Well, I never said it was flawless. The sequel definitively improved on that area a lot, and it's my personal favourite Halo, but that was the only one who never saw the light in any version on 360.

I got your back, Wright.

Halo: CE is my pick for the best too :)

What didn't you like about Reach, gameplay-wise? I can totally understand complaints about the story and characters, but in regards to the gameplay, armor lock aside, it's a tremendous improvement over Halo 3. If you want, you can read my reviews of both games over on my blog (warning: they're very long).

Halo ODST, not just the best Halo on 360, but in general. Was a masterpiece!

For me personally the order is ODST > 3 > Reach > 4.

I'd like to start by saying that each of these games is well produced and I think the difference in opinions comes from what people look for in gaming rather than the quality of any of the titles themselves. For me the big things are cooperative game modes, well balanced difficulty/AI, amazing audio design, stable performance, good image quality, and a good story.

If someone prefers competitive multiplayer or shiny graphics techniques more or values what I look for in a different order I can easily see my ranking of the games completely jumbled.

Having explained that, it's no wonder that ODST wins it out for me. Firefight is my absolute favourite Halo game mode of all. The differing soundtrack fit the setting and set the tone so well and the Superintendent's guidance and the audio tapes were brilliantly crafted. The engine was great for the time (especially the double buffered HDR in the night setting) but left a lot to be desired on the IQ side of things. At least performance was rock solid. And finally, the smaller-scale and more personal story in the Halo-verse had greater impact on me than the grandeur of Halo 3. When things happened they seemed to mean more to the characters' struggle or progression.

Halo 3 was great too and just slightly edged out. Although it didn't have firefight, the campaign was easily the best to play coop of all the Halo games last gen or the gen before. Fighting dual Scarabs on Legendary with 3 friends is just gaming bliss. The graphics were good for the time (the animation left something to be desired) and the performance was also solid regardless of how much mayhem was on screen. The story was a tad muddled in the grandeur of everything but the soundtrack and audio were excellent. I feel it lost a bit of impact because much of the soundtrack was reworks of older tracks with new sounds. And a lot of level design also seemed to want to pay homage to things they got right in older games. All in all though, I think we can all agree that Halo 3 was in general the de facto Halo package.

Reach is where things started getting muddy for me with Halo. This is Halo all grown up; and I'm not sure I want Halo to have grown up. There was charm in its cartoon-y, playful take on galactic warfare. But before even taking that into account, the performance in the first few levels of this game wasn't great. There was a fair bit of hitching in the framerate and there was ghosting throughout the entire campaign. It was quite bothersome to me. The audio got much more bombastic and in your face in Reach which was a welcome change. Bungie also managed to do a great/balanced job implementing armor abilities into Halo. Weirdly though, firefight didn't click with me on the same level as it did in ODST and I think it was due to the new mechanics like armor abilities and the balancing of the AI. On the story side of things Reach was a well told view on the Fall of Reach but when it was announced I hoped it would be based on MC's upbringing from the novel "The Fall of Reach". In any case, the characters weren't greatly fleshed out (compared to Buck and crew in ODST) so it was hard for me to care what was happening to them. Well, with the exception of my character. The ending was fantastically done. One of the best video game send-offs I've ever played.

Now, given my preferences in gaming you can probably see why Halo 4 was a let down for me. Spartan Ops wasn't a great coop mode (especially when it couldn't be played through couch coop), the soundtrack was being completely rebooted for a new trilogy and didn't resonate with me, multiplayer focused on load-outs, and the story incorporated a ton of the expanded universe that I just don't have time for. Heck, I'm taking far too much time away from work just to type this post. There's no way I'm reading 3 novels and 2 graphic novels while watching a TV miniseries and replaying a game just to find hidden terminals to watch just to understand the magnitude of what's going on. I understood the surface of the events and characters but understanding just the surface made it look like a poorly paced shallow story. In order to feel the full weight of what was happening, it seemed like MS and 343 set up the new trilogy to make players throw money at them if you wanted to appreciate the narrative in full depth (at least, legally). Finally there's the new suite of enemies. I don't feel the Prometheans were balanced to incorporate the holy triangle of Halo combat (guns, grenades, melee). I found myself hardly ever melee'ing anything because it was ineffective to pretty much all things Promethean (minus the Crawler... but if you were melee'ing them you were probably surrounded and going to die soon). At least it looked pretty, the sound effects were among the best in the series, and the actual gameplay mechanics were extremely well tuned. But high production values only do so much for me when it comes to Halo.