Chronological Halo, 3/52: Nightfall

Previously on Chronological Halo: Noble Team secured Sword Base, an important ONI research facility, from Covenant attack... but Dr. Halsey was not impressed. The mother of the Spartan-II program demanded that the data module Kat recovered from the Visegrad Relay research team be handed over to her. It could hold the key to what the Covenant are looking for on Reach.

Mission Title: Nightfall (Halo: Reach)
P.O.V. Character: Noble Six
Stage Number: 3/52
Summary
It's later in the night following the recovery of Sword Base, and we're creeping along a tiny ledge on the cliffside, following Jun, Noble Three. We both have Sniper Rifles, and we're here to recon the Covenant 'dark zone.' It seems the Covenant can block electronic surveillance, so our orders are to find out what they're hiding. Kat is running the operation from back at base, and warns us that direct action may necessary. Jun jokes that when Kat runs an op, "direct action is always necessary."

"Direct action."

We come to a small settlement being patrolled by the Covenant, but Kat tells us that it's too small a number; we're not in the dark zone yet. Beyond the settlement, Covenant forces are engaged with a number of indigenous creatures called Gúta. We leave them to it!

The Gúta are about as happy about the Covenant as we are.

There's a pump station beyond the canyons, where local militia are attempting to fight off the Covenant. During a break in the fighting, the militia tells Jun that they came back to recover a cache of UNSC weapons; they have hidden weapon caches all over the territory. Jun points out that the weapons are stolen, but when the militia leader dares Jun to arrest him, Jun just says he's going to steal them back.

Smuggled UNSC weapons? Yes, please!

Freshly-armed, the local militia shows us a smuggler's path down a dried-up riverbed to the hydro-electric plant. Once there, we find a large Covenant structure of some kind, and Kat tells us that that pylon is generating the 'dark zone.' We'll place a remote detonation charge on it, but we won't detonate it yet; Kat tells us 'Command's planning something big, they say that pylon dies at dawn.'

A Stealth Pylon, the source of the Covenant 'dark zone'

Once the detonation charge is placed and a pair of Hunters are dispatched, Noble Team leaves the hydro-electric plant behind and climbs a slope guarded by Covenant Shade turrets. At the top of the ridge we find what the Covenant have been hiding within their 'dark zone': not just a strike force, but an invading army. Jun says if we're going to win this thing we'll need to go in hard and fast, and Kat agrees, saying the sun will be up soon and it's going to be a busy day.

Commentary
Every Halo game has a Sniper section, and this is Reach's; it features Noble Team's Sniper, Jun, and gives you a Sniper Rifle with greater than usual ammo capacity. If you like sniping, this is an entertaining mission, but story-wise it's just build-up. We already know the Covenant are on Reach, and Nightfall exists mainly to foreshadow the UNSC's counterattack, which will happen at dawn... in the mission after this one.

One neat thing about Nightfall is the way it shows several different groups on Reach reacting to the Covenant threat. Coming around the corner in the canyons and seeing the large Gúta creatures tossing debris around and going after Covenant grunts is a highlight, and Noble Team setting aside the normal rules of legality and teaming up with smugglers does a nice job of showing that all usual bets are off.

Rating
The atmosphere of Nightfall is fantastic: creeping through winding canyons beneath a rainy, moonlit sky. Unfortunately, that's really all the mission has going for it. There's not much new going on here. Drink in the pretty sights, and get ready for the UNSC counterattack.

Two Spartan helmets out of Five

Chronological Halo, 2/52: ONI, Sword Base

Previously on Chronological Halo: Responding to the sudden blackout at the Visegrad Relay, Noble Team discovered that the Covenant were on Reach. Not good!

Mission Title: Oni: Sword Base (Halo: Reach)
P.O.V. Character: Noble Six
Stage Number: 2/52
Summary
Two days after the events of the previous mission, Noble Team is called to Sword Base, an important research station for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). It's being attacked by a Covenant corvette, and since the research being done at Sword Base is so crucial, orbital rounds have been taken off the Can Use list; we'll have to deal with the ground troops now and worry about the corvette later.

