I'm sure anyone in their 30s is more than sympathetic to the difficulties of making friends. Work beats you down, leaves you worn out, and schedules are hard to line up when those in your orbit are also trying to pay the bills and feed a family. People grow apart, they change, and eventually you stop hearing from your friends you used to play Halo with in high school.

Not that those four years were some kind of halcyon, but I do pine for those nights when my buddies and I would lug CRTs two neighborhoods over on foot with Xboxes and copies of Halo 2 in tow. There are many aspects of my teenage and childhood years that I think are best left behind and which I don't envy younger generations for missing out on, but setting up LAN parties is my "walked ten miles both ways in the snow," a sick point of pride for a moment in time that can never be experienced again by young or old. Four greasy, pimple-faced teens huddled around CRTs in a dark and tiny apartment bedroom shooting rocket launchers at each other in Beaver Creek, the way Peter Moore intended... I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss nights like that.

The CRT I have now weighs well over a hundred pounds, and since I'm built like a teacup pig, I won't be carrying that over to anyone's house, even if I had someone's house to go over to. So, while I cannot recreate the sensation of playing Halo 2 with friends back in 2004, I can at least experience the single-player campaign on period appropriate hardware, and that's something; and for what it's worth, I had a really good time going back and revisiting this game for the first time since release.

For the most part, Halo 2 is just more Halo, only with the added level of production you'd expect from a follow-up to one of the most popular and profitable games of its time. The set pieces are bigger, levels more varied, there's more guns, more vehicles, and they even paid big bucks to get legendary comedian David Cross to voice a character. Oh yeah and Michelle Rodriguez is here-- BUT HAVE YOU SEEN MR.SHOW!!?

Halo 2 certainly makes a strong first impression. The opening cutscenes jumping between the UNSC celebrating Master Chief's victory and Thel 'Vadam's punishment for allowing him to destroy Halo sets up the game's main conflict wonderfully. I was initially led to believe that The Arbiter would serve as the main antagonist of this story but was surprised (at least in 2004) when the game relinquished control of him to me. Introducing a deuteragonist and cutting Master Chief's screen time by about half was a bold choice, but one that I think pays off, as The Arbiter is a vastly more interesting character. The way in which his faith is shattered as he learns of Halo's true purpose, and his fight to expose the Hierarchs for their deception gives him more depth than Master Chief, who mostly shows up to say cool guy stuff like "I'm gonna need a gun B-)" and "Sir, finishing this fight." Perhaps there's something to criticize there about how little character Chief actually has, and how he could have been used to better effect in exploring the uneasy alliance that begins to emerge between the UNSC and rebelling Elites, but my vague recollection of Halo 3 tells me that I'll eventually get what I want, and there's still a lot more narrative here to sink into than the anemic story of the previous game.

I have more mixed feelings about Halo 2's gameplay, however. The opening few missions are the strongest, and the game wastes little time in introducing new weapons and vehicles for you to play with. Some may lament the loss of the Starship Trooper inspired assault rifle, but I personally favor the more focused burst action of the battle rifle. If that doesn't do it for you then you can always pick up an SMG and, through the power of dual wielding, it can as powerful as a single gun! Even the Covenant get some new weapons, like the plasma sword which can one-shot most enemies when timed right, and vehicle sequences are better about offering multiple rides, affording the player some freedom in how they have their fun. As good as these weapons and vehicles may feel, none of it would work if they weren't complimented by good level design, and for most of Halo 2, that is the case.

Things really start to drop off towards the end of the game. Levels design starts to backslide into Halo 1 territory, with identical hallways and samey arenas that break any momentum the player may have been building, reducing what should be the most climatic moments of the game to a total drag. It doesn't help that the Brutes - who effectively replace the Elites in the end game - are profoundly spongy and present in great numbers, which causes every firefight to be protracted just beyond the point of being fun. Master Chief's last level sends him through the corridors of the Covenant's stronghold during a Flood attack, and nothing about the level is set up in a way that encourages you to be an active participant in the fight. Just avoid combat and run to the goal. Boring.

There may be good reason for this, however. Enough has been written about Halo 2's underwhelming conclusion, but a significant amount of cut content has bubbled to the surface in recent years to imply that the game was at one point much larger in scope. Take the opening sequence in which Master Chief "returns" the Covenant's bomb, which in the original gameplan would've instead saw him boarding and infiltrating their ship, or Alphamoon, a level that was far too large to reasonably ship. To quote Chris Butcher while talking about Alphamoon: "We were building stuff that just couldn't be played, in any engine, we built, and detailed, and went a huge way down the path with a whole bunch of environments and levels for the game that just totally didn't make it."

However, of Halo 2's cut content, Earth Ark is the most relevant to the final product's abrupt ending. Originally conceived as an ending to Halo as a series (there was no plans to make another game at that point in time), Earth Ark would've sent the fight back to earth for three final missions that would alternate between Master Chief and The Arbiter. A complete walkthrough of how these missions would have progressed can be read here, but my personal opinion is that it would have been a vastly more interesting conclusion to Halo 2, and arguably more than what we eventually got in Halo 3. It's a shame that development troubles and a prevailing need to actually ship a game resulted in a truncated conclusion to Halo 2, having a clear adverse effect not just on the narrative but the quality of gameplay during these final missions.

It's fun to think about this theoretical "true" version of Halo 2 and how it would've radically altered the way the franchise developed, but doing so is a exercise pleasant yet pointless as reminiscing on high school LAN parties. It also should in no way be taken as a sweeping condemnation of the game we got, which I think is very good despite circumstances leading to a compromised end product. It also has David Cross in it, which is at least worth a full star. Oh and Michelle Rodriguez, who is worth like, I don't know, 1/6th of a star. The system doesn't let me go that low so I'm going to round it down to zero.