Halo 2 was much more cooperative tonight, so I managed to get through one more area (Uprising) without any more Live trouble. This level was actually pretty fun, with a lot of time spent driving a Ghost and blasting the hell out of everything, and the Brutes didn’t seem nearly as annoying as in the last level. It’s when they’re in the tight corridors and smaller rooms like the last level that they’re a real pain.

This was probably the last Arbiter level, since there’s only two left, the next one is a Chief level, and they’ll almost certainly end with another Chief level. I should be able to finish it off and find out tomorrow, anyway.

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.

I completed yet another Halo 2 chapter tonight (four left to go, I think), but after getting the achievement it then told me “Sorry, Please insert the original Halo 2 disc”, even though I thought the activation scheme isn’t supposed to need the disc post-install. Then it dumped me back to the main menu, and when I tried to resume the campaign, it told me that I had an “invalid checkpoint” that did not match the one on XBox Live, and I could either restart the level or continue without achievements. No matter which one I picked, it dumped me back at the start of the chapter I just finished, though. Ugh.

Fortunately, I discovered that I can go back to the main menu, reselect the character profile, and then use the ‘start a level’ option instead of ‘resume the campaign’, and then I can choose the next level. It had me worried for a bit there, though.

As for this last chapter, there was tons of vehicle-piloting, including my favourite, the Scorpion. At one point it wanted me to board an ally’s much weaker vehicle and he’d take me to the next area, but screw that — I stayed on board just long enough to trigger his movement there, and then jumped off and ran back to get another Scorpion again. It only takes two or three shots from its cannon to take down the larger Librarians, instead of the multiple clips of conventional weaponry.

At the end was yet another elevator ride where me and my allies were attacked by waves of Flood. I kept dying a lot as groups of them overwhelmed me, but soon discovered that I could stick to one spot and I’d only have to deal with them one or two at a time, which was easy with a Plasma Sword.

I only finished off one more area in Halo 2 tonight, though it was a bit of an annoying one. Slightly twisty corridor, drop down a level, slightly twisty corridor, drop down a level, slightly twisty corridor, drop down a level… It only got interesting at the end, when bigger firefights erupted in more open areas, though the Flood continue to be annoying enemies.

Oddly enough, despite preferring Covenant weapons and playing as the Arbiter on this level, I found myself mostly using human weapons this time, since there was far more SMG ammo around than anything else. Since you can only carry two different types, I’ve been trying to stick to having one long-range, fast-projectile weapon for sniping and flying targets (e.g., beam rifle, carbine), and one rapid-fire, larger-capacity weapon for general use (SMG, needler, plasma rifle), switching out the long-range weapon for others as needed (e.g., the plasma sword is good against the Flood-infected or Honour Guards).