Sword Base, an important ONI facility on Reach

Noble Team is dropped off in the courtyard near the front of Sword Base and fights down to the front gate. Just inside the gate we find a Target Locator, which allows us to mark a location for an artillery strike. Two Wraith tanks outside Sword Base make for perfect targets to test it out.

Once the Wraiths are gone, a Pelican drops off a Warthog for our use. Kat jumps in and tells us there are two devices that need to be reactivated outside Sword Base: the comms array at Farragut Station and an anti-air gun at Airview Station. We can go after these two objectives in any order, but the Covenant are swarming all over both of them.

After both the Comms Array and the AA Gun are reactivated we're called back to Sword Base, where things have not been going well. The Covenant have broken through the main gate and have made it into the base itself. A pair of Hunters are causing trouble on the parking level, and after dealing with them we take an elevator up to the security level where we rendezvous with Jorge and Jun, who are managing a marine fireteam.

Noble fights to the top of Sword Base to meet up with Emile, where a massive hole has been blasted in the roof, and with our help clears the skies in the vicinity of the base. That allows a team of Longsword fighters to fly out to the Corvette, mark it for a precision orbital strike, and blast it out of the sky.

After Sword Base is secure, Noble Team is called to debrief with Dr. Catherine Halsey, creator of the Spartan-II program. She doesn't care about our current mission at all; instead, she wants to know what happened at Visegrad, where one of her researchers had made what he called a 'latchkey discovery.' Carter reports that the researcher was killed by a team of Elites, and Halsey says that she has found that Elites are often dispatched to recover artifacts of great religious importance to the Covenant. She hopes that the data module Kat 'stole' has clues as to what the artifact they were looking for might have been, and threatens to have her thrown in the brig; Halsey was remotely notified of the intrusion when Kat tried to access the module.

Dr. Halsey, creator of the Spartan-II program

Carter objects, saying that under Winter Contingency his team of Spartans has the authority to do whatever it feels necessary to complete the mission and safeguard the planet. Halsey isn't happy about that, but as Noble Team leaves she is already deep in thought, studying the data module we turned over.

Commentary
We spend most of the level in the company of Kat, Noble Two, but the lack of subtitles combined with her unfamiliar accent (I can't pin it down, and the Internets have been unhelpful) makes it hard to hear what she's saying a lot of the time. Once again, Jorge is the character development star of this mission, even though he only shows up at the end and has just one brief scene with Halsey. As has been characteristic of Halo: Reach so far, it's assumed that we know more about these characters than shows up in the game itself. Halsey and Jorge's greeting and apparent fondness for each other could be a little puzzling without extra info. So here it is!

The damage to Sword Base is severe, but the facility remains standing

Halsey is the creator of the Spartan-II program, which used genetics and high technology to create super-soldiers. Children who displayed certain traits were taken from their homes and raised under extremely difficult conditions. Jorge is one, which explains why when he's called before Halsey he goes without question, saying 'I've been hers half my life' and deferentially calls her 'Ma'am.' It's a ways off in Chronological Halo, but we're eventually going to meet another of her Spartan-IIs, a guy called John-117. But more (a lot more) about him later.

The rest of Noble Team, aside from Jorge, are composed of Spartan-IIIs, which were the next wave of super soldiers to be created. These guys (and girls) were intended to be made cheaper and more readily, without all of the genetic selection and technology that made Spartan-IIs so expensive and therefore so few.

Rating
This mission packs in a lot of fun toys: a Target Locator for calling in artillery strikes, the ability to choose the order in which you tackle two of the objectives, more Warthog-driving, a battle with Hunters, and a chance to shoot down Banshees with a rocket launcher. It has a little something for everyone, and sets up some important story threads for later. A great level.

Five Spartan helmets out of Five

Chronological Halo, 1/52: Winter Contingency

Chronological Halo, Mission 1/52. It begins!

