Quick Thoughts- Halo 4 (Xbox 360)

Hello dear readers and welcome back to the game room, where we're always slightly behind the times but still ready to offer an in-depth analysis. Somewhat.

Anyway, today's behind-the-times review comes in the form of Halo 4, which I decided to pick back up recently because I wanted to shoot aliens and I can't afford an Xbox One, and also because I realized I never completed the game on Legendary mode, the hardest difficulty level. Released in 2012, Halo 4 was, from what I understand, lampooned by fans because it strayed too far into the "Call Of Duty" realm that has nearly consumed all modern first person shooters. I agree with that to an extent, but I don't think it necessarily "killed the series," as some have claimed.

Picking up three years after the events of Halo 3, the Master Chief and his A.I. companion Cortana have been drifting aimlessly in space when they are suddenly attacked and boarded by a Covenant armada. This, within the first 2 or 3 minutes of the entire game, is kind of where they lost me.

See, by the end of the events of Halo 3, the humans had reached a resolution with the Covenant, finally ending the long standing conflict between the two. However, three years after Halo 3 came out, a prequel to the original Halo was released called Halo: Reach. I have never actually played this game, but from what I understand, it takes place shortly before the events of the first game, where the humans are at the apex of their war with the Covenant. Naturally this game would have to portray the Covenant as enemies again, and they did so by totally redesigning all of the Covenant aliens and making them even more intimidating and fierce looking than they were in the original games.

That's all fine and good, but what does this have to do with Halo 4? Well, Halo 4 portrays the Covenant exactly the same way that Reach does. But wait, aren't we friends with the Covenant now? The game explains this away in that Chief and Cortana just run into a "rouge fleet." Oh come on. That's the best you can do? You couldn't just think of another explanation as to why the two factions would be at war again? It all just seemed like a really lame excuse to keep the style of Reach intact while continuing the main story. 

The Covenant was made menacing again thanks to the powers of exposition.

Anyway, that minor detail aside, Chief and Cortana have some other problems as well: Cortana is is beginning to experience "rampancy," which basically means she's falling apart. Thinly vieled metaphors for neurodegenerative disease aside, the other problem they must deal with is the Prometheans, the new threat that has joined forces with the Covenant. Who are the Prometheans? Uh...something something something Forerunners. You know, the beings that built all of the Halo installations. Sorry, I pretty much skipped all the cutscenes this time around due to lack of interest.

The Prometheans are being controlled by the Didact, the big bad of this game who was imprisoned in a floating ball for some reason...and now...uh..he wants to destroy the universe...or something...

Sorry, I'm just gonna stop trying to explain the story and discuss the gameplay.

Halo 4 throws a lot of new things at you in the realm of controls. There's now running, special item usage (i.e. jetpacks, shields, hologram-decoys, etc.) and a lot of new weapon mechanics. Actually, potentially none of these things are "new" because they may have already been implemented in Halo: Reach, but they were new to me, so that's what I'm going with here.

Again, I can see what they were complaining about here in making it more like a Call Of Duty game, but it still does feel like Halo to an extent. You've got all the classic enemies from the Covenant dropping by to throw a plasma grenade at your face, plus the new Prometheans, as I mentioned before. The Prometheans are all kinds of annoying. You thought the Elites were tough to kill? It seems like the developers intentionally made the Prometheans obnoxious just to give you that much more of a headache while you're trekking through a level on legendary mode.

They come in a few different flavors: there's these little dog-like things called Crawlers which will come running in and surround you in a circle. They aren't too dangerous on their own, but a group of them can easily overwhelm you and since they'll be running around at high speed, it can be a pretty frustrating affair to take them all out. Then there's the big guys, the so-called Promethean Knights, who I think look a lot like the aliens from the movie Independence Day. These guys will do everything in the book to annoy you. They can teleport away when being fired at, they'll use heavier weapons on you (some of which can instantly kill you), they'll run and hide when their shields are down and when you chase after them to finish them off, you'll likely be attacked by a group of Crawlers which will buy the Knights enough time to escape.

