Halo, what a waste of time?

[New_Order]

I've got a cube and a ps2 and a pc, so is there anything else worth getting an xbox for? I can't think of anything right now.

Otogi 2

[Duncan]

For what it's worth, I'm considering getting an Xbox just for Crimson Skies.

[SoccerDude28]

I have nothing against the targetting in Halo, coz I pretty much kicked ass with a keyboard and a mouse.

But another complaint I have about it is the lack of save anywhere or a quicksave button. Consoles need to get out of the habit of savepoints. They are so frustrating, and to be honest, I am yet to play a game without a save anywhere where I'm not about to throw the goddamn gamepad or monitor out of the window. I especially found the level with a lot of rockets and grenades and the big tanks frustrating. I would wipe out almost every thing on the screen, to be wiped out by a flood carrying a rocket launcher and then I have to repeat the same shit over again. It creates a virtual difficulty that to me is more frustration than fun.

And weilding only 2 weapons sucks. coz Some levels you need a sniper weapon, a rocket launcher and a machine gun, so you need to carry 2, and then retrace for the third one to pick it up again. It again adds to the virtual difficulty and frustration. What's wrong with carrying gazillion weapons?

[OftenK]

I, personally, prefer a checkpoint system--if it is implemented well (which, in Halo, it most certainly is). It's not frustrating, it's challenging. I loved the original Halo (the second one I loved too, but not nearly as much) for a number of reasons. I believe there's a rant around here somewhere from Chris that explains those reasons perfectly. (Edit: Here it is.)

EDIT: Just read this bit: I think the two-weapon system is brilliant. Again, it doesn't add frustration, it adds challenge and strategy. I've never had as much fun with a FPS as I did with Halo (and that includes Half-Life 2, which is a remarkable game). Also: Have you played it through on Legendary Co-op? I think you'll find it quite enjoyable.

[SoccerDude28]

I, personally, prefer a checkpoint system--if it is implemented well (which, in Halo, it most certainly is). It's not frustrating, it's challenging. I loved the original Halo (the second one I loved too, but not nearly as much) for a number of reasons. I believe there's a rant around here somewhere from Chris that explains those reasons perfectly. (Edit: Here it is.)

EDIT: Just read this bit: I think the two-weapon system is brilliant. Again, it doesn't add frustration, it adds challenge and strategy. I've never had as much fun with a FPS as I did with Halo (and that includes Half-Life 2, which is a remarkable game). Also: Have you played it through on Legendary Co-op? I think you'll find it quite enjoyable.

See, what is challenging for you is very frustrating for me. That is the problem with the checkpoint system. I dunno, maybe I'm not good at shooters as you? But I still want to play them and not feel frustrated. I don't have a problem with a checkpoint system, if it is augmented with a quicksave for all the other people who would otherwise die frequently. HL2 does it perfectly, it has an autosave thing, with a quick save if you want to use it. It doesn't hurt in terms of challenge, it removes the frustration.

[Redwall]

Solution: Play on Easy.

[New_Order]

That's why they invented difficulty levels

[RLacey]

That's why they invented difficulty levels

I will restrain myself from going off on one about difficulty levels, but suffice it to say that the term 'Easy' is often a downright lie...

[Intrepid Homoludens]

...is there anything else worth getting an xbox for? I can't think of anything right now.

Knights of The Old Republic and Knights of The Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. Played them both on Xbox. Total hours combined: 150. Some of the very best gaming moments of my life.

I tried playing the original Halo on my nephew's Xbox. I dunno, I can never get used to playing a FPS with a console controller. Why can't I play it with a goddamn mouse/keyboard setup?

[Intrepid Homoludens]

But another complaint I have about it is the lack of save anywhere or a quicksave button. Consoles need to get out of the habit of savepoints. They are so frustrating, and to be honest, I am yet to play a game without a save anywhere where I'm not about to throw the goddamn gamepad or monitor out of the window. I especially found the level with a lot of rockets and grenades and the big tanks frustrating. I would wipe out almost every thing on the screen, to be wiped out by a flood carrying a rocket launcher and then I have to repeat the same shit over again. It creates a virtual difficulty that to me is more frustration than fun.

KoTOR and KoTOR II allow you to save anywhere at all in the game, even during combat. Also, they auto save when entering new levels or if you yourself haven't saved in the last 15 minutes, whichever comes first.

[David]

You have a lot of customizable options for autosaving your game in KOTOR/II as well; you can make it save after more events than it does by default, or fewer!

EDIT: I may be thinking of the pause feature, but now I'm too lazy to check. You can save on your own at basically any time which is good.

[Intrepid Homoludens]

Yeah, I forgot about that option. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck I love the KoTOR series!!!

[Intrepid Homoludens]

EDIT: I may be thinking of the pause feature, but now I'm too lazy to check. You can save on your own at basically any time which is good.

You have the option of the game auto-pausing the moment an enemy is spotted. You can also choose to play the combat in real time, or pause it with every single order you issue your characters and party members, which I preferred.

