Throwback Thursday: Halo 2600

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I was thinking of creating a new feature where I play some old games. Mostly because I want to play some old games. There are so many games from before I owned systems and before I had a job whereby I could buy my own games. So most of these games will be new to me, but it’ll have to do.Halo2600

For the first entry, let’s go all the way back to 2010 and the Atari 2600. If that doesn’t seem right to you, then you might be on to something. Halo 2600 is basically Atari 2600 homebrew inspired by the Halo series of games. From Wikipedia:

Halo CartHalo 2600 was written by Ed Fries, former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft, who was involved in Microsoft’s acquisition of Halo developers Bungie Studios. Fries decided to create a version of Halo for the Atari 2600 after being inspired by a book called Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort. The Atari 2600 had such limited RAM, only 128 bytes, that drawing Master Chief was difficult, and creating a game with other characters was even more so. Fries later stated that making the game taught him that constraint is sometimes a fuel for creativity.

The game itself is pretty small, even by 2600 standards. There’s a master chief sprite and a few enemy sprites and a few different levels. The controls are actually pretty good – a good 8 directions and on the ice level you continue to slide. My biggest beef with the game is the gun… You don’t start with it. Remember playing Goldeneye and respawning without a weapon — it was an instant death sentence and we’ve grown since then. Well, not so in Halo 2600, you have to find the gun before you have it. Also when you or an enemy fires the gun the sound is like a cannon firing. The difficulty is on par with actual 2600 games as it’s mostly about memorizing screens and enemy actions, and secondly about finding your way around. The Legendary Difficulty Mode (start the game a second time after first completion) is just the regular game, but the main character moves slower… Does that means that when I’m drunk, I’m playing life in Legendary Difficulty Mode? Now go try it yourself.

Final Rating: 3 Cortanas on a scale of At-Least-It’s-Not-Halo-2