 It's all I thought about when I saw them.

But by far the most obnoxious enemies are the Watchers, which are these little drone things that buzz around in the air above the Knights and Crawlers. These things were specifically made just to piss you off. They don't really attack you directly, but they'll provide shields for other enemies, they'll catch grenades that you throw and hurl them back at you, and they'll even resurrect Knights which you've just killed if you aren't paying attention. And worst of all, these little pricks will quickly fly away the second you attack them. It doesn't take that many shots to take them out, but if you focus on one and start to shoot it, it will swiftly buzz away and you'll need to chase it down, leaving you open to attack from other enemies. This got me killed more times than I want to admit to and made me hate these things so much I'd be screaming at my TV just trying to destroy all of them.

However, like everything else in Halo, you can certainly make it through with a little perseverance. There's a boatload of hidden easter eggs to find and achievements to unlock if you wish to squeeze every drop of content out of the game, but I honestly couldn't really be bothered anymore- I just wanted to beat it on Legendary and call it a day.

And so I did, first playing through on Heroic mode before switching over to Legendary for one more go-through. There are certainly a few high points of the game. Among my favorites was getting the opportunity to actually pilot a Pelican, which are the classic drop ships that you had previously only hitched a ride on in previous games. Getting to fly it around and fire crazy powerful weapons at enemy ships was a ton of fun, even though you only get to do it for a fairly miniscule portion of the game. My other favorite moment was the chapter "Reclaimer" in which you rode around on the massive "Mammoth" which looks a lot like the Sand-Crawlers from Star Wars and provides you with a slew of heavy weaponry and vehicles to battle the Covenant. You also get this little gizmo called the "Target Designator" which allows you to lock onto certain targets and then annihilate them with a massive laser from space. Pretty awesome.

Ever wanted to fire a giant laser from the sky? This was your chance. No, I have no idea what you mean by "Gears of War did it first."

But by the end, I didn't quite feel the same sense of achievement upon beating the game on Legendary as I did with the previous entries in the series. I don't know, maybe I've just gotten more cynical as time has gone on (the original came out nearly SIXTEEN YEARS AGO after all), but it just kind of felt like "eh, whatever" compared to the epic finales of prior games. Oh well.

In all, it does feel somewhat different from the previous Halo games I've played. I suppose that's largely due to the departure of Bungie studies, which had developed all of the prior games in the primary series, but I can't tell you for sure. It just has a much different feel to it. Does that make it bad? Not really. Forgettable maybe, but certainly not bad. At the very least, worth a playthrough if you were a fan of the originals. And this isn't even getting into the multiplayer portion of the game, which I didn't play nearly as much as I did with Halo 2 and 3 but still provided quite a bit of fun.

To sum it up, no, Halo 4 is not as good as its predecessors. But did it kill the entire series? I wouldn't say so, because if I had enough time and effort and energy, I still would've purchased an Xbox One and Halo 5. And maybe I will anyway someday, long after both of them have faded from the public spotlight (I kind of feel like they already are). But until then, I'll just have to stick to killing grunts the old fashioned way on the old fashioned consoles. Thanks for reading.

Gaming Memories: Reaching Level 50 In Halo 3

Hello dear readers and welcome back to the game room. No collection updates to speak of today, but I have something instead that I wrote recently. I wanted to revisit something I started off the blog with and then abandoned shortly after as it proved a bit too ambitious for a recurring series: recollecting personal gaming memories. I wrote a whole huge 4-part saga discussing my memories of playing games in the Resident Evil franchise (which you can find here you're interested in reading it), but haven't really done anything else. So today I'm going to revisit a moment that stands out to me as a tremendous accomplishment as a gamer- not even necessarily because it was all that difficult of a thing to do, but more so because of the story behind it and the long path to victory that ensued.

