Halo
Halo is an obscure video game franchise first created by Bungie and published by Microsoft, it's sort of like Star Wars, except with realer guns and the armor isn't total crap. Later, when Microsoft realized that Bungie's work was not leading to the revolutionary success that they hoped for, Microsoft swiftly replaced them with 343 Industries. The plot of the game is based on the eternal conflict between Microsoft's lord and savior, Bill Gates and his demonized competitor Steve Jobs. Generally, the game is played from the point of view of the Spartan Super-solders, who are the hyper-stoic protagonists of the series. There are currently eight major Halo titles that have been released, including Halo 1-5, as well as Halo Wars, ODST and Reach. Additionally, two more mistakes, Halo 6 and Halo Wars 2, are currently in the making. Halo games are only available on state-of-the-art gaming systems such as Xbox consoles and Windows Operating system. Out of principle, Microsoft would never allow its products to played on what it considers to be filthy second-rate products made by Sony or Apple.
Single-player[edit]
The games of the Halo series offer an extensive campaign for those who play alone because they can't afford Xbox Live. In the campaign mode of Halo, you play as Master Chief Petty Officer John S-117. His nickname is Master Chief (a play on the title he earned playing Masterchef on television) and he is a 1st class Windows tech support manager who answers only to Lord Bill Gates. His face is never seen throughout the games and Bungie says that it is because, like Duke Nukem, if you take a look at him without glasses you will lose consciousness. He is a tool of the UNSC and what Microsoft amusingly considers to be a well-rounded and developed video game character unlike the two dimensional storytelling they passed over when Microsoft abandoned Oddworld. To truly embrace the game, you must look at your gory surroundings as you wade through the Suicide Grunts and poorly-planned out Apple Corporation attacks. Generally, scenarios involve meticulously blowing your way through hordes of Apple Corporation interns and office techs who seem to be unable to inflict any harm whatsoever through your super-invincibility Windows Firewall armor. All the while, your normal human teammates are the basic users of the Windows 98 OS. They support you through the use of harsh language, bullet absorption techniques and tactic retreats. In later games in the franchise, you fight alongside other Spartans who use a lot more heavy weaponry and significantly lower mortality rates. While your human allies actually make for decent comedic relief, you'll essentially be forced to finish each campaign without any real assistance from them whatsoever.
Halo: Combat Evolved[edit]
In the story of Halo, humanity has become incredibly advanced, as it is now a race which exclusively uses Microsoft products. Using the incredible futuristic technology of Windows 10, humanity has become able to colonize space, invent laser weapons and fly around in city-sized spaceships. Your job is to defend humanity by fighting the Covenant, who are an alliance of space aliens that somehow have converted to Islam, but wage war on humanity due to their fanatical love of colorful transparent Apple products. Halo: Combat Evolved is the first game. It takes place after the Covenant have managed to break through the Planetary defenses of Norton Anti-virus. Being one of the few survivors, you're running for your life on a space ship and crash land on a mysterious ring-world called Halo. But you're not there for long before those Apple-loving covies show up. And then things go from bad to worse when it turns out that Halo is full the Flood. Someone in charge of the space marines should have bought some Agent Orange to deal with alien plant life of the zombie parasite variety. When everyone else on the ring dies, it becomes a Red Ring of Death, so you press Control-Alt-Delete on your ship, causing it to explode. The resulting explosion is so catastrophic that it destroys Halo, killing all of the Covenant and Flood, but not before you make an adrenaline-pumping escape on the last jet on your ship. Oh, and a black guy somehow escapes too, but you have to read the books to figure out how that happens, same with all of Master Chief's backstory, and those Star Wars prequel comic books that fill in all the plot holes like a road crew.
Halo Combat Evolved: Anniversary[edit]
Halo Combat Evolved: Anniversary is a Halo game which was the first not made by Bungie. It features an online mode similar to Bungie's Halo games. The only difference is the new armor ability to Roundhouse kick. It instantly kills everyone on the map apart from you, but it can only be used once a game. It also has an exact replica of the campaign in Combat Evolved, with the option of new graphics which, unlike the original, let you see where you're going.
