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Welcome

Welcome

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I literally cackled the first time I fired a sniper rifle in Halo: Reach's PC multiplayer. Two shots, two kills, heavy caliber rounds crossing the map and cracking skulls as casually as you'd order off a drink menu. In the thousands of hours of Halo I've played on consoles in the last 15 years, I've never been a good sniper. With a controller, a headshot was a minor miracle. With a mouse, I point at the thing I want to die, and it obliges. But the same goes for everyone. Playing Halo: Reach on PC is like bringing death lasers to a fight designed for blunderbusses. Is this what the weapons and maps and abilities were designed around? Hell no. Is it balanced? Absolutely not. But now I never want to play Halo any other way. Halo: Reach was made for the Xbox 360 in 2010, and nine years later it's the first part of the Master Chief Collection, an anthology spanning the Halo series, to arrive on PC. Playing it again for the first time in many years, I think it's still a shooter worth experiencing in 2019. The campaign, which lasts for six hours or so, sticks closely to the formula that makes Halo great. Each mission threads together big, open-ended combat encounters against an endlessly killable group of enemies with a freedom still rare in shooters. Sometimes I'll go out of my way to kick a puny Grunt out of his Ghost, a one person anti-grav vehicle with a nasty pair of laser cannons, just so I can use it to run over his friends. Other times I'll hang back and use a rifle to pick off Jackals, who crouch behind defensive shields, by shooting them in the hand and then in the head, the most satisfying two-shot kill in videogames. There's fun to be had even with puny weapons like the needler, which home in and lodge in flesh until they explode, killing anyone foolish enough to stand nearby. The real threats are the Elites and the Brutes, whose AI can occasionally still be intimidating today. They'll dodge grenades and try to get around behind you, and killing them first has many advantages. It'll stop them from rushing you for a deadly melee, and their Grunt escorts will sometimes even flee in terror when you take them down. But they're shielded and much harder to kill, so focusing on them can be dangerous when you're being peppered with shield-draining fire from the Grunts and Jackals in their squads. I've probably killed tens of thousands of Elites in my life, but in Reach I still loved tracking them with my rifle and ping ping pinging them with bullets until their shields popped, then delivering those final killing bullets to their heads and watching them crumple. Reach is also constantly offering other ways to make that kill: a shotgun that you pull out when an Elite charges right at you with a roar, or an energy weapon that drains their shields far faster than bullets, or a warthog that turns them into roadkill. In most shooters it's fun to switch weapons to decide what kind of carnage you want to dish out in the moment, or what works best against a particular enemy. That's true in Halo, too—but because you can only carry two weapons at a time, and you don't have a permanent arsenal the way you do in a game like Doom, every mission is a series of on-the-fly adaptations. I'm constantly analyzing the most efficient or creative ways to work with what's around me. In one tough firefight against two squads of Brutes, I made a beeline for one of the leaders, killed him before the rest caught up, grabbed his massive hammer, and smashed the hell out of everybody else. The freedom of every encounter is key to why Halo's enemies are still fun to shoot, even though they haven't changed much over almost 20 years. The best Halo missions weave together open areas and vehicle segments with close quarters battles, alternating between setpieces and smaller moments. In most Halo games, there are one or two missions that string together all of these pieces and really stand out. But in Reach, that's most of the campaign, and there isn't a single bad mission in the entire bunch. There's no fat on this game. The story, which puts you in the armor of a new member of an elite Spartan squad, gives you sketches of personalities rather than the sense that you truly know the characters you're