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Outpost22 posted:I'm so excited for Halo 3, did it get some polish too? Unfortunately not really. They gave it a bit of a graphical pass, but that's about it on the campaign side of things. e: update for new page FrenzyTheKillbot posted:
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Oct 2, 2021 00:34
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I still laugh a little at that ending. It's not just ending on a cliffhanger while giving no closure to anything new from Halo 2 but also that the boss fight is honestly barely a boss fight, Master Chief is nowhere to be seen, and the character you are playing as doesn't even really get to do the big thing. Also apparently all you need to do to activate Halo is grab a human hand and use it to the press the button so as long as there's a preserved human forearm somewhere no problem.
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Oct 3, 2021 01:46
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Kibayasu posted:Also apparently all you need to do to activate Halo is grab a human hand and use it to the press the button so as long as there's a preserved human forearm somewhere no problem. Nah, has to be a live human at least.
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Oct 3, 2021 02:24
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Lucky the Covenant never heard of lobotomies.
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Oct 3, 2021 02:51
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Outpost22 posted:I'm so excited for Halo 3, did it get some polish too? Ablative posted:Unfortunately not really. They gave it a bit of a graphical pass, but that's about it on the campaign side of things. Yeah I think all they really did was a pass on the textures so it'll render nicely in resolutions much higher than the Xbox 360's original internal rendering resolution of 640 pixels. It's really too bad. There's still a bunch of model/animation/engine issues that are way more apparent at higher resolutions too. The Anniversary versions really cleaned that kinda stuff up. Megillah Gorilla posted:Lucky the Covenant never heard of lobotomies. Hahaha, lobotomies was my first thought too. But they could even use a medically induced coma, or just like, ketamine.
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Oct 4, 2021 01:43
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I'm double posting, because I wanted to let you guys know that there won't be any more Halo videos until November sometime. I'll be posting another short series instead as kind of an intermission from Halo.
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Oct 4, 2021 01:44
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FrenzyTheKillbot posted:I'll be posting another short series instead as kind of an intermission from Halo. Marathon?
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Oct 11, 2021 23:08
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White Coke posted:Marathon? Ha, no but that would have been good. It's something completely unrelated that I recorded months ago, but also don't want to wait for a year and a half to post. So, just a short break for something different while I get some Halo stuff done in the background.
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Oct 13, 2021 00:54
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I might have missed it. Did you post another thread for this other game?
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Nov 10, 2021 02:52
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CzarChasm posted:I might have missed it. Did you post another thread for this other game? It was a 4 video series for Portal. I didn't think it warranted a thread so I just posted it to YouTube. I'll be back to posting halo stuff on Friday though.
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Nov 10, 2021 16:46
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FrenzyTheKillbot posted:It was a 4 video series for Portal. I didn't think it warranted a thread so I just posted it to YouTube. I'll be back to posting halo stuff on Friday though. Cool, I go check that out.
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Nov 10, 2021 16:54
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Alright, time to start gearing up for some more Halo. Today we're starting off with some of the promotional stuff for Halo 3. This might be the last game where I share a bunch of teaser videos like this because while I could still remember all of these from memory, promotional material for later games is a lot more hazy. And also most of it was released directly to YouTube in high quality by that point. Announce Trailer - This was of course the first official confirmation that Halo 3 was a thing that was being worked on. The music in this one, especially the piano, still gets me. Starry Night - This special commercial only aired once during a Monday night football game. I actually remember convincing my whole family to watch the game that night so I could catch it, and afterwords they were all like, "that's it?" They are not Halo fans. Believe Diorama - Another video with excellent music. This diorama was actually built and is large enough to take up a whole room. There are a few videos to go along with it, that are faux documentary interviews with veterans of the Human-Covenant war talking about their experience for the Museum of Humanity. You can find them by searching "Halo 3 Believe Museum" but I think the diorama is the most interesting part. Halo: Landfall - This is the first official live-action media created for Halo. It was originally three short films called Arms Race, Combat Part 1, and Combat Part 2, but was eventually combined together. This was also made at a time when a Halo movie was being pitched with Neil Blomkamp and WETA attached, and these videos were kind of a proof of concept. The movie never got made and those guys moved on and made District 9 instead.
