Halo: Combat Evolved was released on November 15 2001. Developed by then-Bungie Studios (now just Bungie, Inc.), it spawned a whole new franchise. Between the compelling gameplay and amazing story, the former of which will be covered in this article, Halo was a smash hit. It’s hard to make a case that Microsoft would still be in the hardware market if Halo wasn’t as great as it was.

But it didn’t just launch a console, Halo also brought forth many innovations to the console FPS scene. From setting the standard control scheme that would be borrowed by other developers for their games later down the line. So let’s look back at what made Halo great by looking at the magnificent campaign.

This is the final week of my SpOps revisits. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that there will be a Season 2 as of yet, so this is likely going to be my last article about SpOps until Halo 5 comes out. It has to be a good article, and I’m not entirely sure I can deliver. I don’t like SpOps. It has some good moments, but there’s just a lot of repetition and redundancy in the gameplay. I don’t know what the designers in charge of development had in mind when they sat down and decided that, yes, this is what Spartan Ops is, and this is how it will play.

Last week, I had said that Episodes 8 and 9 were inconsequential. This isn’t entirely true. It’s mostly true, but there are only two key points that have any relevance. The first is that Madsen received a map after looting Gek’s corpse in the Episode 8 cinematic. This map was handed to Doctor Glassman, who is using it to discover the secrets of Requiem. It’s actually kind of cool, because Glassman was a worthless character before, but now he gets a chance to be useful. I’ll be touching on this some more later. Anyway, at the end of Episode 9, Crimson discovered another map, and when combined with Glassman’s map, it becomes a super map to all of Requiem.

Too bad Requiem is about to fall into a star.

This week we’re looking at Episodes 8 and 9 of Spartan Ops. I had said last week that Episode 7 was pure filler. It was a level of awful that we hadn’t seen since Episode 3. I also skipped over discussing the cinematic for that week.

Today, I’m going to be talking about Doctor Catherine Halsey.

In Episode 6, she tells Captain Lasky that there are secrets left in the universe, and that she so desperately wants to know everything. That’s why she abducted children, you see. She had them indoctrinated and their bodies augmented to be the perfect soldier. Halsey created the Spartan-II program, because she wants to know everything the universe has to offer.

Oh, and she designed the MJOLNIR Mark IV power armor, too. Equipping super children in the most advanced armor that humanity has ever seen so that they can be the best soldiers humanity has ever seen furthers her goal of understanding the universe.

It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? A little more than two months ago, we saw the season finale of Spartan Ops Season 1. We haven’t posted much on the site since then. We’ve been busy, you see. Everyone is always busy when they’re not doing something, aren’t they? I have been keeping busy with things related to World of Warcraft, but I haven’t finished any of them. Soon, though.

Last time we talked about SpOps, I was just finishing the awful After Show. Let’s go a little further back to Episode 5. I talked about how Jul ‘Mdama is a cunning villain. He started as a Very Evil villain who was bad because Palmer said so. In the three not-so-short episodes that we saw him, we learned that he’s playing a long game.

Let’s watch the Episode 6 cinematic after the cut before we continue.

When I first started playing Halo 4’s Spartan Ops, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with what I saw. Everything I read about the mode leading up to the release of the game suggested that Spartan Ops, or SpOps as I like calling it, was going to be something special. The original Firefight mode in Halo 3: ODST was just wave after wave of enemies. It was an arcade mode. Halo: Reach expanded upon the options somewhat, but it was mechanically more of the same. SpOps was supposed to be different. It was supposed to weave in narrative elements to continue the campaign.

Episode 1 was an exercise in tedium and monotony. It left a very sour impression upon me. I played through each episode as they came out in the following weeks, and I remained unimpressed. When I sat down and played through each episode again in preparation for the Recap series, I found something different. Episode 1 was still as boring as I remembered it, but Episode 2 was different.

Before, my expectations were being tempered by 343i’s hype machine. When I sat down to replay the first five episodes, my expectations were tempered by reality. That is to say, yes, there is going to be a lot of running around and a lot of killing Covenant. I knew there wasn’t going to be much in the way of story content for each chapter. So I paid more attention to what little content I thought there was.

Surprisingly, I found more than I expected.