The level that made the world take notice, and not only that - the one that proved first-person shooters could work perfectly well on consoles. Halo's mix of quick-switch double weapons, regenerating health, vehicular combat and team-based gameplay has now been picked apart ad nauseam, but if you fire it up today there's just nothing like the original Cartographer level. Taking place mostly on a beach with occasional forays through intersecting underground cavelike structures, it was also one of the first times you'd bare witness to cutscenes playing out through your gameplay perspective - giving way to a Normandy beach-like charge at the opening that saw you get stuck in bashing grunts with melee attacks and lobbing sticky grenades into the path of oncoming Elites. In short, it's still just as heart-pounding and phenomenal now as it was then.
