Mr.Duck on 17/12/2010 at 19:28
I've had a blast with all Halos save 2, that one was meh. 3 was kind of meh too, but in a more epic way.
Now Reach....man, that was fun :D
Though I don't forget CE and ODST....cheers
:)
Sulphur on 17/12/2010 at 19:52
Halo 3 was epically meh? :confused:
Pyrian on 17/12/2010 at 20:52
Quote Posted by ZymeAddict
Huh. I thought the brute in that commercial was CG for sure. Interesting to see it was actually animatronic.
Interesting. This, and the Old Spice commercials, demonstrate that real life fakery has advanced to the point where it can compete directly with CG. :joke:
Volitions Advocate on 18/12/2010 at 00:40
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Interesting. This, and the Old Spice commercials, demonstrate that real life fakery has advanced to the point where it can compete directly with CG. :joke:
When done right, the old way always worked better (Alien)
done wrong obviously it looks terrible (Doom teh Moooveee)
but that's a debate for a thread that hasn't been dead for 15 months.
catbarf on 18/12/2010 at 22:03
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
I've realised another key reason why none of the sequels (aside from maybe Reach) are as compelling as Halo 1 from a gameplay standpoint. Combat against the Brutes serves no real challenge at all and thus is pretty dull. They're weak and it's easy to counter their tactics. Contrast them with the Elites, who were pretty challenging, clever opponents. If a Brute are no stronger than your average human, it makes you scratch your head when you consider the series' fiction. WTF were the Prophets in Halo 2 thinking when they ousted the Elites as the core of the Covenant's military and replaced them with the Brutes?
I've been replaying Halo 2 and the Brutes just piss me off. Elites are tough, but have shields you can wear down, and don't take tons of firepower to kill. Brutes just soak up fire without even flinching, and god help you when there's only one left and he goes into insta-kill berserk mode. I've only been able to counter it by using Needlers at every opportunity to just blow them up.
On another note, comparing Halo and Halo 2, I am realizing that they both have annoying repetition in their own ways. While Halo made you repeat three levels and had lots of samey environments (Assault on the Control Room, The Library), Halo 2 loves to let you go to a new area, then kill five to ten minutes fighting waves of enemies until a door magically opens.
henke on 3/4/2011 at 13:59
Opinions about earlier Halo's: loved 1, didn't play 2, didn't like 3(though I can't exacly say why. The dual weapon system turned me off, even though I usually like guns akimbo), haven't played Reach yet.
Just finished ODST, loved it.
Good stuff: walking through the the New Mombasa streets at night as the Rookie, is very atmospheric. It's mostly deserted, and feels just like a big city at night, with all the right ambient street-noises. It feels like a believable future city, with futuristic mail-slots built into the walls and train-ticket dispensers and glow-in-the-dark crossings with ticking "walk now" signs. And some vegetation here and there which really creates a nice counterpoint to the otherwise very sterile environments. And colored lighting! Oh my god do you guys remember back in the late 90s when 3D graphics cards were just starting to come out and levedesigners littered their levels with different colored lighting - simply because IT COULD BE DONE - but then the "wow effect" wore off pretty soon and leveldesigners cut that shit out and instead reverted too far back. It was almost taboo to put colored lighting in your games because it might be regarded as "showing off". But Halo ODST brings that shit back, not overdoing though. Just a splash of red here and there and the end-result is very effective.
The streets are, like I said, quite empty. Here and there you'll run into the occasional patrol or a sniper on a rooftop but for the most-part you'll be walking empty streets and it feels very atmospheric, and completely unlike anything I've seen in any previous Halo game. Littered around the empty city are audiologs which tells a backstory, 30 audiotapes in all, I only found 16 despite my best efforts. If I play it again I'll make sure to make one last tour of the city before triggering the final set of missions. Besides the audiologs there are also objective-items around the city which trigger flashbacks to what your squadmates have been up to during the previous 6 hours. Most of these you can pick up in any order, so you'll never know where in the timeline the particular flashback will take place, creating a Pulp Fiction-style feel to the narrative.
The flashback missions are quite actionpacked, and nicely contrast with the slower pace of the Rookie's trek though New Mombasa as he tries to piece together the backstory. There are dozens of great setpieces here, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the final Warthog sequence in Halo 1. And overall the combat is just fantastic. I tried playing on Heroic at first but it was so frustrating I switched to Normal. After that the shootouts turned into a long string of fistpumpingly awesome encounters all the way till the end.
Oh and not only are the sounds great but the soundtrack too. From soaring ballads to intense jungledrums, it nicely contrasts and complements the on-screen action. And most importantly it knows when to just shut up and let the natural sounds of the city envelop you and draw you right into the setting.
The bad stuff: Bungie attempts some humor with the characters and the dialogue; they shouldn't. The character's heads and faces look terrible, especially compared to how good everything else looks. After you've traversed half the city you'll start noticing a lot of copy-pasting going on as you stumble on areas which you could swear you've been to earlier only it turns out that you haven't. The underground base near the end is a return to the bad old days of Halo 1's leveldesign; a lot of similar rooms that run on almost long enough to get annoying. Almost.
Overall: perhaps even better than Halo 1, in my book.
EvaUnit02 on 3/4/2011 at 17:16
Nathan Fillion was the best element of the non-gameplay parts of this game. Nolan North was the worst.
I agree that the Rookie present time framing device was very atmospheric, but my opinion of the entire city hub level being a grindy, irritating padding device for a very short game hasn't changed.
P.S. Did you see the extended epilogue earned from beating Legendary difficulty? If not, then it's on Youtube, as you would expect.
henke on 3/4/2011 at 17:46
Yeah I know what you think of the city hub from reading the last page, but I thought it was the best part of the game. I just took it real slow, sneaking around, scoping out an area for snipers or patrols before moving on. At one point I found one of those quadbikes and drove it halfway around the city, just sightseeing. :D
I only saw the regular epilogue with the
Sergeant and Virgil. I guess you're refering to (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVrBR7oX4L4) this one? Doesn't really tell me much. Who's the alien king-dude? I guess it has something to do with the story in Halo 3 but I hardly remember any of that.
EvaUnit02 on 3/4/2011 at 17:59
Quote Posted by henke
Who's the alien king-dude?
He's the Prophet of Truth.
The core ODST narrative takes place during Halo 2. I think that particular epilogue occurs between H2 & 3.
Halo 2 is one of the better games in the series narrative wise, but one of the worst in terms of gameplay and mission design. The earlier levels where you play as the Arbiter are especially fucking dire.
The PC version of Halo 2 is definitely better, it solved many of the technical issues of the original Xbox version like the awful texture pop-in, lacklustre framerates and long load times. Also overall I found the game a better experience with mouse aiming.
catbarf on 4/4/2011 at 20:21
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
The PC version of Halo 2 is definitely better, it solved many of the technical issues of the original Xbox version like the awful texture pop-in, lacklustre framerates and long load times. Also overall I found the game a better experience with mouse aiming.
It does have its share of issues- while it has extreme input lag with Vsync on, any modern card can render with Vsync off at a framerate high enough that it renders the game unplayable. I had to use a framerate limiter to play it. Also, the off-center crosshair is really goddamn annoying if, like mine, your monitor is below eye level.
