I still have to come up with a good title..

Have you ever experienced physical fear to move away from the corner you’re crouching into?

I just did. For the longest 7 minutes of ..ehm.. my life.

A carnage. A disaster. Totally in the hands of the adversary team, whose players were at least so decent not to teabag their waiting-to-respawn prey.

Well, this post marks my first week of playing Halo Reach.

Great single player campaign, lovely moments (often related to a great soundtrack!), and really powerful storytelling to keep all the action tied up.

There were a bit of wtf moments, some unclear passages, and I totally did not get what happened to one of the spartans of the Noble team, at the end of the game.. Reason more to replay it, increasing the difficulty level.

Well, this actually brings up some interesting things. In this game, increasing the difficulty level does not mean more adversaries less vulnerable to bullets. The harder the level, the more aggressive the AI gets. Flanking maneuvers, grenade trajectories that know where you will go even before you decide to do so and much much more.

As I read in an other article, I totally agree with the statement that playing this Halo at higher difficulties will make a better player out of you.

And then the multiplayer experience. How the fuck didn’t I discover it before?

It’s a whole game by itself. It adds an enormous value to the package.

I was initially very skeptical.. I thought I would have been the classic noob, getting shot by everybody at any moment, constantly respawning and making my team loose. But no, the interesting thing is that the story went much differently.

The system has a really good way to organize balanced matches between players of similar skill.

Even if in the beginning I often ended up just trying to survive more than an average 14 seconds, with time and practice the game got much more interesting, and balanced. If you have Halo, or any other game offering the multiplayer experience, I really suggest you to give it a shot!

Here the link to my service record! http://www.bungie.net/Stats/Reach/Default.aspx?player=baroquenroll

And so.. was it worthy the money and the anticipation? Hell yea, without a doubt!

Quoting a guy from Bungie: “Two men enter. The better man leaves. The lesser man is respawning. And that’s Halo.”

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Remember Reach, this is the name of the campaign that will market the release of the latest Bungie’s game, Halo Reach.

In the past I read about “I Love Bees“, an award winning viral marketing campaign and Alternate Reality Game that promoted the release of Halo 2.
I was expecting something big, some really cool idea. I am not disappointed.

I found the site of the campaign querying Google for “remember reach”. It was a bit of subconscious: That is the last sentence of one of the trailers previously posted, and I wasn’t expecting to come across anything particularly new.
First result, rememberreach.org. Not the original Halo Reach pages from the developers, pages that I visited days ago. It doesn’t even show up in the first page of result when trying to Google “Halo Reach”.
So yea, curious site. A funny robot arm, 5 Halo characters represented as dotted silhouettes, a couple of trailers.
And then this mysterious ”Add your point of light” button, unusable for those not having a Facebook account (like me! wohoo!).

Ok, it took me some time to realize it, but practically by pressing that button you log into Facebook and then you are given the possibility to add your “point of light” to the main picture.
I guess that initially that picture was blank, with only the five luminous sparks marking the navigation across the different characters biographies.
Click after click, facebook login after facebook login (I guess there must be some viral element in there), the points of light begin to mark a recognizable shape, a distinguishable silhouette, that of a monument to the Noble Team, the main characters of the game.

I love the idea that every user contribution helps creating this collective experience, developed in a way that can be witnessed live.
A simple but monumental idea, that will for sure be talked about by core gamers and not.

The “points of light” in fact are positioned by a robotic arm, which seems to be (for what I read on dedicated forums) displayed via a live feed of an actual robot, that is probably piloted by the coordinates chosen by each user when placing their points.
Quoting a post that I read afterwards, “the monument IS literally being constructed by us, the users“.

I find this campaign really thrilling (i was ecstatic when I found out about the “points of light” collective experience) and I encourage you to visit the site to discover the rest of the goodies, and see them in action..!
Here the link to the site of the Remember Reach campaign.

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• Halo Reach

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