LogFAQs > #959491670

13. Halo 2 (Xbox, 2004)


For the longest time, it felt like the majority of FPSs specialized in either single player or multiplayer, and the ones that attempted to do both stumbled in one or even both endeavors. Then in November of 2001, Halo: Combat Evolved came out and delivered on both ends, and the series has largely upheld that standard for nearly 20 years. I could have easily included 3, 3:ODST, and Combat Evolved on my list, but 2 and 4 are to me the clear best from one of gamings finest franchises.

I always felt that Halo 2 is what kick-started online console gaming to what it is today. It may have started with the Dreamcast several years earlier, but it wasnt until a centralized service like Xbox Live in 2002 that it became more prevalent and utilized, with Halo 2 causing an explosion of more than a million account creations around the time that it launched. I was one of them, and Halo 2 was the definitive game of my high school years.

There was a tight knit group of five of us in high school who would play Halo 2 together almost daily. They all lived close to our high school, but I lived 15 minutes out or so. Still, that didnt stop us from hanging out for a weekend seemingly every month where one night we would basically play Halo 2 LAN and pull an all-nighter on Friday or Saturday. It was pretty chaotic since usually these included somewhere between 10-20 people playing, and a few moms/sisters/girlfriends that I feel bad were subjected to our nonsense. There was little structure to what we did, and we constantly had people leaving one room to speak to people in other rooms. Room and controller swapping happened dozens of times in a single day. Im pretty sure that most of my Xbox controllers werent originally mine. The core of our group was excellent. I jokingly created a clan called the Sexy Kyle Clan as a freshman. They reluctantly joined, and I remember that we once held a matching winning streak in the upper 20s one weekend.

Back then, custom games were so prevalent and everyone had a mic. I dont even know how all these random people became acquainted with each other, but I cant remember a single time where these mega 16-player custom games where we didnt all laugh and get along. For having played this for more than 1000 hours and the technical issues that Halo 2 online was prone to having, thats quite the miracle. Thinking about this game just makes me extremely nostalgic about the memories that I shared with strangers and friends, and for the period in my life that this occurred.

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KCF can't actually be a real person but he is - greengravy
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