety of the thing we kept killing eachother. It started when I got in a ghost and gut blown up by my friend who stole the wraith. In retaliation I air striked him and took the tank out. Our other friend joined in by running me down with a Ghost. This kept going until we quit and ended with a well placed sniper shot to a Forklift that killed all of us.

We (hopefully) will play some more tomorrow. I know I’ve played Reach a bunch but it’s one of my favorites and I love playing it. I do hope this playthrough doesn’t fall in the bin with the other games I’ve started and dropped.