I know I usually talk about older games, but there was a time in my life where I was hip with the world and up to speed on the latest and greatest gaming trends. I'm talking about playing games online, over Xbox Live. Obviously, this has become ubiquitous these days; online gaming is everywhere and almost everything. However, back in the halcyon days of the early-mid 2000's it was a little unprecedented, at least to the mainstream of console gamers (obviously PC gaming, which I've never been into, is an entirely different story). I remember that buying a wireless router and getting into a matchmaking game in Halo 2 for the first time seemed like the coolest thing in the entire world. For the first time in my life, I was playing video games with other people who weren't sitting on the couch right next to me- they were halfway across the planet! The concept alone seemed unimaginable to me.

But there I was, gunning people down in what had already become one of my favorite video game franchises ever, only on its second installment. It was mayhem. I spent days on end locked in my room doing essentially the same thing over and over again but with different people every time (and sometimes friends too). I stayed up all night, I didn't go out with friends, and my eyes were bloodshot from sitting 5 feet away from the TV for hours on end. I remember feeling like I wanted to be better at it than everyone I knew. Better than all my friends, better than everyone I faced online. Now, I'm definitely no pro gamer- I never was, never will be, and nor would I claim to be anything close. However, I will say that I am at least halfway decent at first person shooters, most likely one standard deviation above the mean, for you statistics nerds out there. The point is, I took my quest to be the best that I could be at Halo very seriously back in the day. But alas, the climb to the top was certainly not an easy one.

The early days of Xbox Live were kind of like the wild west. As I mentioned before, online connectivity between consoles was sort of a burgeoning market at the time. Sure, it had existed in some rudimentary forms previously, but it really didn't reach the mainstream until the early 2000's. Because of this, Microsoft didn't really have that sophisticated of a system for dealing with their own online market in the beginning. As a result, Xbox Live was overrun with rampant cheating. Modders who hacked the game to basically allow them automatically kill you, so-called "standbyers" who would use some complicated means of causing other plays to lag while they were free to win the game on their own, you name it- anyone who had the means to screw someone else out of winning a match for their own gain was free to do so, virtually free of any ramifications. Halo 2 also had a plethora of weird glitches that users constantly exploited during matchmaking in order to gain an unfair advantage over players who didn't know how to do so for themselves (admittedly, even I too used the "super bounce" glitch during matchmaking periodically). It was total anarchy.

Halo 2 had a pretty simple ranking system- the more games of any matchmaking type that you won, the higher your rank number got, the highest being level 50. For some odd reason, levels in the high 40s to 50 were denoted by symbols like the Halo ring, a sun or moon, etc. That's neither here nor there, but I remember one particularly disgruntled Xbox user who rambled on over my headset about how anyone with a symbol ranking was not "legit." He was right though- if you saw that your opponents had those symbols, even before a game started you knew that you were done for, and that precious rank you worked so hard to achieve would take a hit. The highest I ever even managed to get myself to was level 34 before I was decimated by cheaters. I loved the game, but after match upon match upon match of getting unfairly beaten down, I grew incredibly weary of the experience. It made me hate playing the game not even very long after I had learned to love it.

Symbols denoting levels 44-50 in Halo 2's matchmaking. If you saw one of these in the lobby before the game, you pretty much knew you were screwed.

About three years after Halo 2 was released came Halo 3, this time on the next generation Xbox 360 console, and you bet your sweet ass I was one of those people parked out in front of my local game store at midnight waiting in line to get my copy on September 25th, 2007. By now, Xbox live had been totally revamped for the new console and things were quite different. Microsoft seemed to have finally gained control over their online empire and now monitored carefully for the aforementioned types of cheating. Any type was met with a swift ban, and finally we were all free to play and rely solely on our skill to win. This time, I wasn't going to let anything stop me on my way to reaching level 50. I played endlessly in the games' "Lone Wolves" matchmaking mode, a free-for-all battle in which 8 players duked it out against one another for 25 kills to win. I was pretty good at it- I even managed to make it to level 47. I was so close- only 3 levels away!

