Tag Archives: Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

Halo Fest 2020 – Forward Unto Dawn

The Story So Far: As the Forerunner dreadnought, the Anodyne Spirit, enters Earth’s atmosphere, Master Chief makes a hasty escape, relying only on his armor and a piece of the ship’s heat shielding for protection. Rescued by UNSC and separatist Sangheili Elites troops, the Master Chief is then sent to help clear Covenant air defenses deployed to protect the Prophet of Truth as he attempts to activate a Forerunner artifact excavated near New Mombasa. While successful, the UNSC isn’t able to prevent Truth from activating the artifact, which creates a massive slipspace portal. As Truth and the remaining Covenant fleet jump through the portal, a Flood infested UNSC ship crash-lands nearby, though Elite forces move quickly to contain the Flood threat. Following a message left by Cortana hinting that a way to stop the Flood exists on the other side of the portal, the Elite fleet, accompanied by a small UNSC force and 343 Guilty Spark, travels through it, leading them to a massive Forerunner Halo control and construction installation called the Ark. Master Chief, along with the Arbiter and a squad of UNSC marines, head to the surface to stop Truth from remotely activating the remaining Halo rings. High Charity, now fully controlled by the Flood, jumps in and the Flood begin their own assault on the Ark. The Covenant succeed in activating the rings prompting the Gravemind to offer Master Chief and the Arbiter a truce. With the Flood’s assistance, the pair fight their way through the Prophet of Truth’s remaining forces, killing him and halting the activation. With the threat of the Halos being activated out of the way, the Flood immediately turn on their new allies. Devising a plan to wipe out the remaining Flood by activating the still under construction Halo Installation 04 replacement ring, Master Chief heads to the Flood infested High Charity to recover Cortana. Despite 343 Guilty Spark attempting to stop them, Cortana is able to activate the incomplete ring and the Master Chief, Cortana, and the Arbiter make a last minute escape aboard the now abandoned UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn. The activation of the incomplete ring causes it to self-destruct, destroying the Ark and the Flood along with it as planned. An unintended side effect of the destruction, the slipspace portal ruptures just as the Forward Unto Dawn is traveling through it, ripping the ship in half, and stranding the Master Chief and Cortana in unknown space. While the Arbiter makes it through the portal, the Master Chief is presumed dead.

Now, before we jump into Halo 4, it’s worth a brief mention that the Halo: CE Anniversary was released in 2011. These days it’s usually thought of as a foundational piece of the Master Chief Collection, but it was a standalone Xbox 360 release first. I’ve already talked a bit about the Anniversary edition when talking about Halo: CE, which has continued to be improved in the MCC even since that post, but there was, no surprise, another live action trailer around its release. No real story here, it simply depicts a UNSC Commander giving a speech at some sort of a remembrance ceremony. Not bad, but entirely skippable.

“Our protagonist, a very young Thomas Lasky.”

Moving on to 2012, no, this isn’t about Halo 4, but Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn. I didn’t necessarily plan on giving Forward Unto Dawn its own post, but between its plot setup and its release date, I suppose it makes the most sense to talk about it separately first. Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is really the culmination of these sorts of live action promotional shorts, at least up to this point. Another marketing effort itself, Forward Unto Dawn was released as five 15 minute web shorts and then compiled into a single movie for a DVD release, which makes it the closest thing we had to a Halo movie by 2012. I watched it around the time I played through Halo 4 and was pleasantly surprised that it actually surpassed my (admittedly, rather low) expectations. In fact, in my brief original post about Halo 4 I joked that I probably enjoyed Forward Unto Dawn more than Halo 4’s campaign. I’m curious about how that statement holds up.

So it’s not Halo 4 proper, but what is Forward Unto Dawn about? Well, for the first time in this series I think I’m going to go ahead and recap its plot in the same post as I just recapped the previous game’s. The reason for that is, despite being set immediately following the events of Halo 3 described above (and also depicted in the Origins sections of Halo: Legends) the movie is essentially one big flashback. That means it mostly takes place out of chronological order from the main series and the parts that don’t are more setup for Halo 4 rather than plot spoilers. As usual, while I’m fairly vague in these plot summaries they absolutely do still contain spoilers, so skip the next two paragraphs if you want to avoid them.

“The freshmen of Hastati squad bonding over some light illegal espionage.”

