I'm not going to talk about Halo 3 or Halo 2 or the massive library of other triple-A First Person Shooter titles I can call on for experience. This is strictly from personal gameplay and biases are going to be running rampant. If you're bad at Halo, brown or have an IQ below 99, then you're probably going to be offended by some of the things I say. I bought Halo Reach three months after release. At that time, the game had an online population of approximately one hundred thousand to one hundred and twenty thousand players online at all times. I hadn't been involved with the Bungie.net forums since Halo 2 and I bought this simply because it was a new Halo title, and I didn't really think Bungie could screw up the formula that's been successful even in the advent of the Modern Warfare juggernaut. So imagine my surprise when I started up my first game of Team Slayer and I found out that if I did a 3 shot with a DMR and a melee, I effectively did the same damage as someone who didn't bother shooting and just decided to run up and punch me. As this continued throughout the game, a buildup of anger and hatred began to build up. But I'm a f­ucking masochist and I kept playing until I managed to go barely positive. My first thoughts were "Holy shit, I suck." 17 and 14 against MarchingCone15. When the hell did I lose the ability to use my hands? Then I watched the replays and I realized that every time I tried to close in on somebody for a melee kill, they'd constantly trade kills with me. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why this was happening, especially since many cases I happened to punch the person at no shields, then suddenly fly backwards like I was just drop-kicked by Bruce f­ucking Lee. Of course, then I found out that the mutual kill window had extended to about half of a second. That may not sound like a lot of time for you, but for anybody who's felt the intensity of a last minute, last kill standoff, then this small difference can easily make or break the game. "Alright," I said. "Fu­ck it." I started up Team Slayer again and began playing on Sword Base. I spawned as the Red Team and immediately, I noticed how incredibly cramped the map felt. Everything seemed to be either a straight bridge, a corridor or a dead end room, leaving no open spaces. It honestly was claustrophobic. I also immediately noticed how incredibly unbalanced the map was. The Plasma Launcher, the shotgun, the all important [i]high ground [/i]was basically handed over to the Reds on a platter made from the testicles of Jesus Christ himself while all the blues got was a Sword and the ability to get teamshot while they struggled to make it past the Low Bridge. I honestly thought this map was a joke the first time I played it. "There's no way this is an actual map," I thought to myself. "Why, you'd have to be braindead in order to lose on this map." Sure enough, I got myself my first Halo Reach overkill when the entire Blue Team lifted up to Gold Room in a single file line, like they were in a desperate rush to fellatiate my shotgun before they had their brains splattered all over the back of the room by some buckshot. It was sort of surreal; it didn't seem particularly possible that there could be a room with literally one viable avenue of access in a map where there are close quarters weapons coming out of the ass. So after that experiment in genocide, I found myself wondering what all of these new loadouts I was seeing were. Jetpack? Seems interesting, if not useless. Armor Lock? Same. I pretty much dismissed everything except for Evade, which I thought made the entire point of using Sprint pointless, and Camo, which I found to be irritating when I'm winning by forty points in a game and the entire other team went camo. Of course, then I found myself on the map Countdown and suddenly I was treated to a coordinated team of individuals using Armor Lock. Granted, they played like they had scrotums grafted onto their thumbs, but it was a much better effort than the usual lackluster effort put forth by the monkey squad on Team Ghost. I was dumbfounded. The Sword suddenly became the most worthless close quarters weapon in the game since anybody could literally just punch the ground, spin around, slap your grey matter out through your nose and then go on their merry way like nothing ever happened. "Is this the real life?" Was a phrase that I found myself repeating several times throughout the game. This marked the first game loss in my Halo Reach career, a nailbiter where the last kill happened to be one of my lobotomized teammates after he managed to somehow betray me with an insane Hail Mary. That was day 1. What followed was many more months of frustration, broken controllers, broken TVs and noise complaints from the neighbors, all brought on in some form by either what I thought were absurd gameplay mechanics, idiotic map design and horrendous armor ability balancing. I suppose that I should end the Reach retrospective with the announcement of Halo 4. By then, I'd gained a rather numerous amount of people who actually possessed the ability to hold an Xbox controller with their hands instead of smashing the thumbsticks with their asscheeks like so many other people I've had to deal with when I played alone. I had given up completely on Team Slayer or as I'd like to call it, Team Institutionalization and I had been reduced to a pessimistic mess of a person whose daily life consisted of going to school, making sardonic comments towards my fellow learners and generally being an a­sshole. Oh wait, that was what was happening before anyways. Ignore the last part then. The point I'm going to make about Halo Reach in my Day 1 Retrospective is that Halo Reach was an incredibly flawed game from a basic gameplay standpoint. Several points, I questioned the common sense of the game's mechanics, especially bloom and the atrocious and claustrophobic map design as I struggled to understand how a bullet fired from a gun can magically curve inside of the barrel and make a general arc around my target's head before travelling straight on and impacting the wall behind. I don't recall taking any assassination training any time in the past, so why is my Spartan trying his hardest to be a [i]Wanted[/i] man, insert lame pun here. Sure, the game had loads of custom options, but nobody wanted to play them, least of all me. Forgive me, but I find little satisfaction in ramming cars into each other in some sort of masculine contest of strength when all you're doing is holding a f­ucking thumbstick forward until someone gets bored. And besides, all of the custom options in the world can't change the fact that basic Halo Reach gameplay felt like I was being anally probed by a barbed wire fence. stay tuned for part 2.