Halo's combat evolves through allowing players to once again finish their fight in virtual reality

Crawling through Pillar of Autumn has not felt this fresh in some time.

To those who grew up with an unwieldy chunk of a controller in their palms, your memories of Halo: Combat Evolved have endured to a greater end than your initial ergonomic discomfort. Beginning aboard the Pillar of Autumn in the midst of an abrupt boarding by a curious crew of alien zealots, fighting one’s way through the hostile hordes delivered a strikingly cinematic experience: gunfire would elicit spurts of teal blood from foes, delivering a desperate manner of resistance to a besieged enterprise. Then, a forced landing upon the earth below unveiled a vista that would come to define a generation, if not a medium: the ringworld of Halo. Whereas the previous level sanctioned a linear experience, its successor provided players with an improvisational set - lightly punctuated by scripted encounters and deft environmental clues. Charting Halo’s cartography imbued Microsoft’s first foray into gaming with a tantamount sophistication to their PCs; elements of a light immersive sim complimented its wholly haptic combat - an evolution worthy of its subtitle’s gaudy assertion.

Though the series’ subsequent sights would either rival or surpass this initial outing, the indelible imagery of the franchise’s superstructure was swiftly woven into the fundamental fabric of the medium. Seldom can a story of this scale convey its intentions not only within its inaugural effort, but its second level; I can turn to Mass Effect 2’s pulsating prologue and Shepherd’s consequent resurrection as an effective iteration on its predecessor’s taciturn tone. Though returning to Combat Evolved via the Anniversary Edition - playable either on PC or Xbox - grants its players autonomy in selecting the original or updated graphics, the principle philosophy remains sound in the latter: finish the fight on your own terms. However, for those who abide by the latter with UNSC-esque fealty, hoping to seize upon an opportunity to experience your first steps upon Halo anew, you may now assume the mantle of the Master Chief through a bespoke conversion of its campaign to virtual reality: HaloCEVR, not to be confused with the Hong Kong Centre for Eye and Vision Research, the most prominent prompt on a Google search of CEVR. As we know, optometrists chafe at the prospect of sitting too close to a screen.

Courtesy of LivingFray on Github, those equipped with a treadmill, prop rifle, and a VR headset may further immerse themselves in Halo’s abundant greenery - admittedly, the majority may be limited to the last. You may be intimately acquainted with the suite of skirmishes, refined through rote sojourns. However, this VR update requires players to operate weapons ambidextrously as though they reserved the Master Chief’s own mechanical mastery. Though this mod requires version 1.01 of the original PC edition from 2003 to function, its articulation is astoundingly astute. Muzzles flash with fiery intensity; magazines drop at your feet. Hiking through the vegetation is at once therapeutic and terrifying: commanding celestial bodies on the horizon shine against smatterings of blood and plasma.

To those wanting to codify a covenant between the past and future of the medium, CEVR - again, not the Hong Kong group responsible for another page on GitHub - provides a liminal passage between these spaces. When nostalgia is delivered through novel means, which generation does it belong to?