While writing my recent Love/Hate posts about the Halo franchise, I was stunned when I realized the amount of effort that had to be put in for the developers to release four mainline Halo games during the Xbox 360 era. Like… these are Halo games, even a smaller title like ODST would have take a ton of work and creativity to complete. This achievement was even more impressive to me compared to today, where most Read More

And with that, we have completed another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! I’m so glad that I managed to finally get through the Halo games – like I said at the start, I’ve had a lot of enthusiasm for this series, long before I got a chance to play them for myself. As you can see with my Top 100 Video Games of All-Time list, Halo 3 was such a well-crafted shooter that it made Read More

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the most recent game in the franchise Halo Infinite. After all the shit 343 Industries had put the fanbase through, expectations were really low for this game, and then got even worse when people saw the reveal trailer, which necessitated a delay to polish the game up for launch. Since then, I’m aware that the game has been through some major Read More

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over Halo 5: Guardians. I’ve been well aware of this game’s reputation long before I played it: stories about the marketing being deceptive, the game being full of repetitive boss fights, being downed constantly in co-op, and a despised story. Honestly though, I didn’t dislike Halo 4 as much as some people, so I’m going into this with an open mind. Maybe Read More

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over Halo 4, the first new entry in the series by 343 Industries! I’ve heard really mixed things about this game over the years. On launch, it was lauded, but with the disappointment surrounding subsequent entries, it has retroactively been considered to be shit by Halo fans. Then again, ODST and Reach are loved by Halo fans, and I found them to Read More

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the final Bungie-developed Halo game, Halo: Reach! Going in, this was probably the Halo game I knew the least about, but I had always heard that it was a solid swan-song for the Bungie games. How does the game hold up today? Read on to find out… Love Customizable Avatar – Perhaps the coolest feature of Halo: Reach was one that Read More

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over our first spin-off title, Halo 3: ODST! This was a weird little release: the series’ overarching narrative seemed to have concluded, so there was a lot of questions about how Halo would be able to continue. Bungie then announced this game, which had started out as an expansion to Halo 3, but would evolve into its own stand-alone experience. The resulting Read More

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the series’ third entry, Halo 3! We’re now past the point where I had any first-hand experience with these games: I remember this game being an absolute blockbuster at the time, and it was the #1 shooter in the world for a few years until Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare took over the genre, but I never got to play Read More

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the series’ second entry, Halo 2! Like I said in the first entry, I had played a bit of Halo 2‘s multiplayer back when we did LAN parties at my church, but other than that, I had very little first-hand experience with the game. I didn’t see past the campaign’s opening cutscene, and I didn’t get that far into the novels Read More

Surprise! It’s time for a new love/hate series! As you can probably tell, we’re going to be diving into the Halo franchise, going over all the mainline entries and their campaigns. Multiplayer is a pretty major aspect of Halo, obviously, but I’m about 23 years too late to properly dive into these games’ multiplayer modes, so we’ll just stick with the campaigns for this analysis. As for my history with Halo, I got invited to Read More

Over the past couple years, one of my friends finally convinced me to check out Magic: The Gathering… and my wallet has been cursing him ever since. One of my weekly rituals is to listen to the EDHrec podcast, which recently had an episode about their favourite cards of the year. This got me thinking about what my favourite cards of the year were as well, which eventually lead to me sitting down and writing Read More

Welcome back to my annual music countdown! As is tradition here on IC2S, I go back through the albums I’ve listened to this year and then rank them from worst to best. Hopefully this list encourages you to check out some new music you may or may not have heard of before now! There’s no honourable/dishonourable mentions this year, so let’s just get right into the countdown, starting with… 16) The Fall, Trapt Trapt hold Read More

It’s mid-December, so that means another count-down of my favourite movie posters of the past year! In case you’re unfamiliar with how this works, I spend the year trolling through impawards and collecting all the really cool, interesting and striking poster designs for 2024 movies and then narrow them down into a shortlist. As always, any poster released during the year is eligible to make the list, but special consideration is given to posters which Read More

25. Jaws: The Revenge (1987) Kicking off our bottom twenty-five, we have another legendarily bad sequel, Jaws: The Revenge. Suffice to say, this movie’s as bad as everyone has said. Again, this is another horror sequel that just kills off its most famous characters, making Sherriff Brody die of a heart attack off-screen and then having his son, Sean, get killed by the shark at the very start of the film. It just feels insulting Read More