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Nov 12, 2021 20:01
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I was so insanely jazzed for Halo 3, and I played the everloving poo poo out of it when it came out. Without a doubt one of my favorite games of all time, it felt like the perfect bookend to the Bungie legacy starting with Marathon(which I also played the crap out of lol). The buddy movie coop with the Arbiter made it even better. WETA digital making an actual working Warthog out of a suv is so loving good, its like a proper offroad 4WD and everything. EDIT: Im very looking forward to when you guys hit my favorite Halo game after 3, Reach. DreadUnknown fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 20:33
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Believe? What did gamers back then not trust that Microsoft was going to release a sequel for their new console?
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Nov 13, 2021 18:29
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DreadUnknown posted:I was so insanely jazzed for Halo 3, and I played the everloving poo poo out of it when it came out. Without a doubt one of my favorite games of all time, it felt like the perfect bookend to the Bungie legacy starting with Marathon(which I also played the crap out of lol). The buddy movie coop with the Arbiter made it even better. So, I'm still planning on skipping Halo: Reach and maybe LPing it as a standalone later. Outpost22 posted:Believe? What did gamers back then not trust that Microsoft was going to release a sequel for their new console? 
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Nov 13, 2021 21:53
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Figured this might be of some interest to the people in the thread.goatrope posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXjt8zSIGfk
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Nov 15, 2021 07:43
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Fantastic Foreskin posted:Figured this might be of some interest to the people in the thread. If anyone didn't click on this, turn back. It's loving incredible.
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Nov 15, 2021 20:14
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 Developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios, as per usual, Halo 3 was released on September 25, 2007. Halo 3 is the conclusion of the original Halo trilogy, where we finally get to continue the story after Halo 2's disappointing and somewhat abrupt ending. The Halo array is primed to fire, the Covenant has fractured, and the Master Chief has made his way back to Earth to "finish the fight". With Cortana in the hands of the Flood Gravemind, and the Arbiter and his fellow Elites now having to find their own path, there are a lot of unknowns to contend with. Halo 3 had absolutely sky-high expectations. Everyone knew that it would be a conclusion of some sort, and fans had been waiting for years to know how this story would end. Halo was secure at the top of the Xbox's flagship titles list and despite releasing 2 years after the Xbox 360, Microsoft was still depending on it to sell a lot of consoles and Xbox Live memberships. To further crank up the hype, Halo 3 had a public multiplayer beta and a $40 million advertising blitz that included live-action short films, an alternate reality game, and the birth of Mountain Dew Game Fuel. All of that effort must have worked, since Halo 3 became the best selling game of 2007 and made $170 million just on release day. The Xbox 360's improved hardware allowed Bungie to drastically improve graphics and increase the scale of maps and encounters. Like in Halo 2, they were able to add new weapons, vehicles, and game mechanics that fit the existing formula and managed to keep that Halo "feel". Halo 3 also saw the debut of some other very impressive features. A theatre mode that allowed the player to go back and watch previously played campaign levels or multiplayer games, and dynamically change camera angles and record clips or screenshots (this is how I created my thumbnails for this game). The most important addition was Forge mode, an editor that allowed players to create their own maps and gametypes. People were very creative, creating race tracks, jumping puzzles, escape rooms, and all sorts of other fun gimmicks. Halo 3 is a game that largely met its high expectations, and even found new ways to keep myself and many others coming back for more.  00 - Separate Paths 01 - Sierra 117 02 - Crow's Nest 03 - Tsavo Highway 04 - The Storm 05 - Floodgate 06 - The Ark (Part 1) 07 - The Ark (Part 2) 08 - The Covenant (Part 1) 09 - The Covenant (Part 2) 10 - Cortana 11 - Halo XX - Bonus Content  Announce Trailer 'Starry Night' Trailer 'Believe' Diorama Halo: Landfall The Complete, Untold History of Halo FrenzyTheKillbot fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Nov 19, 2021 20:41
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 00 - Separate Paths One last thing before we get into the game for real. This is a short video to explain what all of our main characters got up to in between games.
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Nov 19, 2021 20:42
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I always wondered how things seemingly progressed so rapidly before you got back to Earth. I guess Master Chief was gone a while just due to the travel time.
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Nov 20, 2021 02:29
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Outpost22 posted:I always wondered how things seemingly progressed so rapidly before you got back to Earth. I guess Master Chief was gone a while just due to the travel time. Delta Halo happens on November 2. Metropolis happens on October 20th.
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Nov 20, 2021 02:36
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FrenzyTheKillbot posted:
Well, that cleared up a lot of confusion. Thanks. I always wondered how the sargent and captain got to Earth first.