Halo 3 had a bit of a different system for raising your rank than Halo 2- ranks were determined individually by different matchmaking types. For instance, I could have a rank of 47 in Lone Wolves, but only a 7 in another type like Team Skirmish. However, your highest achieved rank in any game type was always displayed proudly in your user profile, the highest once again being level 50. Not only that, but you were also assigned a military rank for higher levels- such as Captain, Colonel, and Brigadier- and only if you managed to reach level 50 would be awarded with the coveted distinction of General.

I had come so far in Lone Wolves, but it got incredibly difficult to raise my rank at that high of a level. Lone Wolves was almost entirely built on preying upon others- as in, using every dirty trick in the book like camping, stealing kills from others and grabbing hold of high powered weapons and powerups as soon as they spawned. For me and my ridiculous sense of gaming morality to a fault, I could never take enough advantage to get over the proverbial hump. So, I had to start over from the bottom by trying my hand in Team Slayer.

Another thing I should mention is that I never really used the headset that came with the console or listened to other people in-game. This is almost a requirement of Team Slayer, but I made things a bit more difficult on myself by purposely choosing not to do so. Additionally, I never joined up with parties- even in a team game, I always chose to go it alone. Even still, I got better and better. I rose all the way to level 48; however, it was there that I hit a wall again. I would go on long steaks of alternating wins and losses, never gaining any ground. I would win several games in a row, just waiting to rank up to 49 but never seeming to get there, only to go on and lose several more in a row. I wondered if I would be perpetually stuck at 48 forever. I was good, but not good enough to rise to the next level. This went on for weeks. I remember reading somewhere that the ranking system was complex and through some sort of algorithm, it always left you at the rank it believed you should be at, and once you reached your limit there was no way to change it. Not knowing if this was true or not, I started to believe that I would never get any higher than level 48.

Even still, I refused to quit. Despite playing as a loner, despite never coordinating with my teammates through headset, I pushed on. I had come so far, gotten so close- the glory of a General rank was too enticing to give up. Finally, my day came. I was on a winning streak and every game I was kicking ass. And then, like a shimmering beacon of hope, I broke through- I ranked up to 49. I was ecstatic; the rumors weren't true, I wouldn't be stuck at 48 forever. However, I knew this wasn't the end- there was still one last level standing between me and the illustrious 50. But now, there was absolutely no way I was giving up. I was too close. I trudged forward, once again facing alternating wins and losses. I wasn't sure how long it would take this time. With every loss I feared that my rank would be lowered to 48 once again. I even kept track of every win and loss, charting out my progress. After days on end, I was trending upward. I knew the end had to be somewhere in sight.

 My actual "charts" of my progress in matchmaking wins, dated February 13th, 2008 and March 8th, 2008. Up arrows are wins, and down arrows are losses. Note the long periods of back and forth wins and losses for both 48-49 and 49-50. Also, apologies for my terrible handwriting. It hasn't gotten a whole lot better almost 9 years later.

And then it happened. I remember the game clearly- my team was getting beaten down from the very beginning. I had won eight of the last 10 games and desperately wanted to keep my streak going, so I buckled down and willed my team to victory. I had the overwhelming majority of kills on my team and despite them dragging me down, I carried us forward and won the game. Then, as the post-game stats screen faded and I was brought back to the matchmaking lobby, something was different. My rank was 50. And then, the shining golden General ranking was bestowed upon me. I leaped up and shouted with joy. I had finally done it. After all of the "unfairness" I had faced in Halo 2, after all the roadblocks put in front of me in Halo 3, I had broken through. I was one of the best of the best now.

I never played Team Slayer again after that day, leaving my 50 ranking as a testament to my dramatic triumph. Now, obviously for many people who are skilled at first person shooters, reaching level 50 probably wasn't a big deal, and if you are one of those people you're probably laughing pretty hard at what a "noob" I am right now (do people still say noob? I'm pretty out of the loop). Rightfully so for you, but for me, this was about more than that. It was about redemption. It was about earning my keep. It was about being the best I could be, and for that one day, I had done it.