The Story: Commander Lasky, executive officer of the UNSC Infinity, reviews a distress signal sent by the AI Cortana aboard the UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn. This triggers a flashback to his time as a cadet at the Corbulo Academy of Military Science on Circinius IV some 30 years earlier. The son of a high ranking officer and brother of another graduate of CAMS who became an elite ODST trooper, Lasky was under a lot of pressure to perform. With ailing health due to cryosleep sickness and grief over the loss of his brother, Lasky began developing a reckless disregard for orders, causing his squad to underperform in combat exercises and leading to him to clashing with his classmates. With the help of one of his professors, Lasky has a breakthrough just before the last combat exercise of the term and leads his squad to a major victory. His sickness worsening, Lasky is given the option of being medically discharged from the academy. As he contemplates his future, a campus-wide alarm sounds and he and his classmates gather at the academy’s space elevator to evacuate. As ODST drop pods land all around them, Covenant corvettes appear overhead and destroy the elevator. Fleeing in terror from this unknown threat, Lasky and his classmates seek refuge as Covenant attackers viciously cut down anyone they see. Unsuccessfully attempting to breach an armory, the cadets are forced to hide from an Elite Zealot stalking them. Just as the Elite is about to find them it’s struck down by an SPARTAN-II. As unknown to them as the Covenant aliens, the cadets cautiously follow the Spartan, who introduces himself as Master Chief before helping to arm them and leading them to an evacuation site. Clashing with more Covenant forces along the way, the few shell-shocked surviving cadets, including Lasky, eventually board a Pelican with Master Chief and the other Spartans of his squad. Back on the Infinity, the ship and its escorts prepare to jump to the origin of Cortana’s signal. Meanwhile, Cortana considers waking Master Chief from cryosleep as the wreckage of the Forward Unto Dawn is pulled off course.

My favorite aspect of the story is that Lasky’s flashback takes place before the existence of the Covenant and even the Spartan program were declassified, and Forward Unto Dawn does an excellent job at conveying that. Seeing the cadets’ wonder at Sullivan’s footage depicting these huge, armor clad soldiers, the panic as they realize the ODST dropping at the school is a really bad sign, their confusion and shock as Covenant ships appear overhead, how terrifying the Covenant Elites hunting them down are, and their awe over Master Chief’s size, strength, and professionalism: it’s all great and helps ground some of the more fantastical elements of Halo that have been somewhat taken for granted in the games. Not only that, but the sheer badassery of Master Chief in contrast to what we’d seen from these young cadets up to this point (further contrasted with how slow the first 2/3s of the movie is) is a great moment of fan service that I loved almost as much during this viewing as I did the first time around.

“Master Chief firing his AR one-handed for extra cool points.”

For a web series, Forward Unto Dawn is surprisingly solid on the production front. The actors are all at least adequate, the direction is, I suppose, fine, and the score, peppered with the excellent tracks from Halo 4 as well as callbacks to earlier games, is good. Besides the fact that most of the action takes place in some very dark environments being a bit of a cheat, CGI is used fairly subtly, and the costumes, props, and practical effects look pretty good (with that old Weta Workshop Warthog making yet another appearance!) It absolutely is not, however, the big budget Halo movie that no doubt both Microsoft and Hollywood executives have been hoping will have major crossover appeal at the box office for years on end now. I believe that by this time any serious efforts tied to the Peter Jackson produced effort had died off, although it seems that the idea was never completely abandoned. After what seems like an eternity, its current incarnation, a gritty Showtime series (now bound for Paramount+) just got a teaser trailer this week.

In conclusion, Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn might not do an awful lot to fill any story gaps as we go into Halo 4, but it did at least help build the excitement for its launch. More importantly, it still stands up as a solid entry in the expanded media of the franchise, even if it is a bit of a side story. I’d easily recommend it to Halo fans, but this sadly isn’t the one that is going to win over masses of non-gamers.

“Capt. Del Rio: ‘Red means bad, right?'”

While we’re here, the CG Halo 4 teaser trailer “Awakening” from 2011 shows Cortana waking Chief up and him scrambling to survey the situation, only to find his chunk of the Forward Unto Dawn being pulled towards a massive constructed object that resembles the Forerunner Shield World we encountered in Halo Wars. More notably, the live-action Halo 4 trailer “The Commissioning” released later in 2012 shows the commencement ceremony for the UNSC Infinity’s new mission as Captain Del Rio gives a speech. As the trailer continues, we see the Infinity sometime later being scanned by a mysterious orange light, then erupting in chaos as systems malfunction and crewmembers strain from the pressure as the ship is pulled to the very same object. Pretty cool trailer, and I think I’d chalk this one up as essential as well. More about what is actually going on here when we get to Halo 4 itself, of course!

