Tonight is the big Halo 3 launch, so of course, I celebrated it by clearing a couple more areas in Halo 2, and now I’m back to playing the Arbiter again.

I have to admit that the enemy Grunt units are somewhat, dare I say…cute, when it comes to the audio chatter. Their squeaky little voices are perfect when it comes to throwing around battlefield taunts like “Loser!” and “Monkey!”, or when you gather a squad and one goes “Arbiter, our saviour! … Stupid Jackal, say thank you!” They’ve got a whole ton of other funny little quips.

I didn’t have much time tonight, so I took a bit of a break from Halo 2 and fiddled with some time attack replays and various hacks of Super Mario World. Either this 360 controller just isn’t well suited for emulating old systems like this, or I’m getting old and my skills suck now. :(

Continuing on with Halo 2, tonight I made it through the rest of the Arbiter’s sequence and through a good chunk of the first area on Delta Halo. I was finally introduced to The Flood, which many people consider the worst part of the original Halo, and they are indeed an annoying enemy. At least they like to clump together, and I think I used more grenades here than in the rest of the game so far.

I also got to (and was forced to) use a greater variety of Covenant weaponry, and a lot of them actually work fairly well, except the still-useless Plasma Pistol. I didn’t really like the sword at first, but later on it became fairly effective against the Flood-infected enemies, since they’d often close to melee range and it was difficult to outrun them while firing back. The Plasma Carbine is nice for longer-range attacks since the bullets are much faster, but it does require reloading a bit too often.

I think the Scorpion is my favourite vehicle so far. It may be big and slow, but the cannon is just way too much fun. Second-favourite is operating the turret on a Warthog, though the AI drivers are often, well, reckless… I haven’t really liked the flying vehicles so far, though. They require way too much quick turning, and I keep triggering a problem where the mouse stops responding if I slide it around too rapidly and I have to fix it by resetting the KVM. I’m not even sure if it’s Halo 2, Vista, the mouse itself, or the KVM at fault.

The story continues to be the weakest part, as it again depended on me having to go seek more information about the plot of the original just to have a clue what was going on.

Only had time to clear one more area in Halo 2 tonight, but I think I might have a new favourite weapon in the Needler. It has a homing effect to it, fires rapidly, and there’s been plenty of ammo around.

The Arbiter’s cloak has been useful in letting me quickly scout rooms and find a good spot from which to start the fight, but otherwise he plays just like Master Chief.

Finished two more areas in Halo 2 today, and was surprised to find that you also play as one of the enemy Covenant characters, with a special cloaking ability. That should prove to be interesting, though the plot hasn’t really advanced much so far. I’ve had to go to other sources for more information on the background that I probably missed out on in the original Halo.

I’m also a bit surprised at the difficulty of it. I’m playing on Normal, and most of the time it’s actually fairly easy, but there are occasional spikes in difficulty that are difficult to predict. It must have taken me four tries before finally defeating the Scarab, usually because I find my shield knocked down way faster than I would have expected.

There’s lots of weaponry, but so far I think my favourites are the Covenant sniper rifle and plasma rifle. There just isn’t enough ammo around for the human weapons, and the other alien weapons just aren’t as powerful or fun to use. There are probably still more types I haven’t seen yet, though.

After taking that series of battles more carefully, I finally finished off Overlord tonight. I’d already heard that the final battle was supposed to be fairly easy, but it was tougher than I expected, mainly because a few unexpected attack types kept killing off a lot of minions at once. I could theoretically play it again for the ‘evil’ ending, as I went for the ‘good’ one on this run, but there is no time, for I must press on…

What’s up next then? Well, Halo 3 is out next week and I have it on preorder, but my replacement 360 still won’t arrive for at least a couple of weeks. So, in the meantime, I figured I’d catch up on things with the PC version of Halo 2.

The PC version’s been a bit controversial, since it’s restricted to Vista for no particularly good reason, the graphics aren’t really improved *that* much (e.g., there’s a lot of jaggies on up-close shots in cutscenes), and has an incomplete implementation of the integration with XBox Live. The most annoying part of the install was where I had to enter my Live ID three times, as each time it would ask me, find another update, apply it, and then ask me for my ID again, having failed to remember it from the last time.

Still, what’s there is good enough for me. I doubt I’ll do anything with the multiplayer with H3 just around the corner, but I at least want to get through the main campaign, and finished off the night just after completing Cairo Station.

Well, I made it through the desert in Overlord tonight, which turned out to be fairly easy but tedious, as you spend 90% of your time just directing single minions to lure exploding bugs to various spots.

But, after that, you have to return to Heaven’s Peak for a series of battles, and it’s far too easy to get stuck in certain ways where you have no chance to avoid continuous damage and quickly die. And there are no save points, so you have to start the whole area over again. After failing three times in a row, I’m going to call it a night there.

I suspect this is pretty close to the end, though.

Today I thought I’d do a bit of minion farming in Overlord so I can enchant my items, but after applying a few enchantments, I realized that I had been applying them to the older, weaker items and not my newest ones. Sigh. Maybe I’ll be in a less ditzy frame of mind tomorrow.

I’m not sure how much enchantment I’m going to bother with though, as these items can ‘absorb’ over a thousand minions, and farming that many would be…dull. I suspect I’m strong enough to finish the game as-is.

Finally made it to the desert in Overlord, after finishing off the dwarf areas for good (there was still more to go than I expected after the brewery) and getting the final forge upgrade. Now I can start upgrading the armour and weapons in earnest, though I don’t have many spare minions to sacrifice at the moment. I hope I’m not going to have to grind the easier orb-collecting spots for hours just to save up minions for enchantments.

A couple more good deeds managed to knock my corruption rating from 5% down to 1% too, which I wasn’t expecting, so I might be able to get a 0% corruption run after all. As one wag in some forums noted, the game really should be called Benevolent Dictator if you take the ‘good’ route.

It should only take one or two more evenings to finish it off, since I think this is the last area. It’ll depend on how large it is and how many dungeons or adjacent sub-areas there are to it.

The only other progress is that I’m now up to level 4 in Free mode in Picross DS. The sounds associated with some of the level themes are getting a bit annoying…

I finally finished off the Heaven’s Peak and Angelis Keep areas in Overlord, and stuck with Rose as the castle’s mistress, even if Velvet is much more…seductive. The brown minions are still the mainstay of my horde, so her upgrade for them will probably be better for me. And maybe her blue minion upgrade will make them not so damn useless — they’re supposed to resurrect fallen minions, but they hardly ever do so unless I specifically park them right next to the dead ones, which is hard to do in the heat of battle.

Next up is the brewery, probably followed by the desert area, and then I’ll probably be pretty close to the end.