This is, I think, my fourth time playing through the original Halo campaign – though in a variety of ways over the years.  There was a run-through of the original back in 2007, then I used the “Anniversary” remake as the send-off game for my Xbox 360 in 2015.  I thought that was pretty appropriate.

Then, in 2018 I decided I was going to immerse myself in Deep Halo Lore and went through a months-long process of reading all the Halo Novels and playing all of the Halo games again before starting Halo 5, this time using the Master Chief Collection on what was probably an Xbox One X by that point.

I can’t remember very much of it, and I think the experience was a bit ruined because it still didn’t give me much background for Halo 5 because a lot of the story was locked behind some weird mission mode. So I should probably never do anything like that again.

When Halo Infinite came out, I didn’t feel like putting myself through the process again, so I just played it.  I quite liked it, as an aside.

Now I’m starting Halo: Campaign Evolved, and…

well, it’s Halo.  It’s prettier, and I understand they have made some tweaks to later levels that I am looking forward to, but it’s still mostly the same game so far, just played using a DualSense this time.

It really does bring home the reason I decided to become a filthy console peasant again, though.  I booted it and had the option of “performance mode” or “quality mode” and then some toggles for Motion Blur, Screen Shake, Chromatic Aberration and Film Grain.  I did not need to decide between four different kinds of hair and agonize over which one was going to give me the Best Hair Experience.

For the record: I left motion blur on but turned off the other three.  The shaking during the Pillar of Autumn segment was giving me motion sickness and I think Halo looks best with a cleaner picture but there was something about the camera movement when I was turning that made me want a touch of blur effect.

Chromatic Aberration and Film Grain have their place in games – Alien: Isolation is one very obvious example of one where I feel they work – but Halo should be shiny and clean.  I feel this quite strongly.

I do hope Forza Horizon 6 also still manages a PS5 release.  The XBOX team seems to have realized that exclusives are good for a platform, and I genuinely hope they can turn their fortune around and give Sony a LITTLE competition in the market, but I’m going to be a little selfish there.

Oh, and for the record:  As hard as I tried, I could not find a single power socket on the Pillar of Autumn, and I certainly can’t judge any power sockets I might run across on the Halo itself by Earth standards.  So there will be no nit-picking of that this time.