Halo: Reach is set on a planet named... Reach. Unlike last time around, you resume your role as a cyborg warrior. However, you aren't playing as Master Chief, but as another Spartan, Noble Six. If you paid attention in the other Halo games, you know what Reach is. It was overrun immediately before the first game.
Back when I first wrote about Supreme Commander, I noted that its sequel shares little of what I liked about it. Back in the day, being so pumped about SupCom, I got hyped for SupCom 2 after reading previews in PCGamer. I probably preordered this, too. I was a fool.
Like the Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us is a series based on comic books. (I'm not familiar with either comics.) The setup is simple: all the fairytale characters were forced to leave whatever kingdoms they lived in, and are holed up in New York City scraping by. You play as Sheriff Bigby Wolf. (Bigby Wolf -> Big B. Wolf -> Big Bad Wolf) Because I've portrayed this guy in school plays, I'm immediately on his side.
Hey look, a game for Halloween! (Yes, I planned this one, unlike last time.) I've finished playing through The Walking Dead, the game that Telltale Games got popular on. This is one of those games from the zombie craze that reached its height around 10 years ago. I think this rode the coat tails of a Netflix series based on the same comic series, but the game has different characters and story. It merely takes place in the same world.
If you haven't noticed by now, I'm going through the Halo Collection by order of original release, not by order of story. This installment follows the stories of a team of drop troops during Halo 2 and 3. Halo 3: ODST largely slipped by me unnoticed when it first came out 10 years ago. I don't recall any of my friends getting psyched out by it. The hype machine was more restrained.
I remember back in the day when Xbox 360 was big. For members of the PC Gaming Master Race, it felt like we were being shunned. It seemed like everyone had a 360, and soon their moms and grandmas would too, alongside their Wiis. So few things were pushed to such stratospheric levels of hype, that you could barely get out of bed without hearing about them. The few in my lifetime: Y2K, Segway, iPhone, iPad, December 2012, coronavirus, and atop this particular pile, Halo 3. It was so big that Pure Pwnage got in on the hype. LoadingReadyRun made such a surreal video about it that I instantly became their fan. I'm positive that similarly sized gaming hype trains have come and gone since, but I can't recall any that topped this. (My preorder warning might have accidentally had some.) Since Pi-hole, browser addons, and not watching TV have made me immune to most ads, maybe I'm too blind to notice.
I wasn't a properly initiated hard-core gamer back when Half-Life 2 came out. My only connection to the series was "oh, that weird box on the store shelf." After going to that one college, I realized that I needed a radical change in how I evaluated choices. I couldn't be a dumb kid that coasted through life on whatever the world gave me. I started by disregarding my freaky dreaming friend's advice that Half-Life 2 was a bad game, or at least so much that I avoided it, so I bought it and started playing.