People have made all kinds of things inside Halo 5 using the game’s Forge mode, but Skee Ball seems to have a special place in the hearts and minds of the game’s players.
The latest mod to recreate the analog arcade game comes from user Spartan 106473. Called Arcade Tokens, the mini-game allows up to five guardians to compete by lobbing bombs at their corresponding targets. You can see how it works in a video made by YouTuber ZannyVids. It still has some kinks to be worked out (occasionally the ball can get stuck on the geometry and won’t roll back out) but the pulsing neon color scheme gives the whole thing a Halo meets Hackers vibe.
But of course this is by no means the first attempt to make virtual Skee Ball using Halo 5. There is in fact no shortage of mods recreating the mini-game with varying degrees of success. One version I highlighted previously was rough but also creative in how it combined Halo 5 and Skee Ball by way of giant golf balls and golf clubs, but Spartan 106473 believes his is unique in how closely it approximates the real thing. “All the others are single player and use the golf club or hammer to hit a golf/soccer ball into a hole,” he wrote last month.
While there are plenty of Halo 5 mini-games that stick more closely to the game’s core, underlying mechanics, I have a soft spot for absurdity of some of more banal stuff. I can’t help but find it reassuring that when you give people the tools to make almost anything they can imagine they will probably end up just ripping off their favorite game from the local pizza shop that closed 20 years ago.
For instance, Spartan 106473 has also made Halo 5 maps inspired by Pac- Man. Players get to run around a giant, Tron-looking maze filled with iconography from the arcade game. Like Skee Ball, Pac-Man is another cornerstone of the Halo 5 Forge community, with lots of different variants. In this respect Halo 5 has more in common with something like Minecraft that most other modern shooters, doubling as a 3D canvass for gaming nostalgia as well as a high-stakes, competitive first-person shooter.