You Can Go Home Again...

Halo Anniversary came out in November last year, and although I wanted it, I had limited funds and decided to place other games like Dark Souls higher on my list of priorities. My line of reasoning was that even though I'm a huge fan of all things Halo, I could put it off because it wasn't one of those games that all my other friends would be playing and talking about. (Ed.-I was right, by the way)

So here I am, about 2 months later and I am finally getting around to playing the remake of one of my favorite games of all-time. I say its one of my favorites of all-time without any hint of exaggeration or hyperbole. When the original Xbox was nearing launch in 2001, I wasn't really interested until I read EGM's review of Halo: Combat Evolved. I suddenly had to have that game. I talked with my father about it and we got an Xbox shortly afterward. I ended up buying the copy of Halo that day because I was so excited about it.

In the months that followed, I became an obsessive fan of Halo. I would discover a lot of tricks and exploits the game's campaign allowed, mostly on my own. My friends would soon learn that multiplayer was not fun with me, since I would dominate with the sniper rifle. This was my new favorite game, and I knew it like I had designed it myself.

So with that little bit of backstory out of the way, you'll understand how my expectations for Halo Anniversary could be different from those of the average gamer. If you hadn't played Halo back then and Anniversary was your first time through this installment's campaign, you could easily be fooled into thinking its not as good as the later games because of the things that are missing here. You can't jack vehicles from enemies, you can't dual-wield, you can't trade weapons with NPC's, and there aren't portable items and armor abilities. Sounds like a lot to have missing, doesn't it?

Honestly, I don't miss any of it because this campaign offers things that no other Halo game does, most importantly among them is freedom. Yes, freedom. There is a sandbox-like quality to the first Halo game that may be entirely by accident, or design, I'm not sure which. Let me give you an example:

''Assault on the Control Room'' is probably the most famous level in all of the Halo games. In the course of this level, you do everything Halo has to offer. You can snipe enemies from very far away, use rocket launchers to blow up enemy vehicles, sneak through indoor sections and assassinate sleeping Grunts, drive the ultra-powerful Scorpion tank, drive a fully staffed warthog, steal enemy Ghost vehicles, steal enemy Banshee vehicles, and escort about a dozen marines through a substantial amount of it all. It's a long list of things you get to do in this level, and that's a big part of why its so great.

Now among those things that I listed, a few of them depend entirely on your actions. Clubbing sleeping Grunts to death is the most obvious one that could be approached differently if you're trigger happy, but the enemy vehicles are a better example. There are two seperate locations I can think of where you can get a Banshee that you're not supposed to have. Or maybe you are? I don't know for sure. What I do know is that it can be easy to miss your chances to pilot them and you'll need certain weapons to make it happen.

The first chance involves a Banshee that is parked way up high, in a place where you're not supposed to see it. In fact, you'll need to reach another area that you're not supposed to be in before you can even get a glimpse of the Banshee. Once you're there though, you can use your rocket launcher to blow the vehicle off its perch and smile to yourself as it falls all the way down to your level. From there, its just a matter of getting in and enjoying the ability to fly pretty much anywhere in the level, which really seems to me like it was not planned for.

But that's what makes it so great! I used to love thinking to myself ''Boy, those Covenant are going to shit themselves when they suddenly see me fly in with their Banshee!''. Beyond the obvious combat perks, there were places you would never be able to reach without this vehicle that are suddenly now accessible. Want to fly down to the bottom of a pit that you'd normally take a bridge to cross? Go for it! Maybe there's nothing down there, but it's cool just to go because you can. There's even a perch several hundred feet high where you can park the Banshee and special music will play while the snow gently falls around you. It's one of those ''I'm on top of the world, so I'm just going to sit here for a minute and take it in'' moments.

And that's the kind of thing that didn't really happen so much in later Halo games. They were much more scripted and just didn't allow for as much tinkering. You could make the claim that Halo 2 required all kinds of tinkering and exploring then site the Scarab Gun as your example, but I'd argue that this would be the only real example. Halo 3 had players hunting down hidden skulls in remote locations as well, but things like invisible walls and glass ceilings prevented you from getting anywhere too removed from the main path. By contrast, Halo: CE had the beach level where you could jump from a warthog up to the top of the level and screw up all the scripted events by reaching places before you were supposed to be there. Then there was the swamp level where you could grenade jump off a pelican to reach the top of the level. Up there you'd find a lone marine, further adding to the game's mystique.

I suppose if you don't care about messing around with these things and you just want to focus on killing Covenant, then maybe a lot of what I'm describing is lost on you. But for me, messing around and exploring just seemed so compelling back then, and I'm very pleased to say that I'm just as compelled to do it all over again now.

Another part of why Halo CE will always have a leg up on its sequels is the mystery surrounding the Covenant. Now, most of the enemies speak proper English. In the case of Halo CE and Anniversary, only the Grunts speak English while the rest of them speak in alien tongues. I really prefer it this way as hearing an Elite say something unintelligible makes them much more fearsome than hearing them say something like ''You will be vanquished by my blade!''. Mystery is better.

So luckily for Halo Anniversary, none of this stuff has been changed. It's all exactly what Halo CE was 10 years ago, minus the multiplayer. While I realize that a lot of people would love to see an Xbox LIVE version of Halo CE's multiplayer, I understand 343's reluctance to fracture the player base for Halo Reach. I feel the main feature that this installment brings forward is actually an acceptable trade-off for the multiplayer. That main feature is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in a game.

Its likely that if you're reading this, you know all about the overhauled graphics and the ability to swap them out for the original graphics at will. I knew about it months before the game came out, as I'm sure everyone who had any interest in it did. Now that I have it and am able to do it myself, I must say that it completely blows me away. There is something really special at work here. Its like watching somebody who has grown old suddenly be given a new youthful body and they're brand new again. This is especially true for players who are intimately familiar with the game from 10 years ago.

Closing Thoughts

We've seen quite a few re-releases of classics come out that offer updated graphics or HD technology, but none of them have offered the immediate gratification that Halo Anniversary does and I think that may be why its so impressive to me. You're not playing through a level twice and then comparing old to new afterward, you're looking at both simultaneously. This feature alone would be a huge selling point for any game, but when you consider this is Halo: Combat Evolved, it makes me wonder what the hell I was thinking back in November when I decided I didn't need to have this game right way. I've been enjoying the process of falling back into old habits again like keeping all the marines alive in a level, not waking any sleeping Grunts, and all the other things I used to obsess over. Halo Anniversary will always be an essential piece of my gaming collection and I hope other developers take note and treat future classic releases with this kind of love and respect.