Halo 2[edit]
In Halo 2, it turns out that the Covenant aren't all dead. In fact, you just destroyed one army out of like a thousand. And now they're pissed because as it turns out, Halo was providing their Apple products with galactic WiFi before you blew it to smithereens. So as an act of retribution, they attack Earth, but with only one ship, which was probably a bad idea, because they soon realize that they are going to need more ships. They immediately Regret being alien bastards, they regret coming to Earth and they most definitely regret it when the humans blow up their raggedy-assed fleet. With the blessing of Admiral Bill Gates, you take advantage of their poor planning and decisively kill off one of the board of directors at Apple. Meanwhile the Covenant are having problems of their own back home. As it turns out, with no WiFi the Covenant can no longer get on Twitter or Facebook, and they quickly become really bored. In their intense boredom, they all realize that they actually have hated each other all along, so they decide to have a civil war, luckily at no point does a history of racism, classicism, nationalism and religious conflicts seem to effect humanity, as the war with the Covenant has created peace on earth for everyone. Nor are there seemingly any human rights abuses by mega corporations and military contractors like Weyland-Yutani, and they never say whether humans are allowed to believe in the Covenants religion on earth, or worship the flood like cultists do with Xenomorphs in Dark Horse's Alien comics; you'd figure humans who side with aliens would make really effective spies and terrorists, but they don't use them, like how they don't use chemical gas against a bunch of space marines that aren't equipped with breathing masks and skin protection and how they don't use biological warfare or nukes when they attack the city of New Mombasa Kenya, why the Covenant respect the Geneva convention more than most nations on earth.
Halo 3[edit]
In Halo 3, the series continues when the cool half of the Covenant, also known as the Xbox Elites, side with the humans. They do so after realizing that the other aliens are all dicks. As it turns out, the other aliens have by lying to them, and Apple products have actually sucked all along. Given no other choice, the Elites accept the glories of Microsoft and agree to help the humans fight the rest of the Covenant. Even though the Elites had already helped kill off 90% of the human race, the humans pretend that they are okay with it because out of all of the billions of really mean Elites, one of them turns out an okay guy. Of course, the new alliance doesn't help much when the Flood show up again, causing immense damage to Earth. Out of desperation, you work together with the Elites to invent the Windows 11 supercomputer and use it to blow the Covenant and the Apple Corporation to Kingdom come.
Halo 3: ODST[edit]
In the crappy spin-off of Halo 3 titled Halo 3: ODST, you play as Rookie, a lost little boy who is possibly the quietest protagonist ever. During this game, you retrace the steps of your crew through the war-torn streets of the supercity New Mombasa. Along the way you fight minimal forces of relatively weak enemies and occasionally cry for your mother like the sad 6 year old you are. In this game there are silencers which reduce your damage, but don't actually silence your bullets. Throughout the game, Bungie shamelessly advertises itself.
Halo Wars[edit]
StarCraft Halo Wars is a strategy game sort of like Star Craft but...well actually Halo starts to look an awful lot like Star Craft when it's not an FPS; which coincidentally, if you made that into a table top game, would look suspiciously similar to War Hammer 40,000, which as it turns out, bears an uncanny resemblance to that dark horse comic book where Alien, Predator and Terminator all fought each other. Anyways, the objective of the game is to beat the other faction. The factions are the Terran Human UNSC, Protoss Covenant and the unplayable AI Zerg Flood.
