OK, so:

Back in 2002, early 2003, Microsoft rolled out the Hype Train for an upcoming game called Brute Force.  In retrospect, they probably poured the hype on a little TOO strongly, as it got a bit of a backlash when it came out and wasn’t the Next Halo… but I digress.

I’d played the demo version included with a magazine and quite liked it, and it came out shortly before my birthday, so my loving and thoughtful wife made sure that I had a copy.

Keep in mind, I hadn’t played Halo, or really any similar games on the Xbox up to that point.  I’d spent an awful lot of time playing Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball and Panzer Dragoon Orta.

With those as my gaming foundation, Brute Force was Hard.  I died over and over again just getting through level 3, then finally gave up on the game as a lost cause thanks to an escort mission on level 4 where I simply couldn’t keep the guy I was escorting from running in front of me and getting to enemies before I had a chance to clear them.

It didn’t help that, while the game looked great, the main character had all the personality of a rock.

Not an interesting rock, either.

Four years later I decide: Yeah, the main character is still pretty damn uninteresting, but I’m going to man up and and least TRY to play it.

I got through the first six levels in a sitting.  I barely even noticed the escort mission this time.  I’m not going to do anything silly like complain about this; I’m just going to feel a little silly about all the bitching I’ve done about how I really wanted to like this game, but they had to put in a stupid impossible escort mission and blah blah blah blah.