Today I set apart the whole day so my friend and I could play some Halo Reach, unfortunately I only managed to play three games after my friend had left at quarter to eleven in the evening. So what went wrong? Well it's mostly my fault but partly Bungie's. First of all I will start with what I did wrong.

1. I foolishly believed a friend who told me the Beta was starting at 1pm, turns out he misread and that it was 1pm Eastern Time in America, making it about 6pm here in the UK.

2. I accidently cancelled the Halo Reach download at 97% by thinking I could press the guide button to see if anybody was playing it at the time without it cancelling the download. I could not.

So those were my mistakes, but I was not totally at fault. The download took stupidly long, probably due to overwhelming demand the download was stuck at 1% for about half an hour, taking a fair few hours to get to 97%. Restarting it was a lot quicker than the first time; the 97% mark was reached in an hour and half this time. Sadly by the time the game had downloaded, at ten o'clock, my friend had left. It was a shame but at least, so I thought, I could get some Reach time in. A friend on MSN was telling me how he couldn't connect with the demo downloaded due to the game taking forever to load matchmaking and eventually telling him the servers were unavailable. This made me feel a bit better because it seemed I wasn't the only one having issues but little was I to know that after the four hour download (well downloads really) had completed that I would have the same issue.

Needless to say I was giddy with glee to be in the beta, I started to play and was told it was loading matchmaking. I then realised I may be having the long load issue my friend spoke of but no matter, I will just wait for a while; it will be loaded by half ten surely. I entertained myself by customising the Spartan, giving him the Unicorn logo (the logo of me and my friends fictional halo clan, a clan formed as a joke due to our all night Halo 3 marathon) and trying to customise his armour. I was then told I needed to buy new armour bits with in game cash, this was a slight bummer because it reminded me once again I couldn't play but I wasn't that concerned because I had my nice blue and white unicorn emblazoned Spartan ready to take on the world.

At about twenty past ten the game started to tell me the servers were down, I couldn't connect at the moment, please try again later. I tried everything knowing this was just a little glitch, I continually quit the menu and reloaded it, reloaded the game, turned the Xbox off and on again but nothing worked. Still I got the message that it wasn't available. So I left it and started to write a vaguely angry blog about my own stupidity and my slight annoyance with Bungie. When I looked up a bit later I saw that I matchmaking had just started. I was in!

My first game in the Beta was some kind of capture the flag thing; I'm not sure how it worked because everybody seemed to be playing it as team death match. By those rules I did pretty well, I came second highest in the game with kills and had what may have been the best k/D ratio, a smashing +9. The game itself was fantastic, it is definitely Halo, and really there hasn't been that much change. The weapons have all been redone but really they are just slightly altered versions of the classic weaponry, with a few really cool twists and one or two new death machines. The gameplay was of course solid and the inclusion of the different load outs is awesome. However I only tried two and the second one only by accident. When one of the load outs includes a jetpack, you go for that one. The other one I accidently chose one was the sprinting one, which was pretty useless. It's all about the jet pack. This rocket propelled backpack really did change it up a bit, now you have to be looking due to low flying Spartans jetting around everywhere. The new heights you can reach mean that new areas of the map open up, the ability to fly on to the roof means you have to watch your surroundings. This may seem like a good vantage point, but now people expect you to be high up, staying exposed like that is a recipe for a quick bit of lead to the head, which of course usually results in dead due to overexposure to bullets. The map itself was well designed and had a blood gulch or high ground look to it. This was sadly the only map I got to play.

After this first game I was ready for more but this was not destined to be for a while, the veto system has changed a lot. You now get four choices, all different modes but some on the same maps, and you'd guess that the one with the most votes went through. I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be the case and maps kept getting a majority but the voting kept failing apparently and it just kept starting again. It got to the point where one map had a complete majority but still the vote didn't count. Eventually I got into a more standard capture the flag on the same map and played this twice. This was still great fun and I didn't do so well but I still got some impressive kills. It's always good to drop in on three enemies with your jetpack and come out alive with two dead at your hands and one that managed to run away. That felt pretty cool I must say. However my fun was short lived because matchmaking messed up again and I was back at a menu. At this point I decided I only wanted to play team slayer because that's how I was playing it anyway, so I picked the Arena Slayer playlist. Then the game told me once more that the servers were unavailable so I turned it off and went to go write this.

So overall Halo Reach seems to have had a rocky launch, which is surprising due to Bungie's pedigree, I would like to think it is just me and my friend how had these issues but they seem to be more widespread. Overall Reach seems to be a fantastic game as far as multiplayer goes but it's definitely not the dramatic shift some fans were expecting. At its heart it is just Halo 3 with slightly different weapons and jetpacks. But doesn't that sound great?