Halo Fest 2020 – Combat Evolved

Halo: Combat Evolved rounds out a trio of FPS games, along with GoldenEye and Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64, that my brother and I did some serious bonding over in my late teens/young adult years while he was living back with my family – we’d watch each other’s playthroughs, hop into cooperative missions together from time to time, and of course, play tons of “Slayer” deathmatch against one another. Unusually, my dad, not much of a gamer, was also strangely drawn to Halo, often filling a third slot in our split screen multiplayer sessions. My dad really got into it and probably spent far more time with the single player campaigns of the first Halo games than either of us did. In fact, through sheer force of will (I imagine assisted by unabashed abuse of the checkpoint system) I think he even eventually beat them both on “Legendary” difficulty.

“Well, well, well. What do we have here?”

Beyond what it meant to me personally, Halo: CE was a special game. I still vividly recall my brother bringing home a brand new Xbox that he’d unwisely blown a chunk of a paycheck on, hyping us up on how awesome Halo was. At first I wasn’t all that impressed with what it was doing, since games like Half Life and Unreal had already started evolving the FPS genre in similar ways on PC, but I was quickly won over by its unique aesthetic, mysterious science fiction storyline, slick, polished execution, and almost perfect early implementation of dual analog stick FPS controls. I found the less linear, more open world sections (complete with crazy vehicles and more advanced AI than I’d seen up to that point) particularly compelling. As much as I had enjoyed some of the previous console FPS games, it was Halo that finally really sold the concept. To me, and to millions of others, it seems.

My enjoyment of Halo wasn’t isolated to consoles though – I preordered Gearbox’s PC port of Halo: CE mostly for the promise of at last being able to play multiplayer online, but I ended up being quite underwhelmed by it. The netcode in particular wasn’t quite as well suited for those of us pitiful enough to still be rocking dial-up Internet in 2002 as a lot of the other games I’d been playing on PC were. In more recent years that PC port of Halo: CE became the multiplayer game of choice for me and a couple of my co-workers during our breaks, and we still occasionally get together for online multiplayer sessions using the Xbox One’s Halo: The Master Chief Collection to dust off our old favorite maps to this very day. While multiplayer really isn’t in the scope of Halo Fest 2020, I can’t go without at least mentioning it since it’s such a huge part of Halo: CE (and the rest of the franchise’s) success, and there’s definitely still a ton of fun to be had there.

“Alright, tutorial time!”

On to this playthrough of Halo: Combat Evolved! I should note that I’m playing through the version of the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary included with the aforementioned Xbox One MCC. This was my first time playing the Anniversary edition remaster, and given that I’ve played through Halo: CE’s single player levels more times than I can recall, I’m going to spend much of my time here discussing that release more than the game overall.

The first thing that I noticed upon loading into the first level of Halo: CE Anniversary was the lack of the short tutorial section based around Master Chief waking up out of cryo-sleep. This immediately left a sour taste in my mouth. I mean, what the fuck? They removed the tutorial? What else did they remove? ARGH! Later I realized that this was because I started the campaign in “Heroic” difficutly, which skips the tutorial just as it’s always done – nothing to do with the new version. Oops. Okay, well, of course, my attention then snapped back to the presentation.

“While beautiful, 343 Guilty Spark feels quite different from the original.”

All of the graphics in the Anniversary edition have been lovingly and painstakingly remastered to make the game look a little bit more suitable to newer generations of consoles. The remaster also makes efforts to bring Halo: CE in-line stylistically with the latter games in the series, particularly Halo: Reach. For the most part, I think this was a rather successful effort. The new artwork is mostly great and overall the game looks how most people would likely remember it looking after not having played it for years. Still, the change in style also means it is often quite a departure from Halo: CE’s original graphics, which were of course Bungie’s first stab at what would eventually evolve into what we got in Reach. The dark purples of the covenant forces have been replaced by lighter hues, the architecture of the buildings on Installation 04 now have a lot more detail, but losing much of their cold, stark character as a result. The dense foggy swamp of “343 Guilty Spark” is now a much more lush, and much less creepy, jungle. The list goes on and on.