[SoccerDude28]

KoTOR and KoTOR II allow you to save anywhere at all in the game, even during combat. Also, they auto save when entering new levels or if you yourself haven't saved in the last 15 minutes, whichever comes first.

That's exactly my point. KOTOR is a fine example of a game that is challenging (Malak was the toughest boss ever) but not frustrating, coz you can use quicksave wherever you want or just rely on the autosave feature. Why can't every console game utilize the same scheme?

[Redwall]

I will restrain myself from going off on one about difficulty levels, but suffice it to say that the term 'Easy' is often a downright lie...

But in Halo, it's not. Halo on Easy it about the most goddamn simple game ever made. I suck at shooters, but I swear you cannot die on Easy. Halo's odd, of course, because it's difficulties run the extremes - easy is piss poor boring, legendary is die-load-repeat ad nauseum.

[SoccerDude28]

Okay I finally finished Halo on the PC. Here are my thoughts:

Strengths:

1- Shield: very nice touch. Instead of running around looking for health when you are about to die, here you can just run around and hide, till your shield goes back to full. It adds a feeling of security.

2- Vehicles: Again brilliant. You have the jeep, the tank, the ghost ship and the banchee. I especially liked the tank whatever it's called. It is so powerful and wipes out everything in its way.

3- AI: Again excellent especially the combine forces. The combine hide behind walls when you shoot at them. Also the invisibility shield adds a level of strategy to the fighting. I especially was impressed with the blue combine that carries the blaster and the plasma grenade. He killed me several times by smoking me out of my hideout with a grenade.

4- Squad: It's really nice to have backup fire in a firefight. The squad members are pretty smart in general and are a great addition to the fighting.

5- Graphics: For a 3 year old game, I was impressed with the graphics, and it ran very smoothly, but then I have a monster machine. I wonder how it runs on the lower end machines back when it came out.

Weaknesses:

1- Repetitveness: First the level design. That was the biggest turn off for me. The first 2 levels aboard the ship and when you land on Halo are very different and vibrant, but then it goes into an endless rut of a room after room that look exactly identical. I wish the developers made the game smaller but varied up the level design a little.

2- Handling only 2 weapons: Although I understand the idea behind it, and it might provide some strategy like some people mentioned, I was really frustrated, coz I had to backtrack a lot at times to pick up a rocket launcher which is only useful for short spurts. I wish weapons like the sniper gun and rocket launcher can always be carried, but then you can carry only 2 guns of any kind (combine blasters or human blasters).

3- checkpoint system: Doesn't work well for a shooter. It was implemented well here, but there were some long fights when you couldn't save (like at the end). It was especially frustrating since you can die by a sudden grenade thrown at you that sticks on you and you can't brush it off.

So overall the game was very enjoyable in some levels, but then it became tedious, and very long. But not the type of varied length that makes you excited to see what's next. The superficial length created by endless rooms. I wouldn't consider it a bad shooter because of all the things it does right, but the single player campaign on the PC fell short mainly in terms of level design. If the developers took their time to make use of all the vehicles,squad, and smart AI to create more varrying and dynamic levels, this game could have been one of the best single player shooters out there.

[baconian]

so, I relented and got an xbox. One thing about Halo that I haven't read is that it's very much like the Turok games. So far it is. I enjoyed Turok 1,2, and Evolution. Nice level design, stylistically individual. And flying dragons is fun, even if the implementation was a bit plastic.

Ive got halo and outrun2 so far, and Im gonna look out for Ninja Gaiden and Otogi.

[jokemaster]

First of all, I like Halo, ok, let me just set that straight.

What I don't like is that it's extremely overrated. People seem to think it's the FPS to beat, when it's actually a decent PC FPS ported to consoles. Now because console gamers hadn't experienced something like it before, they raved about it, but let's be honest, if it was a PC exclusive it would've gotten nowhere near as good reviews.

The singleplayer is annoying, and I find it extremely funny how people start inventing crap about how the level design was to make the game longer, and to leave it up to your imagination. i say that's crap, I wouldn't care if the game was 10 hrs long instead of 15, just don't make me walk the same hallway, then the same room, then the same bridge, then the same room, then the same hallway..........

*14 hrs of that later*

And the flood, I'm sorry, but they sucked. They weren't scary at all, just annoying. I mean I played through ravenholm in HL2, and THAT was scary, but the flood was just freakin' annoying.

Co-op is fun, and basically the only reason why I ever replay the campaign. Ever. Hell, the second one I just played through it because I wanted to see if they fixed anything. They didn't fix a freakin' thing. Hell they just basically recycled most of the enviroments from Halo 1! And the ending? WHere the fuck was it? I understand cliff-hangers, but there's a difference between a clifff-hanger in a movie where the next part'll come out in a year at themost, and a cliff-hanger ina game where the sequel will come out in 2 years at the LEAST.

It also pisses me off that when there was an excellent FPS like HL2, nobody wanted to play it and it got washed out by Halo 2.

And I like the game. It's decent, it makes for a fun thing to play through in co-op, and MP is fun for awhile, but it doesn't deserve the rave reviews they're getting.

