Forum let's plays: delivered by Hanako
Welcome one and all to Hanako's legendary thread of quality forum let's plays! For our first game I decided I'd play the Halo: Combat Evolved decomp, this is very typical of the person who will declare at every instance the endless joys that Halo CE presents at every turn.
For a little bit of history with this game. Halo 3 was one of the first games I played as a kid and served as my introduction to the concept that video games can be exploited and broken by abusing the mechanics given to you, that leads to me later getting into Halo Custom Edition where you had HEK to script your own multiplayer levels in the first Halo. Halo served as my first introduction to creating things using programming and also influenced a lot of my interests outside of video games, I first heard Feel Good Inc in some YouTube video of a guy demoing his trainer for the Halo Demo and some Garry's Mod showcase video with Halo stuff was how I played Half-Life 2. Pretty much, by proxy of how young I was, this game served as a platform for me to explore a bunch of interests.
Naturally, I was pretty hyped to see that the Halo decomp had reached a stage where you could play it on a PC, naturally I was also upset that I had to run the Windows build in wine because the linux port doesn't come with SDL3 for some reason.
We aren't doing the campaign today (Or maybe ever). Instead, we are digging into the multiplayer. The main thing that is being thrown around was the new 128 player servers, something I knew I had to try, And with such riveting server names as CharlieKirk and the oddly foreboding Moss how could I not dig my teeth in? Sadly Moss was full and the CharlieKirk server crashed the second I attempted to join, leaving me to try out the RandomGuns 24/7 server.
After years it was really good to play a version of Halo multiplayer that wasn't either locked to 30fps or had a bunch of issues caused from a rushed conversion of game logic to being agnostic to framerate. There was a real issue with network lag which I assume is related to the fact that the multiplayer mode is just System Link running over an internet connection.
Next my eyesight was set on this CampaignChaos server. There isn't much to be said about a standard match of Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer, but there is something to say about 31 people doing a campaign level.
On my first attempt I just got a flat out crash when joining, which wasn't the outcome I wanted, but after what seemed to be a restart of the server I attempted to join a second time.
I found myself in a fucking BLOODBATH of a Halo level, so much shit had been shot the enemies couldn't even bleed because we were at constant decal limit.
It was chaotic enough that I wish I had the Dragon Dragoon soundtrack blaring as I was doing this. Sadly it actually made it way more boring to play, each encounter comes down to a human wave that kills everything through the power of grenade spam and endless Assault Rifle fire.
I got bored and decided I'd go run off to the door that everyone was about to open and get in first, turns out if you do this it breaks the checkpoint system, everyone got teleported away from the switch and got softlocked at the door I went to. This initiated a mass hysteria of killing each other and attempting to leave while being teleported back or falling into the pink void below.
Eventually the guy ended the server and all 30 people playing did not move to another server, meaning I did my usual stunt of leveling a servers player count.
My quest did not end there! As a Rat Race Zombies map was calling my name, the zombies gamemode in Halo Custom Edition was the same as the one in Halo 2 except you used a skull instead of an energy sword. However, instead I got a PVE game mode where a hoard of questionable AI bots would run at you. This is fine until you see that they have no shield so they can be killed with a single Magnum shot.
It would be much more fun if I at any point felt any stress from having to manage the undead but alas, I'll stick to Garry's Mod for my Zombie Survival.
Finally, I decided I'd end my journey with a look at the server titled Tanks 24/7.
I would learn very fast that this levels name was a lie, there in fact was not a constant stream of tanks on the map, instead it was just your average game of Sidewinder, which is great because it's a personal favourite map.
I got to take in the scenery and blast some of the best snipes my bedroom walls ever saw and concluded my journey with this new bastion of modifying Halo.
Generally I think it's a really cool project, but is also still early days enough that I don't think it's become the definitive method to play Halo, although it could be! I'm excited for when they can get custom maps working, because 128 players on extinction would be one of the coolest things ever, there's already a demo of someone doing it on YouTube.