My Top 10 WTF Moments in Video Games

Welcome back to the game room dear readers, and prepare to travel to the weird side today as I discuss some of the strangest, outrageous, and most ridiculous moments I've experienced while playing video games over the years. Also, I should warn that this will contain spoilers for a lot of games.

10. Doom II (PC)- John Romero’s head

So the year was 1994 and I was just having a blast slaying demons from hell in this game. In fact, much of my childhood was spent exactly this way with the granddaddy of all first-person shooters. I hadn’t even really learned the term “Easter egg” yet, but probably the first time I ever experienced one was when I was having fun playing with the no clip feature of Dooms’ cheat codes that just about everyone on the planet knew. In the last level of the game, Map 30 (the Icon of Sin, as you Doom fans should know already), upon clipping into the hole fixed to the wall that is supposed to be the final boss monster’s head, you’ll be treated to the surprise of a small hidden chamber with a bloody, impaled head on a stick. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I discovered that this was the head of John Romero, one of the head programmers of the game who had craftily snuck his own image into the level, but at the time, I had no idea as a 7 year-old playing this game. I just remember being utterly shocked and disturbed not only to find it there after a bit of random futzing around, but also that the head actually screams if you shoot at it! Might not seem like such a big deal by today’s standards, but this may have been the very first time I ever really felt taken aback by something I saw in a video game.

9. Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (Sega Genesis)- Metropolis Zone has three acts

 

Sonic 2 is one of the all time great video game sequels and probably the most well known and beloved entry in the series (I personally like Sonic & Knuckles the best, but I’m an asshole). This game is always worth a playthrough if you’re bored with other games, but unless you’re a video game wizard (which I am certainly not), be prepared to die at least a few times once you get to the later levels- especially the freakin’ Metropolis Zone. Even if you’ve gathered the 7 chaos emeralds and blasted through the previous levels as Super Sonic, this zone simply has no mercy. You’ll find yourself lost in a maze of machinery, plagued by those goddamn mantis and crab robots, and begging for just one spare ring as you traverse the level. But the worst part about this wretched level? Unlike all of the previous levels you’ve been through so far, this relentless level has THREE ACTS! In the previous seven zones, you’ve already grown accustomed to navigating two levels and facing a boss at the end of the second, but not this time! As a kid, I remember wanting to break my Genesis in half over the shock that I had barely made it through the first two levels, yet it still wasn’t over upon entering that third act for the first time.

8. Resident Evil 3 (Sony Playstation)- Nemesis follows you through rooms

 

If you’re an adamant fan of the Resident Evil series, you’ve probably played through the first three games of the franchise at least once in your life. And what was one precedent that was set in the first two games that we could always fall back on when the situation got dire? That’s right- exiting a room will allow you to escape danger. I know I certainly exploited the hell out of this in the first two games when I found myself overwhelmed with zombies and other bio-organic monstrosities. But then RE3 came along and shattered that precedent before your very eyes as you encounter the Nemesis, a horrifically powerful monster that relentlessly stalks you throughout the game. If you’re low on ammo and health, running into this guy can be the worst thing ever- but hey, no big deal, right? Just use that newly implemented 360 degree spin on the controller and hop on outta that room, he can’t get to you that way. Right? Uh….right? Wrong. As soon as the door is off screen, you’ll hear it slam open and Nemmy will be right on top of you once again. This completely threw out the previously established rules of the first two games that monsters can’t follow you through different rooms. Well, as was in my case when I first tried this…it’s time to think again about that strategy.

