Is Halo 3 known to have a funky save system? I revisited the game but the last saved checkpoint is a good hour away from my last point of progress, and it's really BORING playing the game once let alone repeating an entire hour.
Anyway, had a few laughs with the Warthog MP back before BF1942 or UT2003/2004 stormed the PC scene, but running it even on my puny GPU I realised Halo wasn't all that. But I also didn't forget that it's many people's first major (FPS) game, sort of like our Marios, Sonics and Pongs Kind of a sad fact, that.
I enjoyed Halo 2's single player far more than one. It seemed less rushed and it was more fun. I loved playing as the Arbiter.The game looked and played great. For me the single player felt immensely more satisfying that any other game in the series, even if it ended on a horrible cliffhanger.
I still pick the game up today and play single player, and i can't say that about any other FPS really. The levels were varied and even the flood was somewhat fun to fight. The first game was fun until the introduction of the flood and then it went to shit. The Library has to be the worst level ever. It took me forever to beat it on legendary. Halo 3 and ODST burnt me pretty badly but i might pick up the new game.
As a huge Halo fan im going to have to say something here:
Halo 1 was incredible and in my opinion the best FPS ever made. Unfortunatly due to the diabolical story of Halo 3 and ODST many people assume the first 2 installments were just as bad and unoriginal. Now we all know what assumptions are the mother of.
Halo 1(combat evolved) introduced many new features which had not been seen to the mass public before in a FPS, of which many have become so standard in FPS its easy to forget Halo if not invented, certianly popularised the use of. One example which springs to mind is regenerating heath (in the form of an energy shield admittdly). When people first heard about this they all thought it was stupid would lead to firing one bullet and then hiding behind a rock untill your health replenished. Well now look at easily 90% of modern FPS and tell me they still have health packs lying on the ground.
Another element people often forget is that when it came out Halo combat evolved was a graphical and musical masterpiece. With full orchestral music and graphics which people had never seen before it blew our minds before we even picked up the controller.
Finally the story. Everyone i know slags this off but to me its what kept me playing. In Halo one your ship is attacked by unknown aliens and many people die as you try to escape. Standard Sci-Fi stuff. But you dont land on a planet, you land on a giant metal ring so largeIt has its own ecosystem, water cycle and atmosphere. Instantly you want to know how and why. So the game lets you regroup with all your survivors to try and discover the answers so you can escape from it and head back to earth. But along the way the still mysterious aliens follow you and attack forcing you with your vastly inferior weapons to wage a guerrilla war. Then you discover a parasite which eats people alive and uses their remains as body which for me is seriously cool. Then another twist as the metal Halo your on has its own army of robots which try to kill everything. So now you’re stuck in a 4 way war, with the worst weaponry and smallest numbers. So of course you discover the secrets and escape the ring.
Now someone tell me that isn’t a damn good story for a FPS where most of them are, “The terrorists have invaded America. It’s our job to send them home!”
I will never forgive Bungie for making Halo 3 have no mystery or plot twists, or even blood splatter. But instead a linear story of Defend earth from monkeys wearing circus outfits and kill they’re leader, at least with ODST they made it slightly less childish.
Well, I'm glad you like it. I disagree with your sentiments immensely, but to each their own I suppose. But then again, who am I kidding?
First of all, relatively few FPS gamers I know actually like the regenerating health concept. Call us old fashioned, but we liked the old days where we had to have skill as opposed to the ability to duck behind a corner for a few seconds to get all our health back.
Second, you're falling into the trap about graphics where you feel something is automatically better because it's prettier. I'll admit, Halo was pretty for the time (well, when it wasn't repeating the same thing over and over again. I'm thinking of you, Library), but at this point I'd been repeatedly blown away by graphics in games. Doom, followed by GoldenEye, followed by Half-Life, followed by Unreal, followed by Return to Castle Wolfenstein, UT2k4, Half-Life 2...meh, it really wasn't that big of a deal.
Third, a full orchestral soundtrack is nice and everything, but I started getting stuff like that with Medal of Honor in 1999, and I actually like the memorable electronic music you find in the older titles like Duke Nukem 3D.
Fourth, the story actually closely resembles Larry Niven's Ringworld, published in 1970 (it won the Hugo in 1970 and the Nebula and Locus awards in 1971). Hey, solid awards and accolades for the plot, just thirty years later. In fact, Niven was even asked to write the Halo books, but declined. Personally however, I kinda prefer some of the other scifi plots I've come across in the genre, such as Unreal's "Your ship crashlands on an alien planet and you become the liberator of a race enslaved by another far more militant alien species that has also crashlanded on the planet", or Half-Life's "a hole has been ripped in space, causing creatures from another dimension to be brought into this one, forcing you to try to escape the facility and bring back help," or even Doom's "demons from Hell have appeared on Phobos, make your way through the colony and find out what's going on." The whole terrorists invade America thing really didn't get popular until after Sept. 11, 2001, which is also about the time CounterStrike started its surge in popularity.
Quick question though, as this might answer a few things about why you feel Halo was so great...how many FPS had you played before playing it?
Ack wrote:First of all, relatively few FPS gamers I know actually like the regenerating health concept. Call us old fashioned, but we liked the old days where we had to have skill as opposed to the ability to duck behind a corner for a few seconds to get all our health back.