Mission Title: Winter Contingency (Halo: Reach)
P.O.V. Character: Noble Six
Stage Number: 1/52
Summary
We begin with some absolutely gorgeous shots of the planet Reach, and as we get closer it becomes apparent that something terrible happened here. It's a desolate wasteland, and a Spartan helmet is abandoned on the ground. Fade to white, and we're now in first-person: we're holding that same helmet in our hands, we bring it up to our face and put it on. It's July 24, 2552, and we're a passenger in a Warthog being driven to a military post.
When we get there, we're briefed on the situation: contact with Visegrad Communications Relay has been lost, and it's believed that the local insurrection is to blame. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) thinks that sending in a Spartan team is 'a gross misallocation of valuable resources,' but Colonel Holland disagrees. He's sending in Noble Team to check it out, and to report on the whereabouts of the missing troopers he sent in first.


Stylin'!

We're Noble Six, the newest member of the team, and a replacement for the previous Noble Six, who died in action. Carter is Noble One, the team's commanding officer, and as everybody piles into a Falcon to fly to Visegrad, he tells you that he's read your entire file -- even the parts that were blacked out by the ONI censors -- and he's glad to have your skillset on the team. Intriguing! He emphasizes, however, that Noble is a team; 'That Lone Wolf stuff stays behind,' he says.

En route to Visegrad something begins jamming our communications, so we'll have no contact with Command for the duration. They detect a distress beacon and land the Falcons, but there's no sign of the troopers. In a nearby building, the team finds a number of farmers. They speak Hungarian, and one of them tells Jorge, Noble Five, that something in the fields killed the farmer's son.


Don't shoot them -- they'll shoot back!

Further on, the team finds two of the missing troopers. They are dead, and have obviously been interrogated. Just then, the source of the trouble reveals itself: the Covenant are on Reach! One of the Falcons lands to bring Emile and Kat to Visegrad Relay so they can get communications back to warn Command. Meanwhile, the rest of us go to recon the next valley to determine the scope of the Covenant force. We commandeer a civilian vehicle, and Jorge stands on the back, wielding his minigun like a turret.


A little hard to see in this shot, but check out Jorge on the back

We drive through the agricultural region on Reach, clearing out Covenant forces, until we find the rest of the missing troopers. Noble Team protects them from Phantom dropships long enough for their evac to arrive, and then we jump in Falcons and are flown to the Visegrad Relay to rendezvous with Kat and Emile. As the Falcon comes in for a landing, Carter tells us, 'Six. Break's over.'

Badass.

Kat is trying to get the door to the Relay open, so we protect her from Covenant attacks. Finally she cuts through, and everybody runs in. It's dark inside, so we have to use our Night Vision. Inside there's a body, and also a wounded trooper. While Carter arranges medical attention for the trooper, we find a data module on the body. Kat picks it up. Jorge finds another survivor, but before he can learn anything from her, the team is attacked by an Elite squad! After the Elites are dealt with, Kat manages to use her Whatever Technology to patch through a connection to Command. Meanwhile, Jorge learns that the survivor is the daughter of the dead man.

Carter uses the comms signal to inform Col. Holland that the Covenant are on Reach. It's the 'Winter Contingency.'

Commentary
Halo: Reach is the most recently-released Halo game, but its storyline is the earliest in the timeline. That gives it a unique atmosphere, since anyone who has played the other games in the series already knows what happened to the planet Reach: it was invaded by the Covenant, and it's during the escape from the planet that the first Halo is discovered.

That's not true when played in sequence, though! For us, we don't know what's going to happen to Reach. So when the game opens with the shot of Noble Six's helmet lying abandoned in the middle of a scorched wasteland, it's entirely possible that Noble Six took the helmet off, or lost it, or something. We aren't surrounded by the same aura of dread we are if we know that Reach is going to fall.

A note about that abandoned helmet. In Halo: Reach you can select the gender and armor of your own personal Noble Six, and since I chose a manly pink for the armor with a Scuba-style breather on the helmet, it's extremely clear that the helmet does in fact belong to our character. It's less obvious if you leave it at the default, but how awesome is it that the helmet changes based on your setup?

The cutscene that precedes this mission means to introduce us to Noble Team, but it's a confusing whirl of names and designations: Carter, Kat, Two, Five, Holland. We'll come to know these characters pretty well over the course of the game, but the introductions don't stick. Only Carter makes much of an impression, and that's because he seems to know something about us that the rest of the team doesn't.

If you didn't see any of the pre-release videos or read the instruction manual, then you won't know what 'skillset' Carter is so pleased to have on the team. I won't spoil it until we get there.

