10 Video Games That Cost ALL YOUR FRIENDS

Halo 2 may be 20 bloody years old now, but it’s still easy to recall those halcyon days of playing the co-op campaign with your best bud while chugging down a bottle of Mountain Dew with Dorito-encrusted fingers. Too vivid?

The earlier Halo games stood as one of the few legit contenders to GoldenEye’s console FPS crown, but even the tightest of friendships were stretched close to snapping point by Halo 2’s infamously shoe-leather-tough Legendary campaign.

Legendary is of course the series’ highest difficulty setting, in which enemies are hardier, smarter, and more numerous, guaranteeing that gung-ho players will be made short work of.

Halo 2’s Legendary mode makes things even more fraught by introducing a maddening wrinkle - if your co-op partner dies, you both get sent back to the last checkpoint.

This alone is enough to drive a wedge between even the chillest of homies, because when success is this challenging, making a silly mistake just isn’t good enough.

Ideally you’d both unite in frenzied anger at the game itself and those damn dirty Jackal Snipers. But human beings being what they are, it’s far more likely you’ll groan at your friends’ deaths and mutter unpleasant things about them under your breath. That’s what Halo 2 on Legendary does to the soul.