/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10201779
I played it for the first time earlier this year, PC, not the master chief collection (not sure if there's difference).
I really like FPS of that era, and even though I hate sci-fi I heard great things about this game so decided to try it out.
I didn't like it, ended up dropping it after a few hours. The guns just don't feel great to use, it's one of those games where it feels like you're shooting paper targets, as in, there's no other feedback your shots have landed besides visual.
I also heard the AI in this game was supposed to be amazing, but as far as I got they didn't really do anything besides hiding behind cover when in low life, not sure if that changes in the late game or higher difficulties (I think I went with the one above normal, don't remember what they called it).
The environment was pretty cool. I understand why people like this game especially if they experienced the multiplayer, which I didn't but I can imagine it would be fun, but the singleplayer wasn't enough o hook me.

>>10201779
I haven't played it even after all of these years (grew up with a GameCube, never cared for the FPS genre). It was super popular when I was in middle school and maybe high school, though.

>>10201814
how old are you?

A very solid FPS that still has more in line with FPS games that came before it than others may see. It's definitely a departure from the more sprawling/exploring levels of others, but it still has a varied cast of enemies that force different tactics. Weapon placement is important and can change how you fight too.
I think the energy shield is a fun idea and can help facilitate constant forward progress while helping players shrug off a few hits, while still giving badly battered players a safety net to fall back on if they need it. Multiplayer is pretty fun too.

>>10201823
22.
Not sure what you're planning to assume from my age, but if it's one of those instances of accusing zoomers of not being able to appreciate old stuff, I refer to you the part in my post whre I said I normally like late 90s early 2000s FPS, I just found Halo's gameplay too shallow, probably because it was developed for consoles so it's understandable, but for me it isn't as fun as PC FPS of the same era.
And if someone is going to say that the AI was great for the time, I don't doubt it, my expectations where higher after hearing so much about it but that's my fault.

>>10201779
it ripped off Iain M. Banks and no one noticed because gamers don't read.

also Alien$

>>10201779
Good game, campaign has some bad level though that suck especially on replay

>>10201779
It's shit and always been shit but console peasants would give their everything to defend it because they didn't have better FPS games.

There, you asked for it.

>>10201779
it's good. I always liked the multiplayer because I excelled at that in comparison to later Halo games for some reason

Fun when played co-op, not so much when alone.

>>10201779
great CO-OP game, one of the best.

>>10201838
you had to be 13 when halo came out to appreciate it now
my friend and I still co-op halo 1-3 and reach to this day and enjoy the heck out of it
did you get to the assault on the control room level? if not, go back. the game doesn't really pick up until that level

>>10201779
Not a big fan.
The story is interesting, the world seems like its got a lot to offer, the characters are fine though a tad underdeveloped (I have however heard the books really dive deeper into that), and even the weapons feel decent.
The two things I don't like are the open levels and the wave-based enemies. And unfortunately that's what some 90% of Halo CE is.

Never particularly grabbed me. I was still in Goldeneye mode when it came out, and playing Timesplitters instead.

I think the Halo universe feels very "sci-fi for people who don't like sci-fi". Aka, it's American military aesthetics in space. It doesn't strike me as creatively interesting like the Star Trek universe, or the Dune universe, or the Warhammer 40k universe.

>>10201814
>not sure if there's difference

They fixed alot of the graphical and technical issues like missing lighting effects/30 fps animations.
So yeah MCC is the definitive way to experience CE and 2

>>10201779
Should've been a dreamcast exclusive

>>10202770
Everything about the UNSC Marines designs and weapons is ripped basically wholesale from Aliens.
So yeah, more or less just sci-fi easily accessible for non-sci-fi people.

>>10201814
>it's one of those games where it feels like you're shooting paper targets, as in, there's no other feedback your shots have landed besides visual.
maybe when you're literally hitting shields, but it's hard to think that enemies don't give feedback when the enemies are one of the best things about the game. like grunts are nothing but a pile of reactions to how the player fucks with them

>The good
It has a sense of scale that at the time was completely unmatched in FPS games, with huge sprawling levels that really fueled your imagination and made it seem like a real place. Great production values that made it feel like a grandiose journey even if its mostly a bunch of sci-fi tropes thrown in a blender. Sticking mooks with plasma grenades and seeing them run into each other is still great fun. Vehicles were a novel addition that helped add much needed variety to the gameplay.

>The bad
Other half of the game is literally just the first half played in reverse; On a recent replay I was shocked I never realized how much the game reuses. I get they were under a deadline but its frankly pretty bad and really kills a lot of the atmosphere and awe it built up until then. Shitton of rooms are reused over and over, often in the same level. Flood are AIDS to fight against and not fun in the slightest, and the game will throw them at you constantly in the latter half of the game.