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Nov 20, 2021 15:05
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Megillah Gorilla posted:Well, that cleared up a lot of confusion. Thanks. Same way Johnson got back to Earth the first time, in a way cooler game that was never made.
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Nov 22, 2021 00:40
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Man, goddamn Bungie and their penchant for shoving tons of background info into books and ARG´s.
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Nov 22, 2021 09:43
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Sylphosaurus posted:Man, goddamn Bungie and their penchant for shoving tons of background info into books and ARG´s. Kibayasu posted:Same way Johnson got back to Earth the first time, in a way cooler game that was never made. Hmm. It might be just me, but none of that stuff sounded to me like it really needed to be in the game. I wouldn't have minded a level of the Chief raising hell on the Forerunner ship, but I think it works better in the context of Halo 2, not 3 (I think I remember a dev interview describing some of the cut levels, and one of them was pretty much this.) Which is unfortunate and a missed opportunity, sure, but that's game development. More Earth levels would have been great too. What can you do? They had a ton of dreams for Halo 2, and I've always been impressed that they were able to get as much done as they did. There's also the problem of how to present all that info. Bungie was generally pretty conscientious with their cutscenes- they managed to strike a nice balance between exposition and not slowing down the game, IMO, and loading a bunch more background details would have tripped up its pacing for very little benefit. I suppose they could have made a Bioware-esque codex, but meh. It would have felt... pretentious, maybe? Overindulgent? I dunno, I guess where I'm coming from is that I was able to play and enjoy the Halo trilogy's story just fine as-is, and while there's always room for improvement, I feel like they covered all the important bases.
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Nov 23, 2021 02:33
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Awesome. Really looking forward to this series, i played the hell out of Halo 1/2 but only did the campaign one time in Halo 3 and never really played it after that.
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Nov 23, 2021 02:51
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EggsAisle posted:Hmm. It might be just me, but none of that stuff sounded to me like it really needed to be in the game. I wouldn't have minded a level of the Chief raising hell on the Forerunner ship, but I think it works better in the context of Halo 2, not 3 (I think I remember a dev interview describing some of the cut levels, and one of them was pretty much this.) Which is unfortunate and a missed opportunity, sure, but that's game development. More Earth levels would have been great too. What can you do? They had a ton of dreams for Halo 2, and I've always been impressed that they were able to get as much done as they did. I think you're right here that the only part of the story that could have really been gameplay was the Chief on the Dreadnought part (and I also think you're right that it was intended to be a level). As I said, Halo 3 is actually pretty good as far as the gap between games goes. From the first level, it seems pretty obvious how everyone got to where they are. The biggest headscratcher without explanation is just the timing. That being said, I would love like a half hour short film just about the conversation with Halfjaw, Arbiter, Commander Keyes, and Sergeant Johnson. Or the 10 day journey back to Earth. I'm picturing the scene from Avengers: Endgame where Tony Stark and Nebula are playing table football. The biggest offender (so far) for hidden away important info is definitely the gap before Halo 2. The way they just happen to be back at Earth and also Sergeant Johnson is there is just shades of "somehow Palpatine returned", but you know, 15 years earlier. It's also crazy because so much stuff happens in the First Strike novel that it could totally be an entire game in itself. I almost wonder with the new mod tools that 343i has put out whether someone with talent could actually make all that stuff into an unofficial game the way people have done for Half Life and Portal.
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Nov 23, 2021 15:24
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The problem with a Halo 2/3 filler game is that you have to answer the awkward question of what happened to the In Amber Clad's crew. Halo 2 just handwaves away hundreds of people (gotta get dem Flood zombies from somewhere!), and it's hard to sympathise with Halsey in particular if we have to acknowledge that she got her entire crew killed offscreen. Old Halo 2 storyboards have now been released showing just what Bungie originally had in mind, including the mission on the Covenant cruiser in the opening. It looks like most of it was rolled into Halo 3 and ODST, but some plot points had to be reshuffled to take into account the final order of levels - in particular some of the big revelations from 3 were intended to be in the ending of 2, and would have been handled better. But generally speaking the planned third act of Halo 2 became the first act of Halo 3, with some tweaking.
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Nov 23, 2021 18:17
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Loxbourne posted:and it's hard to sympathise with Halsey in particular if we have to acknowledge that she got her entire crew killed offscreen. Ok I know you're not her biggest fan in this instance but Miranda still isn't as bad as her mother.
