My name is Cathryn and I’ve been a Halo fan for five years.

It started in high school when I decided that it was high time a gamer like me got proficient at first-person shooter games (hereby now referred to as “FPS” because that sounds less dangerous). This was also around the time that Halo 2 came out, and Breaking Benjamin had a song in it, and high school sophomore me thought Breaking Benjamin was edgy and cool, so clearly I needed to play Halo 2.

Turns out, I’m completely an utterly worthless at games like Halo. I did find out that the Halo series has a freakin’ sweet back story in novelization form. Nerdy, I know. But the books, if you don’t mind dry scifi, are even better than the games. (Well, Halo 1 and 2, at least.) Reading the second book, The Flood, is literally a play-by-play of the first Halo game. I somehow managed to play Halo 2 and read The Flood before playing Halo 1, so playing the game was a little surreal when I could predict the exact objective and somewhat know what enemies would be in each level.

Ultranerd.

Unfortunately, due to being at college and unable to play awesome games on my brother’s Xbox 360, I never played Halo 3. Instead, I read the Wiki article on it and found out that everyone you love dies. Awesome.

So then, in a feat of brilliance, Bungie decided to make a prequel game about the planet Reach, where everyone also dies. Sweet move, Bungie. So I had little motivation to play this game, too, knowing that it was only going to end in tragedy. But one of my friends bought it and said we should play.

IT WAS SO AWESOME.

So much better than Halo 2, which may not be saying anything since I have no idea how good Halo 3 was. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the squad-based gameplay and frequent cut scenes. Also, I could drive a Warthog around all day.

In short, I know way more about Halo than a casual gamer should, and I also would like to admit to the Internet that I spent most of French I and American History in high school reading the Halo books. And I still scored excellently in both classes.

FIN.

Did I mention I take glamour shots of my Master Chief action figure?