>>10201779
Loved it, it made me an X-box fan for a short time. Still have two X-boxes to system-link with friends once a year or so.

>>10201779
Generic, but it was a good type of generic. Sort of like Crysis, in that it was really eye popping for 2001 what could be ran on a console. There was only a slew of shooters on consoles at the time and vehicle combat for an FPS was almost non-existent. I enjoyed it a lot, especially fucking around with the indestructible vehicles. But still, it was pretty generic in terms of level design, felt sluggish comparatively to PC FPS's, and the 2 weapon limit and regen (b-but muh health underneath shield) influenced the genre in all the wrong ways.

>>10202905
>Flood are AIDS to fight against and not fun in the slightest
I honestly prefer Halo 1's Flood over Halo 2/3's Flood. There's just something so satisfying of blowing off the chunks of decomposed flesh in Halo 1. Hard to explain, but it doesn't feel satisfying fighting them in later entries.

>>10202865
Aliens basically was sci-fi easily accessible to non-sci-fi people.

>>10201779
>Simon Belmont movement
>majority of guns can't hit the broadside of a barn
>Half of the campaign is going through the same 3 copy pasted prefab forerunner rooms and some entire levels get mirrored for even more padding
Its campaign was just as shitty as every other console shooter of its generation not named Halo 2. The race mode in multiplayer was pretty dope though

>>10203153
>insinuating Timesplitters Future Perfect, and XIII have shitty campaigns

>>10201779
It was a decent game that a lot of other developers tried and failed to replicate, and as a result retards blame Bungie and Halo. No different to how people blame Valve and Half-Life for all of the shitty Half-Life clones that came after

The campaign is fun with a friend, and it felt like the first shooter that had a sense of scale to it. By that I mean, it was fun getting into big shootouts with elites and other things and slowly taking ground and pushing your way forward. I can't remember a shooter prior to Halo that felt like that.

I will say that for a shooter, a lot of the guns felt like garbage to use. Some retard will tell me to get gud, but I've beaten the game on Legendary multiple times back in the day with a friend, and also again more recently with the MCC on Steam with a friend. The assault rifle feels like one of the worst weapons ever implemented in vidya, and all of the alien guns except the plasma pistol feel like shit to me.
>le needler is really strong!!
yeah okay let me get close to an elite to mag dump and elite
>le plasma rifle is really strong!!
yeah okay let me get close-mid range to an elite to mag dump him and try to take out his shield
I spent a large fraction of the game one shotting everything in the head with the magnum, and then full charge plasma pistol elite shields to once again shoot them in the head. The rocket launcher is cool, the sniper rifle is cool, and the shotgun is really fucking cool, but that's it. Clearly the devs realized that they fucked up and in Halo 2 gave the player the BR and plasma carbine (and maybe another headshot-capable weapon??). Halo 1 is decent, but it's massively overrated IMO.

Rifle: peashooter with 500 bullets.
Game: good until Flood appears and you have to bunnyhop backwards for entire stages.

>>10201779
maybe I shouldn't have played it on heroic
it wasn't hard, everything was just a fucking bullet sponge
weapons are shit, they feel shit to use and deal no fucking damage
the flood levels are horrible, absolute abomination, a massive waste of time
the game is a 6/10, and that's being very generous
I love doom, blood, duke, quake everything that came before, during and after halo, but not halo 1
haven't played the others yet

>>10203397
Each weapon has a role, learn them.

>>10201814
>I didn't like it, ended up dropping it after a few hours.
You didn't play it. You can't have a valid opinion on a game if you didn't beat it.
>The guns just don't feel great to use, it's one of those games where it feels like you're shooting paper targets, as in, there's no other feedback your shots have landed besides visual.
Shockingly retarded opinion. Literally brain damaged.

https://youtu.be/qcrdeaut9KE?si=msYNc5izqzeepxJr

>>10201779
got bored, didn't even beat the first level

>>10203430
I actually haven't really used the alien ones, they were kinda bad, human rifles seemed to be the strongest, so I beat the game with the rifle and pistol. Pistol was good for killing the small guys. Maybe some alien weapons are good and I'm retarded, but I only used grenades and human weapons. There was an alien weapon I used occasionally that was effective, but I don't remember what it was. The explosive claw thing, maybe.

>>10203153
>not named Halo 2
Can't tell if this is a shitpost or not. Halo 2 was just as slow if not more when you consider how much padding out was on fucking gondolas.

>>10203461
>You can't have a valid opinion on a game if you didn't beat it.
Not him, but yes you most certaintly can. You don't need to invest 70 hours into a JRPG just to have a finalized opinion on it. Or 1000 hours into an MMO's endgame to have an opinion of it. That's why the first 30-60 minutes of a game are so crucial of a make or break for people and why introductions need to be alluring to people.
And a newcomer to Halo CE doesn't need to invest more than a few hours into the game to have completed over half of it unless its legendary. At the halfway point, you SEEN everything noteworthy that the game has to offer.