fighting alongside. You know which Spartan is the tough guy, for instance, because he's always playing with his knife (and he has a skull carved into the visor of his helmet). Reach tries really hard for poignant, sentimental moments as members of your squad die, with a sad piano score for every tragedy. But we don't get to spend enough time with any of them to really feel the gut punch. Still, Reach does feel remarkably somber, which is hard to pull off in a bombastic action game about shooting aliens. The campaign is about those aliens, the Covenant, invading a vital human world and slowly destroying it, despite everything you throw at them. Every mission you complete ends with success—saving a naval base, destroying a Covenant supercarrier, evacuating civilians from a besieged city—and is then immediately undercut. As that ship explodes, a dozen more warp into orbit to shell the planet. After you fight to save the city, a nuke obliterates it. It's hard to make a hopeless war fun to play, but Reach leaves a heavier emotional imprint than most shooters I've played. The only one that comes to mind that does it better is 2014's Wolfenstein: The New Order. After experiencing the story, I'm already eager to jump back into my favorite campaign levels with 4-player co-op, and so far my experience playing online, both in co-op and competitive multiplayer, has been great. The Master Chief Collection uses dedicated servers, and I've experienced almost no lag in the 10 hours or so of multiplayer I've played. The game feels smooth, even in the co-op Firefight mode, which, like the campaign, requires the game to keep track of dozens of AI units at once. Back on the Xbox 360, without dedicated servers, this mode was almost unplayable online. Today, on PC, it's practically indistinguishable from playing solo. Dedicated servers make a huge difference. So does the performance of a modern gaming PC. On my system with an i7-6700K and a GTX 980, Reach ran at over 200 fps at 1440p resolution. By default, the game is set to 60 fps, and there are still some issues with its unlocked framerate. With VSync off, Reach has distracting screen tearing unless you own a G-Sync or FreeSync monitor. Even with G-Sync on, I experienced a very rare stutter that I initially thought was the campaign loading, until it happened in multiplayer. It's a minor enough issue to barely register for me, and the developers have already acknowledged they're working on improvements to the unlocked framerate implementation. They've said the same for Reach's audio mix, which is unfortunately poor and sounds a bit muffled on PC. Advertisement Again, though, it didn't stop me from having fun with the game—playing with headphones and adjusting the audio balance to bring voices and sound effects up over music, I didn't have a problem hearing what I needed to. Ultimately the issues with Halo: Reach on Steam wash away the moment I start aiming with a mouse. Halo multiplayer on PC is fundamentally different than it is on consoles—with mouse aim, accurate long-range weapons like the DMR really dominate maps. Most of the guns become irrelevant. And Reach's other issues from 2010 remain: Halo has always had the DNA of an arena shooter, where everyone is on equal footing and controlling the map is key to victory. Reach added "armor abilities" like sprint and invisibility and a hologram decoy, and weapon loadouts that change your starting firearms. Neither makes the game more fun to play, and they're definitely not fun to play against when you expect to be on even footing. They're why Reach's multiplayer is probably my least favorite in the series, overall. But playing it now on PC, I'm finding armor abilities and loadouts don't bother me nearly as much as they once did because the basic gunplay is so satisfying with a mouse—Reach is more fun than ever with pinpoint accuracy, and the enhanced power of a basic rifle minimizes the effect of those balance issues. As the Master Chief Collection expands, I expect I'll play Reach less and the first three Halos more. They all have great selections of multiplayer maps, and more importantly, the simplicity of no armor abilities and no loadouts. But it's exciting to come back to Reach after nearly a decade and find its multiplayer more fun than ever, in a port that bodes well for the rest of the series.

