Combat (Re)Evolved

So let me tell you a story... about Halo. I've been a fanatic of the game for a long time. I remember reading about the game when I was a freshman in high school in videogame magazines, back when it was only going to be on Macintosh systems. After seeing the first videos of the game in action at some Mac conference years ago, I was damn near ready to buy a Mac.

Then I had the pleasure of seeing the game in action at E3 my sophomore year. I had to wait in line for like two hours to get into a dark room to watch some guy play the game on a huge screen in front of myself and a bunch of other nerds. He showed off all kinds of cool stuff, all while I sat there and drooled.

A year later on my second trip to E3, Microsoft had bought Bungie and made Halo an Xbox-only title. A long way from being a Mac-only game, for sure. Being the Halo fanatic I was, I just had to get my picture taken with a giant Master Chief statue. What a glorious day that was.

The original Halo did quite a number on my free time when it came out a few months later. My friends and I spent plenty of time lugging around Xboxes and TVs to get massive LAN games going on. I fondly remember the days with some CTF on Bloodgulch, or pistols and shotguns playing Slayer on Hang 'Em High.

Things only got worse when the XBConnect software came out, making it so that you could play Halo online. It tricked your Xbox into thinking it was playing a LAN game when, in fact, it was over the Internet. Sure, it was laggy, but it was Halo online. Can't beat that.

So I subscribed to Xbox Live last year expecting Halo 2 to come out around Christmas time... but no luck. I invested in a few Xbox Live games to warrant my purchase, but never really got into the whole Xbox Live community thing. I was just more of a casual Xbox online gamer.

So here we are a year later, and the news has just broken that the much anticipated Halo 2 has gone gold and will meet its launch date of November 9th. Now I know I'm not the only Halo fanatic around here, as I'm sure many people reading this will spend a majority of their free time post-November 9th playing it. I also know that the Xbox Live community will undoubtedly grow exponentially as a result of the game's release.

As a result, I've made my gamertag publicly available, in anticipation of Halo 2, as you can see on the right side of the page. It also sports a link to a list of Live-compatible games that I own and currently play online. I've decided it's time to get the most out of my investment into Xbox Live, so for anyone reading who's got Live and wants to play some games, feel free to send a friend request to me.

My latest Xbox Live obsession has been Star Wars Battlefront, which came out a few weeks ago. While not as polished as other similar titles (like UT2K4), it does offer massive online combat in the Star Wars universe, which is enough to get a nerd like me all excited. I tell ya, there's nothing like trapping an AT-AT in the tow cables of a snowspeeder, all online.

And it will suffice in the meantime, at least until the glory of Halo 2 graces all of us with its presence.