Halo: The Master Chief Collection (2014)

When I played this game the first time, I remember The Flood being really, really annoying and killing me a ton. The Flood co-op is amazing, just hard enough to keep you on your seat. And I love hearing my kid scream every time another ton of enemies pops onto the screen.

If the entire game had been this good, Halo would have been so much better.

I played the first Halo game on the same day I bought my original Xbox in the fall of 2001. I never owned it, but during my three-day rental I managed to beat the first 75% or so of the game. I was never in love with it, first person shooters on the Xbox seemed so much less everything that their PC brethren. Worse level design, copy and pasted interiors and bland, boring exteriors. And playing an FPS with a controller when you are used to a mouse and keyboard was terrible.

Now 14 or so years have passed, I game on my consoles far more than I do my gaming PC and even when I'm on my PC I use a Xbox One controller more often than not. I've played plenty of good first person shooters and plenty of bad ones. So when I ended up with a copy of the Halo Master Cheif collection, I wasn't even sure if I would play it. But one day, when looking for a new game to co-op play with my son I thought I'd give it a shot.

I'll be honest, the game isn't really that much better. It's still far too hard to find your way through the levels because every hallway still looks the same. We have spent a lot of time lost or confused because the next area is hidden off in the distance, around a corner and behind some trees. The ugly visuals have been replaced by far prettier textures and the abilitiy to toggle them on and off with a button press is very fun, if only to see how far games have come in a decade and a half. But they are still really repetitive, as are all the enemies you fight. The Warthog still drives worse than any vehicle excpet make the Mako in Mass Effect.

But even with all the negatives (and there are a lot of negatives) we are still having a lot of fun. Maybe I've just gotten less critical as I've gotten older. Maybe it's playing it with my son who is seeing it for the first time and from a completely different perspective. Maybe it's because I've spend most of the last decade playing games on a console and not on a PC. Maybe it's just not that bad of a game all things considered.