Welcome.

The first island you visit in The Touryst is a tiny, perpetually sunny place, and it's full of spots to have a sit or a lie down. Having a rest doesn't achieve anything, but I found that my immediate instinct was to give my character a moment to luxuriate on a bed in one of the island's small personal rooms--this is a game about vacationing, after all, and on any vacation it's important to relax. The Touryst is a soothing and relaxing experience thanks to the lovingly rendered voxel graphics and the (mostly) gentle gameplay, and despite some occasional moments of frustration, playing it really does feel like taking a mini-vacation. You play as a moustachioed man in a loud shirt who is tasked w ith travelling between different island vacation spots and collecting cores that rest within the game's scant few monuments--essentially short dungeons. You move between beach parties under orange sunsets, lush tropical expanses, and Mediterranean tourist spots, before diving into murky underground caverns that contain jumping puzzles and non-violent boss encounters. It's a strange combination of elements, but The Touryst wears its strangeness on its sleeve. This is, above all else, a game about the joy of a holiday. As you play, you unlock new islands to visit, and while each one is small, they also all have their own distinct flavor, as well as unique activities to discover and engage with. The superb voxel art style imbues each setting with personality and makes the simple act of sightseeing a pleasure. Simply existing in these beautiful locations is inherently enjoyable, and while each new setting won't take long to fully explore, I found walking around each one calming. The monuments themselves contain puzzles and tests of your dexterity, and working your way through them is essential to unlock every island and complete the game's story. They're ultimately the least interesting part of the game, but they're certainly not without their charms. They can be quite challenging, but the key is usually to just remember that there's an optimal solution to the puzzles, even when it seems like they're just asking you to nail precise jumps. Often, how you're mani[CENSORED]ting the camera to line up your angles and judge the space you're in is as important as your ability to control your trajectory; if you're messing a jump up often, it's because you haven't quite cracked what that room is asking of you. Even so, every now and then, the game asks for a greater level of precision from your actions than the controls want to give you. The controls are a bit floaty for how small some of the platforms you're landing on are, and one jumping puzzle took me, at a conservative estimate, 25 attempts to get. The rooms inside monuments are viewed from an isometric perspective, which can make judging gaps difficult. Any situation that requires you to throw an object with great precision is frustrating too because of how the throwing arc works, but these moments of frustration only stick out because they are rare. Outside of these moments, The Touryst is a game with a lot of chill. One island doesn't even have a monument at all--instead it has a movie theatre that shows a short highlight reel of moments from the rest of the game, an art gallery that you'll eventually po[CENSORED]te with your own photography, and, best of all, a retro arcade with three cabinets. There's a racing game (based on the studio's own Switch game Fast RMX), a strange platformer, and a Breakout clone, all offering brief diversions that successfully sucked me in for an hour. Completing the high scores in these arcade games (and earning the arbitrary cash reward) is challenging, but there's something almost zen about a game that encourages you to waste your time like this--it perfectly captures my very specific childhood memory of discovering arcade machines in local pubs while on holiday and shovelling coins into them. The Touryst, appropriately, frames everything you do as an act of tourism. Completing sidequests will earn you money, but cash is largely inconsequential to completing the game--by the time the credits rolled I had hundreds of coins left with very little to spend them on. The sidequests play into the shaggy nature of the game--you don't complete them because they're helpful, but because you want to see everything the game world has to offer. I spent a long time down a mine you encounter on one island, engaged with a spelunking challenge that lets you collect gems that can then be exchanged for money. I spent so much time down there not because I needed money--I never even traded the gems in. I did it because the mines are particularly enjoyable--they let you abseil down cliffs, swing between ledges, and even ride rickety minecarts as you delve deeper and deeper. There are plenty of other activities scattered across The Touryst's small world. You can fix up a boring beach party, then liven it up further by buying new records for the DJ; you can show off your sporting prowess in surfing, soccer, and pull-up minigames; you can search the game world for photography subjects with the camera you're given early on, or hunt down several carefully hidden scrolls. The sidequests are often very simple and easy but watching as island life slowly shifts and changes based on your actions is a delight. I found that as the credits rolled on The Touryst's strange ending, I was keen for them to finish so I could jump straight back in and mop up the remaining objectives. Admittedly, even if you want to do absolutely everything, The Touryst isn't very long—my completion total sat at 94% after five and a half hours. But perhaps it's better this way--after all, the best vacations often end before you've had a chance to really get homesick. It's the next best thing to an actual holiday.

Happy birthday Nico

Welcome.

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welcome

Happy birthday

Welcome.