People who knows me, know that I've never been particularily excited about the Halo franchise. I don't know why, but somehow I've never cared for the games despite how good they may be. The story is nothing special, the gameplay is OK, but the weapons both looks and feels like shooting with plastic guns at weird aliens. Why Halo has generated such an enormous fanbase, which is bigger than the population of Norway, is something I never understood. It's not that I hate the series, I just don't see what's so special about it.

Recently, a friend lend me a copy of Halo 3: ODST to try to make me see what Halo fans have been coming in their pants about since 2001. Ok, fine, I may have asked for it because I sort of want to play the reach beta, but that's totally justifiable because of two words: FU*KING JETPACKS! So anyway, I popped in the disc and started the single player campain.

The first thing that struck me was the awkward controls. I kept forgetting that LT was grendaes not aiming down sights, which made for a lot of wasted ammo. My second complaint is how the screen turns red when my shield depletes. This is nothing new in FPS games, but it happens way to fast, and after just a couple of hits the screen turned red and blurry which made it difficult to see enemies. This also made me take cover more frequently than neccessary. I don't know why or if I'm just imagining things, but it seemed to me like the aiming wasn't as smooth as say MW2, so I played worse than I normally would which led me to die... alot.

Granted I did play on heroic even though I've never really played much Halo before, but I'm fine with dying as long as it's a fair challenge, but there definitely was a lot of cheap deaths. Since Halo is heavily vehicle focused, whenever I was on foot against a vehicle, I could die from a simple shot even if I had full health. There was one sequence where I had to defend a location against hordes of locu- I mean covenant, and one of them was driving a big, ridiculous thing which could take me out with one shot. So I died, and then I had to rekill all the enemies again. I finally managed to kill it on my fifth try or something, but then my biggest problem with the game happened. After completing the chapter I was somehow sent to a previous mission I had already completed. It wasn't untill I was halfway through that I realized this and I was forced to do the entire chapter again. The same thing happened so I guess I'm fu*ked...

I did get to try the Reach beta, and I gotta say I was pleasantly surprised. The controls were better, the weapons looked cooler, the jetpack was awesome and I had a really good time with it. I liked how you can take more damage than in say MW2, which means less people killing you before you can even react. I have high hoped for Halo: Reach, and hopefully it won't let me down, wops, jinxed it... Damn.