When I first played through Halo: Reach (this being my fifth or sixth time through), I was a little disappointed that the Covenant were a known quantity. Since I'm pretty unfamiliar with anything Halo-related outside the games themselves, I had expected the invasion of Reach to be humanity's first contact with the Covenant. It's not. It's a surprise that the Covenant are on Reach, but the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) know what the Covenant are and believe that they're prepared to deal with them. The name of the mission, 'Winter Contingency' refers to an emergency procedure that's supposed to be followed whenever the Covenant discover a colony world. That isn't really explained in the mission, but Holland's closing words convey what a bad thing it is for the Covenant to have found Reach:

'May God help us all.'

Rating
The slow burn up to the first reveal of the Covenant is solid, and interacting with civilians is surprising and well-done; I like that Jorge is the only one who can speak to them. The initial firefights with the Covenant are exciting, and the showdown with the Sword-wielding Elite at the end is genuinely tense. I dock a Spartan Helmet for breezing past important exposition, especially the introductions for the members of Noble Team.

Four Spartan helmets out of Five

Chronological Halo: Introduction

Some of my favorite videogame series have been around long enough to develop a complicated mythology, and the more complex these things get, the more developers have to work to squeeze in additional entries. Often this takes the form of creating prequels or side-stories that take place simultaneously with already-released games in the series. Resident Evil has been doing this for ages: even before Resident Evil Zero, we'd already had a complete game that took place both before and after its immediate predecessor: Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. They're complicated stories with confusing timelines. It's true of the Halo games, as well, though Halo often gets knocked for its story being just an excuse on which to hang the multiplayer component.

I've always had the desire to play through complex series like those in chronological order, to see how well they hold up when played in the form of a single long game. Does the story flow in a way that makes sense when you see it from the absolute beginning through to the absolute end? Does it feel like the games could have been released in this sequence, and is there value in seeing the story this way, from beginning to end?


Storyline among the explosions? Really? Really!

I'm going to find out, and I'm bringing you with me! It's Chronological Halo, and it's my new project here on this silly blog of mine. For the next As Long As It Takes, I'll be playing through every level of every game of the Halo series in proper chronological order, and writing about my thoughts on each mission. How is the story of Halo when played from the beginning through to the end? Does it deserve the criticism it gets for being too samey? Or will it hold together better now that we have all the pieces?

Some comments on my approach, first. I won't be playing Halo Wars, the RTS that technically occurs prior to all the events of the main entries in the series. That's because I don't own it, but also because part of the idea of this project is to see how well this series would play as a single (admittedly very long) game, and having that game switch from an RTS to an FPS after the first ten hours isn't really to my taste.

I've divided the main games of the series (Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: O.D.S.T., and Halo: Reach) into their constituent levels, and then sorted these stages according to their chronological sequence in the timeline. The result is a list of fifty-two missions that should tell the story of the Halo series in order. The one major exception to this occurs during Halo 2, when the Arbiter missions take place simultaneously with the Master Chief's missions; I decided to leave them in the sequence they appear in the game, so as to preserve the overall feel of that story. I'll talk more about that decision when we get there.

From a very high-level perspective, here's the sequence:

Halo: Reach
Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo 2 (through New Mombasa)
Halo 3: O.D.S.T.
Halo 2 (after New Mombasa)
Halo 3

I'm pretty excited to get started, so buckle up and hang on: Chronological Halo is about to get underway!

That MMO Haze

I was up too late last night, and now I have that old familiar feeling: that MMO haze, the tired feeling you get the morning after staying up later than you should playing an MMO. It usually compounds, too: it's bad enough on the first day, but wait until you've been in the haze for a couple days in a row! The major culprit for causing that MMO haze has got to be group content, especially instance runs; you don't want to let down the group by bailing too early, and that sense of obligation keeps you from leaving when common sense tells you to.

But look at what was accomplished in Blackrock Caverns on Heroic last night, my very first run at a Heroic dungeon in World of Warcraft. Most importantly, I didn't embarrass myself too badly! Rumour has it that the bosses in Blackrock Caverns are not so bad, as far as Heroic Mode goes, but for this n00b some of these fights were tense. I'm an Arms Warrior, so DPS is the name of the game. Anything more complicated than 'point at this guy and wail on him' is pretty imposing, and in this dungeon there are bosses that:

1) Chain up your whole group. You have to attack the chains to break free, and then run as far from the boss as you can, or he'll do a massive one-hit kill attack on you. Don't be That Guy that doesn't know to run away... I wasn't!

