The two zombies then begin a systematic execution of your squad, picking them off one-by-one as they make simple mistakes or grow impatient, charging out from behind the safety of the barricade to engage the beasts in melee. Within minutes, your squad is down to three men, facing off against more than a dozen of the undead. They could easily burst through the barricade before you'd even have a chance to kill half of them, but they don't. They bide their time, waiting.
As the minutes tick by, you slowly start to go insane. You can usually hear them moaning or taunting you, but now it's quiet - too quiet. "They're up to something," you think. But what? Suddenly, it becomes clear, the zombies, using their swords as tools, have uprooted an energy container and rolled it in front of your barricade. One of the walking dead slices the container open with his sword, sacrificing himself, and blowing your barricade to pieces. The rest of them are laughing as they charge through the breach and begin hacking away your limbs. Your squad falls in seconds. Your vision starts to fade. Just before it all goes to black, you watch the last man fall to the ground to be eaten, or, depending on the night, teabagged.
The end, like the beginning, is always the same. The Alpha and Omega of an invasion of the undead: The zombies are relentless and no matter how many times they fall, they will always get back up to come after you again. You, being human, do not share this resilience. You will, therefore, perish. But it's OK. That's the way the game was designed. First you lose, then you win. It's a classic "break you down, build you back up" scenario, and it's a hell of a way to spend an evening. Besides, the zombies are your friends.
There are many reasons for the popularity of Bungie's Halo 2, and I will not attempt to capture them all here. Released in November of 2004, the game sold almost 5 million copies by the end of that year alone; essentially, one copy of Halo 2 for every three Xboxes on the market. A year and a half later, the game still rests at or near the top of nearly every sales and rental chart in existence, and has been widely credited with single-handedly saving the Xbox brand from an early grave. With so many copies in so many hands, it's been no surprise that enterprising gamers have taken to creating their own multiplayer variants.
Halo 2 ships with seven basic multiplayer game modes, each of which sport a dizzying number of configurable options. This makes creating and saving a new Halo 2 game mode easier than getting off of the couch and buying another game. A player hosting a Halo 2 multiplayer game on Xbox Live can then share his new variant with his entire party simply by selecting it from a list. It would be hard to track the spread of custom game variants from the game's release date through today, but having purchased the game in November of 2004, and begun playing customized multiplayer variants the very same day, I for one can attest that it didn't take long for them to propagate.
