This weekend, an unprecedented event occurred. In fact, I could scarcely believe it myself when it happened: I actually finished a game.

While this may seem like a relatively common event for most people, it isn’t for me. In my long history of gaming, I have only been able to finish two games in my entire life. That’s right, just two. Through a freak series of accidents, I will normally get to the very end of a game, in some cases down to the very last two or three fights, and something completely out of my control will happen and I will not be able to finish. Whether the computer blows up or my memory card suddenly becomes corrupted and unreadable, I cannot see the ending of a game. (By the way, I’m a ninja.)

You could possibly say that I have finished three games, but I wouldn’t count the third. Last summer, a friend of mine recommended Sacred, saying we could play it together. (I’m a sucker for playing games with friends.) Despite how buggy it was, I was completely addicted, and went on into the game a lot farther than he had. It’s a great game. First of all, the world is absolutely immense. When I finished the first few quests of the game and had tromped all over the area, I checked my stats and realized with surprise that I had only discovered 2% of the world. The main storyline doesn’t even take you into 10% of the gaming map – the game gives you the opportunity to forget about the main quest indefinitely to tromp off to other towns for quests and adventure elsewhere. If you’re the kind of person who insists on doing every single side quest and filling in every single part of the map, this may or may not be the game for you because it would take quite a while to finish. At any rate, I loved the game and really thought, with great excitement, that this may be the second game ever that I would finish, but no, it was not meant to be. At one point near the end, the game informs you that your character must go back and repeat everything on a higher level before you can continue on and finish the game. Screw that. I moved on to the next game.

When Halo 2 was released, I was very excited and got pretty far on my own. But I’m not the kind of person who can plow through a game because I’ve got a huge list of games that I’m working on all the time and I rotate. Call it Gamer’s ADD, I don’t care. Whatever you want to want to call it, I didn’t finish. Luckily enough hulk wanted to play with me, and it became my first (albeit, painful) multiplayer experience with a first person shooter. Considering my track record of not being able to finish games for whatever reason, I wasn’t sure if we would finish it, but I was hopeful because it seems my chance at seeing the ending is much greater if someone’s good gaming karma is negating mine.

And it did. This weekend, hulk sent me a message saying he wanted to play, since we were so close to the end. After a couple of hours, Halo 2 was over. Considering that this was a momentous occasion for me, I expected fanfare and celebration and explosions and more gratuitous carnage – but alas, I was given none. After killing a few guys, Master Chief says one sentence, and the credits roll. What the hell is that all about? Of course, I had been forewarned by thousands of Halo fans before me who had finished and griped about the ending (or, lack thereof), but somehow, I was still really disappointed because it’s only the second game I had ever finished. Ah well, can you say “Halo 3”?

As many fans suspected, Halo 3 won’t be released until well after the Xbox 360 is released, but there’s no reason that you can’t get a Halo fix in the meantime. If you’re a fan of the games, head on over to Red vs. Blue because you’re probably the only English-speaking Halo fan who hasn’t yet. A while ago, the guys at Rooster Teeth Productions started making a hilarious movie inside of Halo, and eventually it snowballed into fandom. The guys (and gal) at RvB have started releasing the videos for Series Four, and they can be found here. Unfortunately if you haven’t been following the story, it may be a little difficult for you to catch on so late at this point. If you want to check out older clips, the site has a rolling archive and every week releases a different bundle of previous episodes. The previous episodes can be found here. The videos are released to the public in smaller, not superb formats, but they’re free so quit complaining. Or if you’d like, you can sponsor the site for $10 per six months and get better videos and more exclusive content.

Well, now that I’ve finished Halo2, I am looking forward to a new game to plow through and possibly even finish. Anyone up for Dungeon Siege 2?