2) Use three energy beams to evolve adds into giant scary death-machines. You have to interrupt the beams, but not for too long! As you stand in a beam, a debuff increases on you, and once it gets to a certain level you need to run out of the beam. Once the debuff fades after several seconds, you have to jump back in the beam. It's exciting and dangerous to have three people managing the beams. Great fight!

3) Are all but immune to damage until pulled into a lava fall that superheats armor. But the catch is that it also increases the boss's AOE damage, so you need to keep him in the lava fall, but not for too long, and bring him back into the fall before it wears off, but not for too long, etc.

That last boss dropped the Burned Gatherings, a cloak of item level 346 that I selected Need on, rolled 100, and received not just the cloak but the Needy achievement as well. Awesome! So the MMO haze this morning is in full effect, but you know what? Totally worth it!

And the cycle continues!

RE5: Desperate Escape DLC

As you might expect if you've been reading my silly blog this week, today is indeed another Resident Evil 5 update. Today I'll be talking about the second of the two extra DLC episodes: Desperate Escape. If Lost in Nightmares was a throwback to the creepy atmosphere of the first few games in the series, Desperate Escape is one hundred percent cut from the same mold as RE5: all action, all the time. Spoilers ahead, as usual.

Toward the end of RE5, Chris and Sheva manage to free Jill Valentine from the mind control device that Wesker is using to control her actions (Shocker! Jill is still alive? Of course she is, and if you didn't call that the mysterious masked woman introduced in the opening cutscene was Jill, welcome to Planet Earth! It will be a place of mystery and intrigue for you, especially its television sitcoms). But there's no time for Chris and Jill to reconnect, because Wesker is getting away and plans to infect the entire world with Uroboros! So Chris and Sheva follow after him, hot on his trail, and... leave Jill in the mansion where they found her?

Yep. Later on Jill calls them up on a radio and gives them the information they need to defeat Wesker, but other than that she doesn't show up again until the end of the game, where she and Josh Stone fly in on a helicopter to save the day. How did she get from the mansion to the helicopter?

In the $5 DLC episode Desperate Escape!

It turns out that Jill's escape from the mansion to the helicopter was extremely, extremely difficult, probably the most difficult stretch of any part of RE5. I started on Veteran, since I figured getting through the rest of the game and Lost in Nightmares readied me for anything I would face here. Not true. This chapter is *tough*. Tons of cannon fodder, executioners, chainsaw guys, actual cannons, guys with gatling guns, and very little in the way of ammunition.

It's a pretty tough slog through a heavily fortified base to get to the Communications Tower (where Jill calls up Chris on that radio and we see the other half of that cutscene from the original campaign -- why she didn't just give him this information in the mansion I'm not entirely sure) and the promise of extraction by helicopter from the roof.

About that roof. Here you have a five minute countdown timer until Josh's pilot Doug arrives with the rescue helicopter, and this is where my Veteran playthrough came to a sad, sad end. You get a single checkpoint for this part, so the odds of bulling your way through are pretty slim, considering what you're up against: countless waves of enemies and a lot of sub bosses. After dealing with a gatling gun sub boss and two chainsaw guys and then running out of resources and attempting to kite the remaining enemies around the roof, the timer was down to less than a minute. Doug calls us up and says that he's had to take a detour because there are too many airborne B.O.W.s in the area. The timer resets itself to two and a half minutes remaining!

Hilarious, but mean. I was quickly overwhelmed and my Veteran playthrough came to an end. I'm just not good enough at RE5 to get through the Left 4 Dead 'No Mercy' style finale of Desperate Escape. I started it over on Normal and it was still tough enough to be exciting there at the end, but I managed to get through it. It's an entertaining enough chapter, but I'll only be playing it between 5-3 and 6-1 of my RE5 playthrough (where it fits), if that playthrough is on the Normal difficulty or less.