Halo: Reach[edit]
In Halo: Reach, you play as Noble Six, the sixth member of the Noble team (Duh.) He is also the only video game character with fewer lines than Master Chief, and throughout the game you listen to the deep silence of his mute body. The game is set before Halo CE and is the story of how the Spartans fought for the planet Reach. In the game your team mates are no longer space marines who barely made it out of boot camp. Instead, are the worst Spartan team ever lead by Carter. Due his somewhat lacking leadership skills, Carter manages to lead his entire team of noobs to their deaths. One-by-one, they are all killed in cut-scenes during which the player is bombarded by sad music and sappy one-liners. Incidentally, Carter eventually dies in a plane crash when he collides with a shiny purple tank. He lost his license for 2 years and his no claims discount. In the end, you keep the AI, what we now know to be Windows 10 Home Professional, safe and deliver it to the Pillar of Autumn (Microsoft Headquarters). You are then left alone to die since nobody really cares about you enough to send a rescue shuttle. After this, all you have to do is survive the ``final level´´ by not dying. To do that you just don´t stop living. To do this just don´t stop breathing.
Halo 4[edit]
This is the first game made by 343 Industries. Halo 4 takes place 50 years after you slapped the Apple Corporation silly. The game starts as you crash land on a strange world. To make matters worse, your internal AI Cortana is dying after you accidentally gave her HIV by forgetting to renew your Norton Internet Security program. Clearly, she will not fall in love with this virus like Sara did with Swayzak. This causes the otherwise stoic Master Chief to suffer an emotional breakdown. While you are on this strange world, it turns out that it is filled with a bunch of robots running on the ancient Mac 1.0 Operating System. Due to the need for a convenient plot-twist, it suddenly turns out that they are trying to kill you! Later, more humans track your signal and find your crashed ship. However, due to their equally incompetent driving, they too crash-land on the planet. Working together with the other humans, you manage to get enough guns to destroy the evil that inhabits the planet.
Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn[edit]
In 2012 Microsoft, ever innovative in its attempts to make money, thought of a new way to squeeze even more profit out of the Halo franchise. To this end, they filmed Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn. This five-part mini-series was shot from the point of view of lame normal humans fighting evil aliens at the side of the always-exciting Master Chief. To further please its ever-loyal customer base, Microsoft attempted to create an interesting story through the use of a lame love-interest. However, this love interest was later ruined by the predictable death of the only attractive female in the entire series. Apart from Microsoft's ever-loyal Halo fanboys and bored 14 year old kids, nobody actually cared enough to watch it.
The Master Chief Collection[edit]
The Master Chief Collection is a collection of the main Halo games, which was sadly made for the Xbox One. The only new thing about the game is that the graphics were upgraded slightly in Halo 3 and Halo 4, while throwing in Halo CE: Anniversary graphics and new, fresh, and stale Halo 2: Anniversary graphics. The target audience for The Master Chief Collection was for 8-year-old kids who haven't played the games before, which has lead to screaming once they start playing the older games.
Types of enemies[edit]
The Covenant is composed of a wide variety of alien races, all of whom are adult men and who equally desire to rape our homes and burn our women. Fortunately, not all of them are equally dangerous.
- Grunts Generally used as cannon fodder, they are about as dangerous as a box of Fig Newtons. They also like to have birthday parties, complete with stock iMovie sound effects.
- Jackals These aliens look more like birds than jackals. Then again, naming them 'birds' probably wouldn't have been nearly as intimidating. They're what Infinite wishes he could be like.
- Elites Space lizards with tentacles for mouths and a tendency to use your spine as a sheath for their laser swords. Usually acting as field commanders, they send all the other aliens on suicide missions against you.
- Brutes Basically they are the hairy sweaty jocks from gym class. The only difference is that their alien counterparts are a bit more mild-mannered.
- Hunters Their bodies are made up of the tentacles from Hentai, only now they are packed into a suit of power armor. However, instead of wanting to bonk you, these tentacles prefer to flatten you into a human pancake. Cortana secretly writes naughty fanfiction about Master Chief being bonked by Hunters, though, while she's on her vacations to Texas.
- Drones These space bugs are the size of African mosquitoes. They appear infrequently, but when they do appear, they swarm the player quicker than alcoholics going to happy hour.
- Sentinels They are combat drones sent to kill you by the Apple Corporation. Due to their ineffective programming, they really aren't very good at anything.
- Prophets The elderly CEO's of Apple, they sit in their hover chairs all day being holier than everyone else. The Covenant are actually capable of having three leaders at once, unlike that time Catholicism tried having three popes.