7. Pikmin 2 (Nintendo Gamecube) –The Water Wraith

 

What’s worse than an enemy that relentlessly stalks you from room to room? Why, an enemy that relentlessly stalks you from room to room that you can’t even fight back against! Such is the case of the horrific Water Wraith enemy in Pikmin 2, which thankfully you will only encounter once in the game in the Submerged Castle dungeon of the Perplexing Pool level. The creature, which looks like the Pillsbury doughboy if he were made out of Jell-O and riding on a concrete steamroller, unexpectedly drops in on you in the second floor of the dungeon. Try attacking it like any other enemy you’ve encountered to this point and you’ll find that it’s utterly useless- the thing can’t be hurt at all. At the final floor of the dungeon, you’ll discover that only Purple Pikmin can destroy the beast- however, since the entrance to the dungeon is underwater, you’ll only be able to enter with blue Pikmin, meaning that until you get to that last floor, you’re at this monstrosity’s mercy. Not only that, but it can instantly flatten and decimate your entire Pikmin squad in seconds and it’ll actively hunt you throughout the dungeon while emitting horrible otherworldly grunts. It even has it's own horrific theme song. The first time encountering this thing, I had no idea how to handle it. All I could do was run around in circles scrambling to figure out what the hell to do and how to escape the wrath of this monster.

6. Halo (Microsoft Xbox)- The special legendary ending

 

Admittedly, it’s not too terribly difficult to beat the original Halo on legendary anymore, after playing it and it’s sequels for over a decade now. But back in the day, some of us first-time Xbox players had quite an ordeal escaping the clutches of the legendary difficulty in one piece. I distinctly remember my friend Dave telling me he’d heard a rumor that upon beating the game on legendary, a spectacular secret awaited those who managed to make it through. Nearly every day that summer, I’d get up in the morning and race over to his house, where we’d take on the horrible legendary mode playing cooperatively, dying over and over and over again through each level (The Library, anyone?) until one by one, we eventually conquered them. Finally, when at last the final level of the game was beaten, we eagerly awaited our prize. But for all of our hard work and dedication, what did we get? A 20 second clip of Sergeant Johnson fighting over an assault rifle with an elite, only to reconcile their differences with a big ‘ol hug as the Pillar of Autumn explodes behind them. And that’s it. Our jaws were on the floor as the credits began rolling afterward. Nowadays we joke about this and always have a good laugh, so I guess it did its job at being memorable- but back then, we felt anything but rewarded after going through that hell and back.

5. Bomberman 64 (Nintendo 64)- Sirius’ betrayal and Rainbow Palace

 

I have a lot of truly fond memories of playing this game, and unless I’m mistaken and this game is more popular than I know, I feel like it’s a criminally underrated N64 classic. Back in the day I played the shit out of this game, whether it was in the story mode or doing battle with friends in the insanely fun multiplayer. However, I had quite difficulty obtaining all 100 of the golden cards that are scattered throughout the levels and are awarded by beating bosses in certain ways. In particular, I couldn’t figure out how the hell to get one of them in particular in the 2^nd stage boss of Black Fortress, the final world of the game. I stuck with it though and one day was finally rewarded by obtaining it, at which point I promptly headed to the final boss to see if there was any extra reward. However, what I completely didn’t expect was that upon beating the game with all 100 golden cards, you’ll be betrayed by Sirius, a character who’d been previously helping you throughout the game. And not only that, but to my utter shock, the game wasn’t over yet and a secret 6^th world awaited! By this point I’d been playing the game for a very long time and was so completely stunned to find that there was more to it than I knew. And not just more, but a very surreal and dream-like world with extremely difficult puzzles to solve (and a very creepy 2^nd level boss, I might add).

