Last week, I played Halo 3 with some of my friends and I can't remember the last time I've had that much fun playing a video game. I felt like a child again while playing a custom game called Jenga, where one person was launching items at a crudely built tower in the air with everyone else on it, trying to knock us all off and break the tower. There's just something magical about Halo 3 that makes it ridiculously fun every time I play it.

The only catch is that I wasn't actually playing Halo 3 despite it being nearly identical to Halo 3.

In 2014, Halo Online was in development by Microsoft, 343 Industries and Sabre Interactive. It was originally going to be an official online Halo game that was going to be released on the PC. The game was only playable in Russia and the project ended up getting cancelled. Luckily, a team of mod developers have continued to support the game and continuous work is being done for it.

ElDewrito, the name the developers have taken on, recently released a .6 update for the project and it is amazing. It's basically straight up classic Halo 3 multiplayer for the PC. This is something Halo fans have been asking for ever since 2007 when Halo 3 originally was released.

Yes, you read that correctly. Halo 3 is available online and its for free. Glorious Halo 3 with no sprint, no armor abilities, classic art style, returning maps (and some entirely new ones made by Sabre) and classic sound design. The best part, it's completely free and safe to download and play. Just download the game files from a link provided by the HaloOnline subreddit.

The new update improves general connectivity and optimization for the game. In addition to that, a server browser now exists to make finding a game easy and fast. Finding a game is no longer an issue. Full servers will be popping up in your search faster than you can go through the list to read them all. Now, it's just as playable as Halo 3 was back in it's heyday, even for people that don't have high quality gaming computers.

HaloOnline also adds to the base game of Halo 3. Map editor Forge mode is much better than it was in the original game and even rivals Forge mode in Halo 5. That, along with new custom game options such as increasing or decreasing the size of your character opens up even more sandbox possibilities that Halo 3 originally had created with its custom games.

It's not Halo 3, but it's the closest thing to it that works properly and is the only way to truly play classic Halo multiplayer on the PC.

While ElDewrito's project is amazing and everything a Halo fan could ask for, Microsoft has already moved to shut the project down in order to protect. It was built with Microsoft-owned assets and was never lawfully released. Hopefully, the message is clear: we want classic Halo back.