RE5: Lost in Nightmares DLC

One of the reasons I wanted to use 'Level-minded' in the name of this silly little blog of mine is because I wanted to talk about individual levels in games, rather than focusing on entire games the way review sites do. In the modern era, that's going to mean talking about DLC a lot of the time; now that we're mostly out of the Horse Armor era, you're often buying new, bite-sized portions of games. That's the case with 'Lost in Nightmares,' the first of the two additional episodes for Resident Evil 5, and the one I'll be talking about today. As is always the case with my blog, expect spoilers.

Early on in RE5, you learn that Chris Redfield has guilt issues concerning the fate of his late partner, series fave Jill Valentine. During a routine investigation into the sordid history of the Umbrella Corp., Jill took a header through the window of a cliff-side mansion and fell to her presumed death. We see all this through flashbacks as Chris tells his new partner Sheva about what happened to Jill, and over the course of the game he broods that something similar will happen to Sheva.

But what really happened on that earlier mission with Jill? 'Lost in Nightmares' is a new playable chapter that serves to answer that question. In actual fact, there aren't any real answers here -- the chapter begins with Chris and Jill entering the mansion and ends with Jill going through the window, so as far as information goes there's not much new. The real draw here is the gameplay, and for long-time fans of Resident Evil it absolutely should not be missed.

The reason for that is that 'Lost in Nightmares' is a complete throwback in feel to the earliest games in the series. The starting location is extremely similar to the mansion from the first Resident Evil, and the gameplay there is completely unlike that in the original RE5 campaign: you're not fighting off hordes of Not Zombies; in fact, there's almost no combat at all. You're moving from room to room, reading creepy documents, collecting passwords and cranks and making your way through an ominous mansion. Watching the doors slowly open from a first person perspective is itself a throwback to the early games, and there's even more.

In what feels like a love letter to series fans, here's a hilarious easter egg: when you first enter the mansion, turn around and examine the door. Then examine it again, and the description will change to '?'. Examine the question mark and the camera angle will change! Gone is the over-the-shoulder viewpoint of Resident Evil 4 and RE5. In its place? The static camera angles of the first games in the series! You can then play the mansion section of 'Lost in Nightmares' in the old style. Eventually the story takes you into the basement and the old style camera angles go away, but it's incredibly cute that it was included. In all honesty you probably won't want to play through in the old style more than once, since the Score Stars hidden throughout the mansion can be impossible to see with the old camera angles.

Once you drop into the basement, the sense of tension that has been building is finally paid off with your first encounter with a new enemy type: the Guardian of Insanity.

A Guardian of Insanity, fresh off his beauty contest win

These guys move slowly and deliberately, hauling that huge anchor behind them, and can deal massive damage with it. They can also lift you up and insta-kill you if your partner doesn't come to your aid quickly enough. Their perception radius is fairly low, but when they see you there's a musical sting and their pursuit is accompanied by scary, driving music. Their weakpoint is a tiny eye on their backs, and just when you get used to attacking them with your weapons, 'Lost in Nightmares' takes your weapons away and traps you in an area with a number of these guys that varies based on your difficulty level. On Veteran level I had to figure out how to use the environment to defeat four of them; on Amateur you only have to tangle with one.

Once you figure out the puzzle it's not so tough, but there are clever wrinkles to change up each subsequent encounter. The Guardians of Insanity make for tense and frightening battles, just what I want from Resident Evil. The Internets tell me that on higher difficulties they can even show up in the mansion section, before you drop down into the basement!

At the end of 'Lost in Nightmares,' after you escape from the Guardians, you arrive at the final battle... a trick battle with Wesker. What is it with RE5 that requires us to always face this guy in puzzle battles? It's less annoying than some of his fights in the original RE5 campaign, but it's still not that fun. You need to force him into situations where he can be countered with melee Quick Time Events. Luckily there's a three minute timer, so you just need to outlast him, but there's an achievement in it for you if you deal enough damage to him.

On the whole 'Lost in Nightmares' doesn't add a great deal to the storyline, but it's a must-play for fans of the original series because of its atmosphere and mood. It's also pretty inexpensive at $5, and I'll be playing through it at the start of all my RE5 playthroughs from now on.