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Nov 23, 2021 18:44
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Loxbourne posted:The problem with a Halo 2/3 filler game is that you have to answer the awkward question of what happened to the In Amber Clad's crew. Halo 2 just handwaves away hundreds of people (gotta get dem Flood zombies from somewhere!), and it's hard to sympathise with I don't think it's an awkward question, I think it's made very apparent than in both Halo 1 and Halo 2, all of the UNSC forces, excepting the 2 or 3 main characters, are killed. It's a whole "thing" in Halo that I think I've mentioned before, and I definitely plan on bringing up in more detail later in Halo 3, but when you put galactic extinction into moral calculus it really screws up the math. Is getting your entire crew killed bad? Of course. But is getting your entire crew killed to achieve the goal of averting galactic extinction bad? Seems understandable, unless that outcome was obviously avoidable. Ablative posted:Ok I know you're not her biggest fan in this instance but Miranda still isn't as bad as her mother. And here we have a bit of a fun revelation for those unfamiliar with Halo lore. Commander Miranda Keyes is the daughter of Dr. Catherine Halsey and Captain Jacob Keyes, although was raised exclusively by her father as Dr. Halsey was too preoccupied. I really wanted to do a talky bonus video all about Master Chief and Cortana's relationship/partnership, but I don't think I'll have time as those videos tend to take way more effort than I expect and I don't have enough of a backlog to work on that instead of regular videos. One main point of it would have been all about how much John-117 and Cortana actually have in common as weird as that seems. They're both built for a specific purpose; created as tools to be used against the enemy. But despite the fact that they are expected to spend and possibly give their lives to defend humanity, their qualifications as "human" are kind of unclear. John has been genetically and physically altered, including being essentially chemically castrated, and spends basically his entire life in an armored suit hidden from view. He doesn't have family (that he knows of) to protect, or the hope of a normal life once the war is over. Cortana is more obvious, being an AI, but AIs in the Halo universe are made by mapping neural pathways of a (dead) human brain. They have thoughts and ideas and feelings, or at least very, very good digital approximations of them. But more than that, Cortana was made from Dr. Halsey's brain. Using basically the same (illegal) process as she used for the replacement clones for the Spartan recruits, she cloned herself a dozen times, took the brain out of the one with the least copy errors, and used it to create Cortana. We haven't seen Dr. Halsey in-game yet, but Cortana takes her appearance after a younger version of her, and they share the same voice actor (Jen Taylor). So by some non-biological definition Commander Keyes, Master Chief, and Cortana are all half siblings. FrenzyTheKillbot fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Nov 23, 2021 |
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Nov 23, 2021 19:39
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Oh poo poo I could have sworn you mentioned it already, my bad!
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Nov 23, 2021 19:42
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Ablative posted:Oh poo poo I could have sworn you mentioned it already, my bad! No worries. There isn't really an appropriate time to bring it up. Even if I did decide to make that bonus video I wasn't going to include the detail about Commander Keyes, so this is as good a time as any!
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Nov 23, 2021 19:45
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I don't mean to overload the thread, but because I am still enamored with the Halsey's Journal collectible I decided to grab some scans to go with that last effortpost. I may rework it at some point and include it in the table of contents.     
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Nov 23, 2021 20:15
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drat. loving ice cold. How long has the human covenant war been going on at that point? Because I'm pretty sure it's less time than Miranda has been alive.
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Nov 24, 2021 04:54
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CzarChasm posted:drat. loving ice cold. How long has the human covenant war been going on at that point? Because I'm pretty sure it's less time than Miranda has been alive. She was born about two weeks into the war. So at the time they were both 25.
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Nov 24, 2021 05:10
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As far as I´m concerned dr. Halsey has earned herself several executions due to the giant walking crime against Humanity that she is. I´d say more but I think I´ll hold off until Frenzy have finished Halo 3.
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Nov 25, 2021 00:26
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I mean, now might be as good a time as any since we're sort of talking about her already. As long as we're only talking about stuff from the year 2552 and earlier. I do plan on talking about her a bit in my Halo 3/4 Interstitial video. I find Dr Halsey to be a really interesting character, and if I wasn't just about to curl right now I'd give my own little rundown and thoughts. edit: I forgot about this after curling. I guess we will wait. FrenzyTheKillbot fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Nov 26, 2021 |
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Nov 25, 2021 02:07
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 01 - Sierra 117 After a short "rest", the Chief is back to defending Earth from the Covenant invasion.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:03
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Not only can you save that dude but he has unique dialogue for the rest of the mission too.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:34
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And here we go with, in my opinion, the best of the Halo games.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:47
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