- Forerunners People who run away from the Master Chief in Halo 4.
Multiplayer[edit]
Halo players can now experience gameplay with millions of strangers, most of whom swear profusely and use 'Your Mother' jokes at a rate second only to Call of Duty fanboys. Even a decade after the release of its first title, Halo's Online Multiplayer remains one of the largest pastimes of loose-tongued nerds in the world. In the earliest days of Halo, online matchmaking had not yet been invented. Multiplayer for Halo: Combat Evolved required Local Area Connections, which required you to have more wires than Iron Man and a 17.5" TV for you friends to crowd around. However, now that mankind has advanced beyond the Stone Age, millions of people can simultaneously explore the exciting and insulting world of online multiplayer matchmaking.
In multiplayer, you usually start out with weapons like the Assault rifle and the Magnum, which do very little damage to the enemy's Windows Firewall armor. Therefore, multiplayer games mostly involve searching for weapons that aren't terrible, such as the sword or the rocket launcher. In the off chance that you actually manage to kill somebody with a normal rifle, consider yourself extremely lucky, as you are probably the first person to do so in the past decade. In addition, the multiplayer of Halo Reach and Halo 4 enables you to use the Armor abilities in the Windows Control Panel, allowing you to optimize your armor's abilities to your play style. The Control Panel gives you incredible abilities such as the ability to run or the ability to try to hide from your enemies. However, some players have criticized these armor abilities for being overpowered.
IGN scored the game 9001 out of 100, praising it for its powerful story-line and unique game-play experience. However, despite its high ratings, Halo Wars unfortunately did not sell very well. This came much to the shock of Microsoft Studios, who had anticipated that an RTS game would have been far more successful on the Xbox 360 than on the PC. In this game our super awesome Spartan guys are back, but they aren't quite as effective. Sometimes the game may glitch and give you Carter's squad from Halo: Reach, which usually results in a complete failure of that squad, wasting your precious resources and may lose you ground and time. It is really annoying to expect a real Spartan and get Carter. You may as well buy the futuristic idiot marines and send them into the bushes to do the minimal amount of damage possible.
So who is Master Chief?[edit]
Throughout the entire Halo series, Master Chief takes off his helmet several times. However, just like Barack Obama's birth certificate, you never actually get a chance to see it. As a result, there has been a lot of speculation about Master Chief's true identity. Is he a kidnapped orphan raised by the military to kick alien ass? Or perhaps he is an ancient robot bent on the extermination of all life in the galaxy. What if he is a black man? As frightening as some of these possibilities may be, nobody knows for sure. However, experts have suggested several possible answers about his identity.
- Leonidas
The famous king of Sparta and the only man known to have made Xerxes wet himself, it would be fitting for Leonidas to be the rampaging Spartan II of the Halo series. But is it possible that Leonidas was resurrected by Zeus like Kratos to save mankind from the Covenant?
- Keanu Reeves
What if reality as we know it in 2552 is just an illusion? What if everything that we have ever known and felt is just an artificial experience programmed into our head by robots, and we just don't know it. If this is true, then only Neo can be the one.
- Chuck Norris
In 2014, photographic evidence was found on 4chan which seemed to suggest that America's most famous marshal artist was actually the masked man in green.
- Darth Vader
Just like Master Chief, Vader practically only ever exists inside of his suit of armor. Considering that they both sound exactly like Mufasa and enjoy slicing and dicing their enemies to bits with a laser sword, the caped Sith Lord truly sounds like a viable possibility. There is also a possibility that John's real face is just Hayden Christiansen.
- RoboCop
It is possible that the Master chief is a newer model of America's favorite crime-fighting machine of the 80's. Only now he looks a lot less like a washing-machine with legs.
- Robert Heinlein
Others believe that none other than science fiction Robert Heinlein's cryongenically frozen head as the brains behind the power armor, though the absence of giant commie bugs makes this unlikely.
See also[edit]
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