This might have all been less obvious if 343 didn’t include the fantastic addition of being able to instantly toggle between new and old graphics with the press of a button. I found myself doing this quite often to really take in the differences. Surprisingly, sometimes the original graphics “up-resed” still looked quite acceptable, even rivaling the new ones, and it took me a few seconds to realize I was accidentally still on the old graphics on more than one occasion. They would have been even better if they weren’t based on the aforementioned flawed PC port. That said, the outdoors sections of the game are where the remastered graphics clearly blow the old ones out of the water. The lighting on the indoor sections is quite a bit different too, and while some might protest a loss in tension, some sections are much easier to navigate as a result. “The Library” is the prime example; while still being a Flood infested, repetitive slog, you can probably remove getting turned around and lost multiple times from your list of its aggravations now.

“Ugh. The Library…”

While discussing potentially unpopular changes, let’s talk sound. The music has been completely rerecorded for the Anniversary edition, and it’s mostly great. The biggest issue I have here is with mixing – there were definitely many points where the music was drowning out the in-game dialog, which is an issue I don’t remember having with the original game. They did eventually add the option to toggle between soundtracks to keep the purists happy, which is probably a good thing given how beloved the Halo: CE soundtrack is. The sound effects have also been completely redone. Again, they did a great job here, and most people probably won’t even notice, but some of the effects do indeed sound radically different which I’m sure irks quite a lot of the more hardcore Halo fan-base. While I believe they’ve included an option to use classic sound effects when starting a single player session in a recent patch, it’s still not instantly toggleable like the graphics are, unfortunately.

As I mentioned, I went through the campaign in “Heroic” difficulty, which is way more of a pain in the ass than I remembered it being. There were definitely a few sections where I had to bash my head against the scenario I found my last checkpoint throwing me into over and over until I managed to work out a strategy to survive, or at least had a rare bit of good luck with. Honestly, this didn’t feel much better than “save scumming” through the difficulty, and was seriously frustrating. Maybe this is just a case of me getting older and my l33t FPS skillz withering away though. Finally, as if Heroic didn’t make me hate myself enough, Anniversary added the “skull” system found in later Halo games, and while I did go out of my way to collect all of the skulls, I certainly didn’t activate any of them as part of my normal playthrough. Searching for them was a fun diversion, at least!

“As annoying as the later levels can be, they have their moments.”

Throwing back to a complaint I’ve always had about Halo: CE, I hate how goddamn repetitive and long some of the levels in its campaign are. I’m looking at you “Assault on the Control Room”! At least the checkpoints come frequently enough to subdivide the levels into more bite-sized chunks pretty well. The infamous fact that you then have to backtrack through a few of them in later levels on top of that still almost feels like a direct middle finger from the developers to the player though. These rehashed areas tend to play out just differently enough to just barely work. The saving grace here is that, despite all of this, the campaign overall is fairly short. Again, this just barely works for me, and thankfully Bungie never really repeated these mistakes again in later entries.

Halo: CE’s story has always been a little odd. The overall plot, which I’ll recap in my next entry, is easy enough to understand, sure, but there are so many vaugeries in its details and its backstory that only later get fleshed out as the series progresses, and even then, I’m guessing (having never read them) those are mostly only truly explained in the novels. The Anniversary edition adds a hidden terminal to each level that can be triggered for a short animated cutscene that goes a long way to help explain flesh out the origins of Installation 04, Guilty Spark 343, and the Flood. I have to imagine that some of these would be utterly bewildering to new players, but to a Halo veteran like me they’re pretty damn cool and very much appreciated.

“I never get sick of The Silent Cartographer, especially in co-op!”

You know, Halo: CE still managed to be a fun ride despite its old age and more well-known shortcomings. The first time you load up a Warthog with marines and go tearing down the beaches in “The Silent Cartographer”, out maneuver a charging Hunter to land that final shotgun blast to the small of its back, or perfectly stick a plasma grenade to a rampaging Banshee as it dives down from high above you, you’ll forget all about this game being almost 20 years old. To me, it remains a reasonably timeless game, and the Anniversary enhancements should only help it to feel that way a little longer.

Now onto a game whose campaign I’ve somehow only completed once, Halo 2!

Screenshots taken from the Steam community for the PC version of Halo: The Master Chief Collection.