Anticipation was heavy Monday as I awaited the remake of Halo CE. About 8pm local (EST) I took a shower, got dressed in appropriate Halo attire (UNSC flat cap, the kind MSgt. Johnson wears) as well as a t-shirt sporting a Mark V/Football helmet mashup title “The Chiefs,” and grabbed my “guns.” I have a Covenant Plasma Rifle and two Plasma pistols.  Both were made years ago and I was fortunate enough to get them on sale. I only took one of the pistols and the rifle. The are kind of like Laser Tag props. I brought them for a kind of show and tell, much to the delight of some of the other folks in line.

On that note, I was first in line as I usually am at these sort of things. This was at my local Gamestop, were I know most of the staff.

I hadn’t intended on buying the game guide, but since I was going to get 20% off, and it does have some cool art in it, I thought, what the heck. So I bought it.

At the stroke of midnight I got my copy of the game and the book and proceeded home with a short stop to a convenience store for some late night munchies to have while playing.

When I got home a problem arose. I had NO AUDIO! I had turned on my TV and XBOX and no audio whatsoever. Frustrating indeed. After downloading the Anniversary maps, Grunt Funeral Skull, and the Male Master Chief Avatar item, I shut down both the TV and XBOX and turned them back on. Much to my relief the familiar sound of the XBOX “swish” hummed and I knew I was on my way.

First thing I did was go to the multiplayer maps and checked them out in Forge. *NOTE: do this and use the “Juicy” item to really pop out the color of the maps. Wow they look fantastic. Even without Juicy applied though, the maps look great.

I gamed until about 3:30am, then hit the sack to play later.

I’ve played the first three missions co-op on Heroic. Enjoyed them so far and the graphics are SO much better than 10 years ago. Heroic is a bit too easy though, so I’m going to go for Legendary from here on out. Gameplay feels different to me. I guess that’s because I’ve been hardcore playing Reach for the last 14 months that I’ve gotten used to that style. It’s great to have the overpowered magnum again. The Sniper is awesome and I LOVE no recoil! I do however find myself missing the ability to sprint. So the game moves a little slower for me. One thing to note, the audio on my disc isn’t synched up correctly. The audio plays about 1 second before the mouths move in the video. I can brush this off, but I hope that’s not a precursor of things to come. Other than that small hiccup though, the rest of the game is great and I’ve come up against NO other glitches thus far.