Space Ninja

Staying home sick from work and puking my guts out earlier in the day is apparently no excuse for canceling Halo night, especially not when it happens to be the day the Legendary Map Pack gets released. So last night the boys came over and we fired up the old 360 to test out the new maps, and I can tell you that they’re pretty good. Ghost Town is the only new map, and is a smallish area set in the jungle from early in the Halo 3 campaign. It seems good, but I had a hard time telling where I was most of the time. The other two maps were more fun. Avalanche is a remake of Sidewinder, the huge snowy outdoors map from Halo 1. The addition of man cannons and mongooses makes the map playable, even with just a few players. The gem of the pack is Blackout (pictured above), a remake of Lockout from Halo 2. The first thing we did was drop a huge pile of explosives into the central platform, which means that every few minutes, someone would detonate it in the hopes of taking someone out. It never gets old. The previous (heroic) map pack, with the addition of Foundry, I think was really aimed at casual gamers like me, and I really got a lot of use out of it. This pack, with the focus on maps for more serious players and the addition of the goofy forge filters for machinima creators doesn’t give quite the same bang for the buck, but I’d still say it’s worth picking up.