Another Halo 2 chapter, another “invalid checkpoint” error… I hadn’t fully completed the level when it happened this time, so I couldn’t simply select the next level as the starting point, but it didn’t put me back at the beginning this time either. Instead I just won’t get an achievement for completing this chapter. It was a fairly long one, so I don’t really want to redo the whole thing just to get the achievement right now.

It seems to happen when I lose my connection to XBox Live, which is happening more often now thanks to the mass influx of Halo 3 players. It’s not like the 360 though, where you still get achievements even if you’re offline (just without a timestamp on them); with the PC version, you don’t get the achievement at all if you’re offline at the time.

There were no Flood in this chapter, thankfully, but this was the introduction of the Brutes, and they’re also plenty annoying. They’re hard to hit when they’re in ‘berserk’ mode, and take a ton of damage. There were also a few pairs of Hunters, placed in just the wrong spots as I’d already spent most of my good ammo on the preceding battles.

The level design wasn’t all that impressive either, with roughly three different areas, each of which was made up of fairly repetitive elements. At the end there was one really frustrating room where I had to carefully hit-and-run at the entrance, but the enemies loved to lob grenades, and getting hit with a plasma grenade is instant death, making you redo the whole long, careful slog through the room. I think it took me five or six attempts total.