4. Earthworm Jim 2 (Sega Genesis/SNES)- Jim Is Now A Blind Cave Salamander!

Earthworm Jim and its equally wacky sequel are easily some of most outlandishly creative and fantastically weird games ever conceived. I mean, as if the premise of an earthworm running around inside of an alien suit chasing an intergalactic alien crow across the galaxy wasn’t crazy enough, the second game will have you fighting a giant unicycle-riding maggot, bouncing puppies off of a giant marshmallow, and being attacked by a salt shaker through a level made entirely of food. But the most bizarre level of the game has to be the aptly-titled “Jim Is Now a Blind Cave Salamander!”, also known as “Villi People.” After 3 levels of playing as Jim, you’re now transformed into a salamander carrying a gun, swimming through what appears to be intestines (intestinal villi are tiny buds that line the walls of the small intestine and aid in digestion) while shooting at sheep, dodging bumpers and pencils sticking out of the wall, and collecting worms (more on that in a moment). Oh, and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is playing as the level music. There’s also what appears to be a tiled floor and windows looking out on the world. What drugs were they on when they made this? This level actually disturbed the hell out of me when I was kid. These days I love how spectacularly nonsensical it all is, but something about the surreal and strange nature just really weirded me out when I was younger. Oh, and remember those worms I mentioned before? At the end of the level you’ll suddenly find yourself in a gameshow out of nowhere, where you can exchange the worms for chances to answer questions and win prizes. And by the way, the questions make no sense whatsoever and it’s fantastic.

3. Silent Hill 2 (Sony Playstation 2)- Two Pyramid Heads

I’ve been talking a lot about relentlessly stalking enemies, haven’t I? Well good old Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 pretty well fits the bill in that category. The hulking, knife-wielding monster periodically materializes from the darkness and attacks you, and I was certainly one of those gamers terrified at the mere mention of his name. However, nothing on Earth could prepare me for the penultimate confrontation of the game, in which you’ll do battle with not one, but two Pyramid Heads. Admittedly, the first time I played this game I wasn’t too well-versed in subtext (or psychopathology for that matter, which I am now) and at that point in the game, I had no idea what the hell was even happening in the story anymore. I understand the reasoning now and it certainly makes sense within the lore of the game, but at the time I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it, so walking into that room and seeing two of those evil bastards just completely blew my mind. As if one of them chasing me around wasn’t bad enough, here was a second one out of nowhere. And worst of all, I had to fight them both at the same time.

2. Pokémon Red & Blue (Nintendo Gameboy)- Encountering MissingNo for the first time

MissingNo is probably the most well-publicized video game glitch of all time and probably the one that spawned the most schoolyard urban legends and myths of any video game I ever played. I remember constantly hearing about it and the subsequent infinite item glitch that can be triggered by spawning the strange mess of pixels, so I certainly knew what to expect after hearing all of the rumors and fantastic stories. However, I was still totally blown away the first time I ever encountered the garbled mess of a sprite for myself on the side of Cinnabar Island. Even stranger was what happened if you decided to catch and use the glitched-out mess in a battle, where it could spawn even further glitches and devolve your game into a complete mess. 

1. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty (Sony Playstation 2)– Colonel Campbell was actually GW

Was I just talking about how the plot of Silent Hill 2 confused me? Weh-heh-hell…let me tell you about the utter insanity that is Metal Gear Solid 2. The game begins just the way you’d expect it to be as you take control of Solid Snake and resume the usual tactical stealth antics. However, as the Tanker chapter ends, the game pulls a complete 180 and drops you in control of a new character named Raiden, who’s pretty much the antithesis of Snake. Nonetheless, you progress from this point forward as Raiden, who’s being aided by a familiar face: Colonel Campbell, who assisted Snake all throughout the first game. As you move forward through the game completing objectives, something seems oddly familiar about everything you’re doing. And then they hit you with a bombshell: the entire mission you’ve been a part of is a complete fabrication, designed to exactly emulate the events of the first game. And if that weren’t enough, when you find yourself inside of a massive war machine called Arsenal Gear, it’s discovered that Colonel Campbell was actually just an AI program, a complete façade designed to fool you the entire time. And not only that, but after a virus is uploaded to destroy the system core, the AI starts going haywire and Campbell starts repeatedly calling and babbling on about utter nonsense. As if everything in the game hadn’t been outrageous enough up to this point, I was really ready to just put my controller down and quit video games forever once the Colonel started calling and talking about purple stuffed worms in flap-jaw space.