Holy heck, E3 week is upon us!

That being said, it’s hard to focus on much of anything else, but I wanted to pop in for my regular monthly game challenge weekly update.

Grunts and I powered through and beat Halo 2 with little fanfare. We only had a couple of missions left, and we finished them in good time. We moved straight into Halo 3, and we made it through about 70% of the game before we ran into some…issues.

We started in on a mission that plopped you down on a coast somewhere, and a few minutes in, the game started to chug chug chug to a crawl. I’m not a frame rate stickler, but when full seconds go by where there is no movement, that’s a problem. We tried exiting the mission and restarting. That didn’t work. We tried exiting the game, restarting, and coming back. That didn’t fix it. We tried powering through it, but kept getting killed due to our lack of being able to move appropriately.

So we decided to come back to it another day.

When we came back to it, it was just as bad, but we tried our best to power through, and through trial and error, we made it. But holy heck, sometimes it was so bad, it hurt my eyes to watch the screen. I suppose I should qualify that, due to my flu symptoms, I was already dizzy, and watching this stop and go screen issue was not helping. I would ask Grunts to let me know when it eased up a bit, and in the interim, I would look away.

It was really that bad.

When we finally finished the game, we felt victorious for making it through some of the worst frame rate issues either of us have ever seen.

I had looked up the issue online, and apparently, even many months after release, 343 knows these issues are there. And they still aren’t patched.

That’s unbelievable.

But those issues were nothing compared to what we faced in Halo 4.

We kept joining up before starting the game (as is necessary with the Master Chief Collection), and once we started the game, it would boot Grunts out. Sometimes it wouldn’t allow me to skip the cutscenes (it was never clear why it would work and why it wouldn’t), so I would have to sit through the first two cinematics of the game, only to immediately quit to start all over again in hopes he could stay in the game.

When we finally were able to do so, we made it maybe ten minutes before he was booted out. This was after much screen stuttering, and we both felt wary. How could these issues still be in a game released over six months ago?

It’s disappointing.

Anyway, we kept trying to start over, and after a few more tries (with him getting booted each time), we finally gave up for the day. Looking at the forums, we found that these have been issues since the release of the collection, but they still haven’t been fixed.

We talked about starting up and trying again, but if we aren’t able to get the game to allow us to play together, we are going to play through Halo 4 on our 360s in hopes that perhaps we can finish what would have been the Master Chief Collection.

I’ve never encountered such a broken game.

In the mean time, I also completed 10,000,000, and that was much fun. I may never have played it, had I not gotten sucked in to You Must Build A Boat. Both were exceptionally engaging.

After E3, Grunts and I will dive back into the monthly game challenge. Here’s hoping everything works.

And now, please excuse me, as I’m getting all geared up to live tweet and recap the day’s E3 press conferences, beginning with Microsoft in less than an hour. It’s so exciting!

Cheers!