[Kode]

And weilding only 2 weapons sucks. coz Some levels you need a sniper weapon, a rocket launcher and a machine gun, so you need to carry 2, and then retrace for the third one to pick it up again. It again adds to the virtual difficulty and frustration. What's wrong with carrying gazillion weapons?

Yeah, for a guy weighing 500 pounds, who can flip a tank with his bare hands, I would think slinging a few extra guns over his back would be a piece of cake.

But oh well. I liked Halo.

[jokemaster]

Yeah, for a guy weighing 500 pounds, who can flip a tank with his bare hands, I would think slinging a few extra guns over his back would be a piece of cake.

So true. I mean, let's compare Raiden and Master Chief. Even though everyone seems to hate Raiden, he'd beat Master chief simply because Master Chief would only be carrying 2 guns while Raiden could switch between rocket launcher, sniper rifle, tranq gun, ninja sword, and machine gun any time he wants to.

BTW, Raiden's sword also doesn't have limited battery life

[Chris]

NOTE: I am referring to both Halo and Halo 2 when I say "Halo" because these particular points I am making I think apply to both.

I disagree completely about Halo being a PC FPS ported to console. I don't think it's ANYTHING like a PC FPS. PC FPS games are by a million percent way more about twitch gameplay. Great PC FPS games are things like Quake, Unreal Tournament, and so forth, which honestly have very little in common with Halo other than being FPSes. Even the Half Life series, while clearly an astonishing watershed in gaming, in terms of gameplay has more in common with its PC brethren. The thing that's so good about Halo is its unique style of play. The weapons have far more individuality than in any other FPS I've played. PC gamers complain about only getting two weapons, but that's the point. You only need two weapons, because the weapons in that game are so diverse and versatile that there's ALWAYS a strategy to use one how you need it. There really aren't "weak" weapons, with the possible exception of the assault rifle/SMG but even that has plenty of uses if you know what you're doing. There's none of the traditional PC business of weapons being very much similar in character while only different in terms of damage done. The battles too feel very different. Halo has a much slower than a PC FPS. I mean yes it's still an action packed game, but you really have to invest way more time into planning out all your options and tactics before you run in guns blazing, assuming at least you're playing on one of the highest two difficult modes (and it practically isn't worth playing any other way). Sure, quick reflexes will save you to a point, but not nearly as much as they will in a PC game. The closest comparison I can think of in this specific regard is Far Cry, but even that is a far cry (...ha) from Halo. Far Cry is much more of a long range sniper sort of thing while Halo has some of that but is for the most part more of a short-mid range game. I loved Far Cry by the way, and I love Quake and UT. I'm not passing value judgments here, I'm just trying to explain how different Halo in fact is. PC gamers give it a lot of crap but I think it's unfair and inaccurate to try and compare it to PC FPS games. Had it ended up on PCs (or Macs) first, I still think it would have been very different from other PC FPS games.

Also, jokemaster: Lots of people played HL2. That and WoW were (possibly still are) at or near the top of the PC charts from the time of their release. The thing is, the PC market is much niche than the console market. It's unreasonable to assume that tons of people without gaming PCs are going to go out and upgrade just so they can play one game.

[SoccerDude28]

Halo was planned to be released on the PC first, before bungie was bought, so it was a PC planned game to begin with. And I do believe that if it was a PC exclusive, it wouldn't have sold or gotten the hype that it did. For the XBOX, it was the first first person shooter, and with Microsoft's marketting, it soared. The game is good but flawed (if you look at my review I pinpointed what I thought were the weaknesses). And PC shooters are not really all twitch gameplay. Quake and Unreal that you mentioned are mainly multi-player games so it is expected that they offer lots of shooting. But look at System Shock 2, Half-life and its sequel, Swat 4, Far Cry, No one lives forever 1 and 2, some of the best first person shooters that came out in the last 5 years. All of them are much more than simple shooting. Actually DOOM 3 that turned out to be a twitch shooter was shunned by a lot of people as simple run-and-gun. So I don't believe that there is a "console" FPS or a "PC" FPS, there are just good FPS'es and better ones. It's not the fact that Halo is a bad game, but if you read the reviews and listen to people talk about it, they make it seem like the best thing since jesus.

EDIT: And half-life 2 is coming to the XBOX. Hopefully now it will get some more fan recognition

[Jake]

You're forgetting the part where they totally redesigned huge huge facets of the game when it went xbox.

The game was, if I'm not mistaken, originally a 3rd/1st person hybrid multiplayer game, but was redesigned to be an almost entirely singleplayer / coop FPS.

There was a lot of development time in between when Microsoft bought them and when the game came out. It wasn't all spent simply porting the PC game over to the xbox controller.

[Chris]

I specifically mentioned Half-Life and Far Cry, but I still consider their gameplay to be a very different sort than Halo's, like I said. I tried to briefly explain why.

[Redwall]

IIRC, wasn't it orginally supposed to be a Mac game (which would be ported to PC) in the same way as Bungie's previous releases?