For the past five nights, we have had Halo LAN parties. Not Halo 3, not Halo Reach, not even Halo 2.
Halo: Combat Evolved.
The idea spawned while I was reminiscing about my first LAN game - I had ran a 100 foot cable from one room to another at my dad's house, and we played a 2v2 Capture The Flag match on Blood Gulch. As more people started picking up the Xbox/Halo combo, more system link matches started happening. Soon, they became a weekly activity. 4v4 matches on Blood Gulch, Slayer matches on Hang 'Em High, Oddball at Battle Creek...
When Halo 2 was released, these stopped. No one wanted to do them anymore. We had tried it once or twice, but we were just not into it. LAN parties ceased to exist by the third release. So what happened? What made Halo:CE so addictive compared to the other releases?
-Speed: Halo:CE is the slowest game in the series. Players run slower, stay in the air when jumping longer, and vehicles tend to take more time to really pick up speed. This gives players the advantage to formulate strategies to really make a clean get away in CTF games instead of simply pulling a "speed capture" that games like Quake and Unreal were so famous for in the late '90s. Tracking players and aiming were easier thanks to the speed of the engine. Casual gamers who really sank their teeth into Halo:CE never seemed to be able to catch up in Halo 2 and 3.
-The Pistol: There is a weapons section further down, but the pistol from Halo:CE deserves its own section. If given the choice to keep one gun throughout the entire series, I can say with the utmost certainty that a vast majority of players would have kept the pistol from Halo:CE. They have tried to substitute it, retweak, etc. The pistol has never been the same - either the gun was weaker or the essential scope was removed, which made the gun so appealing to use in the first place. Most FPS's have the memorable gun - Quake 3's rail gun, Half Life 2's Gravity Gun, Doom's BFG9000 - and Halo's pistol tends to always make the list.
-Map Addiction: I can't even begin to figure this one out. Players have an attachment to the Halo:CE maps - even writing off the remakes as borderline bad. My group played one game of CTF on Halo 2's remake of Blood Gulch and immediately demanded a switch to the "real Blood Gulch." Despite the map being largely the same, it was not Halo:CE. This applied to the remakes of Hang 'Em High and Battle Creek. To me, there has to be a nostalgic factor being worked in. Most people remember ramping off the hills in front of the base with a Warthog and plowing 3 opponents at once and running off with the flag. These memories don't seem to be attached to any of the new maps.
-Weapons: This can be pretty debatable depending on your stance, but from what I have personally seen, players have an affinity towards the original weapons, even as misbalanced as some of them are, and call some of the newer weapons "cheap" - for example, some gamers that I associate with think that the energy sword in the second game is "cheap" (which, oddly enough, never gets brought up during Halo 3). I am in the Halo 3 camp when it comes to the weapons due to vast variety and my favorite weapon of the series, the Spartan Laser.
-Campaign: Halo has one of the most unforgettable campaign modes ever created for a console shooter. Halo 3 comes reasonably close, while Halo 2 is a long, long way down near the bottom (especially with the ending). Clever AI for the time, compelling storyline, well-implemented cooperative play, and a fantastic cast sealed the top honors for Halo:CE. Sure, flaws existed - levels were repeated and the Flood were beyond annoying - but these are less than minor when compared to the grand scheme of the game, and the Flood is easy to forget when you remember the first time driving the Warthog across the levels, or taking down your first Banshee from the sky with a rocket.
-Simple Nostalgia: Although this has been referenced many times in the post, I need to hit on it once more. Ever wonder why Perfect Dark sold only a quarter of GoldenEye's sales, despite being vastly superior? Nostalgia. People had attachment to GoldenEye; to try to shake them away from that and alienate them over to the successor was next to impossible. Similarly, Halo 1 has a similar problem. While each Halo sold better than the last, most people reference the LAN parties that they had with friends from the first one and how deadly that pistol was.
In relation to this, I have a lot of hope in Halo: Reach. There was a lot of the feel that Halo:CE had that definitely felt retained, while adding a lot of new elements to experiment with; with armor that allows for usage of invisibility, jetpacks, etc., new modes outside of your standard CTF, Oddball, Slayer, etc., and a slower pace, I'm starting to have faith again in where this series is headed. LAN parties may not be able to happen once every week like they did, but as long as the magic is still there, I can't be disappointed.
