Impeccable atmosphere, phenomenal level design, and the hottest man in gaming Leon Scott Kennedy. While there are things I prefer in the original, like how many times Leon and Claire cross paths and how the both scenarios interact in general, when taking it on it's own it's a hard to beat survival horror experience. I also have a minor gripe about Claire's 2nd Run replacing all her regular pistol ammo with Quickdraw Army ammo. I very much did not like it's reload time but I had no option but to use it because there was basically no regular pistol ammo laying around. Not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things but worth mentioning.

I've always had a big soft spot for this one. I love the atmosphere, I love the non linear structure, I love playing as a regular human and really having to think out attacks while scraping up whatever ammo I can get my hands on, I love collecting the logs for Sadie's Story and supply caches. It's my favorite iteration of Firefight still. It certainly has it's issues, I don't know what the hell Nolan North is doing as Romeo that shit's not good, but it's the underdog Halo game and I'm always happy to revisit it.

This was my first time playing Halo 2 Anniversary. Original Halo 2 was a big part of my childhood but I have not played the campaign as many times as any of the other Bungie era Halos. Replaying now I understand why. It's a very mixed bag. Equal parts "this is bigger and better than Combat Evolved" and "this is a tedious slog with bad checkpoints." In terms of how everything controls and the combat loop It's a total improvement to the first so I did have fun playing it mostly. The Flood are a bit more annoying this time around and I'm a Flood apologist usually. It's a weird situation where Arbiter has the way more interesting stuff going storywise but his missions have boring as hell Gameplay. Master Chief and Humanity in general on the other hand really doesn't have jackshit storywise but have the much better designed missions. Gravemind being my favorite. If Halo one's biggest flaw was repetitiveness, Halo 2's is stopping the momentum dead to have you fight waves of guys.

As far as the Anniversary updates themselves I felt they did a much better job with 2 than Combat Evolved. I very much enjoyed that the goal was to make Halo 2 look like a shinier newer Halo 2 instead of making Combat Evolved look like Reach. Though I will say going from the gorgeous new cutscenes to the actual gameplay was always a bit jarring.

Halo Combat Evolved is a groundbreaking but flawed classic. When it hits it hits but then you have missions like the Library that are just a slog and a lot of reused levels. Not really much interesting to say. Fantastic game that had sequels and prequels that were simply better. Well some of them.

As for the Anniversary changes themselves, yeah it suffers from "let's make everything brighter!" and as a result sacrificing part of the tone and atmosphere. Letting you switch back to the old graphics while maintaining the upgrade in performance is still worth it though and I'd be lying if I said there weren't some changes I like better.