Ugg. Everyone is entitled to their opinion of course but please don't resort to preaching about how your side is better because it requires more "skill." Halo is a skill-intensive game, as is pretty much every FPS.
I don't really have an opinion on regenerating health. It's not better or worse for me; it's just different. I've played a lot of online Halo 2, and I've played a lot of online Doom. The gameplay is very different; you have a to master a completely different set of skills to become good at the games, and in both games a poor player will be thoroughly crushed by a skilled player. I actually prefer old-school FPSs (Doom, Quake, Unreal, etc.), but that doesn't mean that Halo isn't a great series (or Halo 2 at least).
I'm known as ZebetiteGlitch or Zeza Von Thantos on other platforms.
Your right about the story it is very similar to Ringworld story. However to me at least that doesnt matter as it was still enchanting and mysterious, not to mention plain different.
The graphics as you said were great in their day andyes some things were repeated but to be honest i dont think anyone cared because endless giant indentical corridors was suitable and actually in the level, Library as you mentioned, added to the entire lost on a giant world feeling.
As for the health it was but one example. However whilst i would agree with you that health packs are supirior in many ways (Doom 2 wasnt my favourite FPS for years with out them) there is no denying that the true majority prefer regenerating health as this is shown by the industries shift.
If you personally dont like Halo thats fair enough, just like i have never seen what so great about gears of war. However recently it seems many people just hate Halo because it is Halo, in the same way some people hate Harry Potter just because its Harry Potter.
Does that make any sense?
As for your last question, lots is the answer. It was my favourite genre untill the last few years where the Call of Duty games have kinda killed it for me.
Frizz.Meister wrote:Your right about the story it is very similar to Ringworld story. However to me at least that doesnt matter as it was still enchanting and mysterious, not to mention plain different.
The graphics as you said were great in their day andyes some things were repeated but to be honest i dont think anyone cared because endless giant indentical corridors was suitable and actually in the level, Library as you mentioned, added to the entire lost on a giant world feeling.
As for the health it was but one example. However whilst i would agree with you that health packs are supirior in many ways (Doom 2 wasnt my favourite FPS for years with out them) there is no denying that the true majority prefer regenerating health as this is shown by the industries shift.
If you personally dont like Halo thats fair enough, just like i have never seen what so great about gears of war. However recently it seems many people just hate Halo because it is Halo, in the same way some people hate Harry Potter just because its Harry Potter.
Does that make any sense?
As for your last question, lots is the answer. It was my favourite genre untill the last few years where the Call of Duty games have kinda killed it for me.
Sorry for coming off as an ass, I was extremely tired when I wrote that. I should clarify a few things: I don't hate the Halo series, I find it to be a very competent line of games, and I have played through the first two in the series several times. But I've never found them to be the be-all end-all that some people have described them as.
To make matters worse, going through college shortly after Halo's release and during the years of Halo 2, I'd often find the "HALO IS TEH B3ST GAME EVAR" crowd populated by people who could count the number of games they'd played on one hand. When asked why they thought it was so good, some of them would manage to come up with a few reasons, often along similar lines with a few of yours, but they could never really defend their statements because they lacked the background to do so. So when I read your response, I thought "Oh great, another kid who's only played a couple of games beyond Madden here to tell us why Halo is the greatest thing since sliced bread." I see my assumption was incorrect, so I apologize.
However your response to at least one of my criticisms is interesting. I've never heard anyone defend Library, even the most die hard fans. But your reasoning for it makes sense, especially considering your grand view of the game world. I found it exceedingly repetitive, but I guess its length could be a measure of scale of the world. People did care about the repetitiveness, but if one enjoys the feeling a level inspires, then I guess it can be easily overlooked. I've heard a lot of complaints about the level where the Flood appear being the same thing over and over again, but as I liked the way the flood would suddenly swarm into the room in that level, I was ok with it.
But I still don't see what Halo did that hadn't been done before. I've never gotten that argument, and nobody's ever been able to tell me what it was.
I think a big part of people thinking Halo is overrated is because of the Halo players. Most of them are douches who give a bad rep for all Halo fans. They don't like it for the plot, music, artwork, gameplay, etc. They just want to "pwn some n00bs" and then brag about it and talk about how "Halo is the best game ever". The true fans are the ones who don't even care about miltiplayer and have been playing since the beginning.
Yes, I do think Halo 1 (Combat Evolved) is the best FPS of all time. Out of all the FPS I've played, this one has the most fun levels, gameplay, music, and the best overall story. Yes, I've played all FPS you would expect a hardcore gamer to play and I must say that the only ones I really liked enough to ever play more than once were Halo, Time Splitters, and Goldeneye.
So anyway, since I disliked Halo 2 and thought Halo 3 was just 'meh', I really think I'm going to enjoy Reach as it is supposed to be most similar to the first Halo. This is actually the first time I pre-ordered a game since Halo 2.
I have always been a halo fan. After Sega discontinued my poor dreamcast,I preordered my original Xbox, Halo 1, and Dead or Alive 3. I loved my original Xbox and it was my only console for last gen until 2009 when i finally broke down and bought a PS2 when the price dropped to 99$.
Kind of a sad fact, that.
