Rampancy

For most of the past few years the bulk of my attention has been on Halo's campaign play: story, characters, and settings. Partly it's my choice, since it is where my interest in Halo lies, but partly due to circumstances. For most of the past seven years, the Internet connections I had access to were unsuitable for online play.

Recent events, however, have conspired to bring my attention back to online play. The first is the upcoming Halo 3 multiplayer public beta. True to form, it appears that Bungie will have multiplayer ready to show the world before the campaign is finished; so between now and when the beta test ends, most Halo 3 discussion will probably focus on multiplayer aspects.

The second thing is that I finally have a reasonably priced Internet connection that makes it possible to participate in Halo 2 matches. While I still have more latency and less skill than a below-average Halo 2 player, for me, participation is the thing. I've already missed out on far too much.

The last thing was that during a discussion of an entirely different subject, my attention was drawn to Halo2sucks.com.

This is not normally a site I would pay much attention to. There's something incongruous about reading a site that labels Bungie "sellouts" and proudly (if largely incoherently) claims that Halo 1 is better than Halo 2 and this inevitably leads to the conclusion that Halo 2 sucks.

However, then I began to feel that simply dismissing all the points the site tries to make simply because of the presentation was prejudicial; and despite the fear of directing attention somewhere it's not warranted, I felt a need to address some of the points the site raised. Then I discovered what really bothered contributors to that site. More on that near the end.