I did love it at the time.
I remember an interview with a producer or developer (I forget), and they talked about their goal of having something like 30 seconds of interesting gameplay mechanics, and that would be enough to carry the game across a full campaign and make online play entertaining.
And they were right, you had somewhat interesting movement, a range of weapons, immediate melee, vehicles, grenades and in most cases the AI would react in fun ways.
That basic approach was the turning point in video games (for the worse), to define that 30 seconds of gameplay and turn it into a 10, 20 or 40+ hour campaign.
Games today have an incredible amount of repetition and filler, and it started, in part, with Halo.

>>10203430
>Each weapon has a role, learn them.
Lmao no they don't. The assault rifle is shit and is basically "babies first fps gun" It deals half damage to the Flood and its accuracy is trash. It becomes incredibly apparent early on that both plasma pistol and the magnum are incredibly OP compared to everything else.

>>10201779
It was an incredible experience in 2002. I know I just had to get an xbox after playing the multiplayer at a party one night. When your usual fix was splitscreen on goldeneye then this seemed like an astronomical leap

For starters, not merely opinion but a fact, it's not retro.

>>10203691
>You don't need to invest 70 hours into a JRPG just to have a finalized opinion on it. Or 1000 hours into an MMO's endgame to have an opinion of it
Absolutely wrong.

>>10201838
Please explain how Halo lacks depth by itself or compared to any shooter released before or since. What could the AI have done differently compared to those games?
The "triangle of fun" paved the way for more decisions than "aim at feet with rockets while bunny jumping" or "aim at the torso with railgun while bunny jumping". Together with vehicles that had considerations enabling them to be countered by on-foot players, it had a lot of options.

>>10203992
Absolutely correct.

>>10203701
>I remember an interview with a producer or developer (I forget)

Jaime Griesemer.

>Halo Dev Blogs
Matt's Halo Updates (6 October 2000 - 5 October 2001)
https://halo.bungie.org/haloupdates/allupdates.html
Frankie's Bungie Update (16 January 2004 - 5 November 2004)
https://halo.bungie.org/halo2updates/allupdates.html
Bungie Weekly Updates (12 November 2004 - 17 June 2011)
https://halo.bungie.org/bwu/
Feast of Bones
https://haloarchives.fandom.com/wiki/Feast_of_Bones

>Books
The Art of Halo: Creating A Virtual World
https://archive.org/details/artbook-Art_of_Halo/

>Bungie behind-the-scenes
Halo - Macworld Unveiling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ2yvWl9nQ
Halo 1999 Story
http://marathon.bungie.org/story/halo_backstory.html
Halo Archive
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOUc9OgYDliDuz1FfipKNE5TtKF4D-XMM
Making of Halo: Combat Evolved (Ultra Rare Xbox magazine DVD)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueJR-irzjmw
Halo: Combat Evolved Devs React to Speedrun (Marty O'Donnell, Marcus Lehto)
https://youtu.be/9ndZbg8Mr-Q
Behind the Scenes Making of Halo 2
https://youtu.be/0q69Msy8ttM
Halo 2: Developer Commentary Playthrough
https://youtu.be/sBi_xx26ClM
Halo 2 Killtacular Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7xObHgI8gE
Halo 2: Artifacts
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqfmKw3gt7l-HyTBI7S31sjqduDCX6-eZ
Halo 3 - Full Documentary + Bonuses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rszStapddKk
Halo 3: ODST [Behind the Scenes]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCS9A1PScHM
Halo Reach Developer Commentary (2010)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_1LxdgGkOg
Work of Rob Stokes
https://rpstokes53.wixsite.com/work-of-rob-stokes/halo-2
Max Hoberman dishes on Halo 2's crazy development
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BURsPjNKck
Martin O'Donnells YouTube Channel Archive
https://archive.org/details/TheMartyODonnellArchive

>>10201779
it brought the LAN party to the layman
the devs were bros after figuring out how to make fps games "feel good" on a controller and just telling everyone instead of guarding the secret jealously
first half of the game is kino

>>10201779
I replayed it years ago. Silent Cartographer and some of the airship segments were highlights. I was annoyed by any level with Guilty Spark and the amount of recycled levels.

>>10201779
The campaign is good right up until the Flood hit and then the game decides it's time to backtrack a lot of familiarly-designed areas to the very start at the Autumn. Level and encounter design go right down the shitter at that point. Multiplayer is fun, but hilariously imbalanced. A solid start but lots of rough edges and a blatant showing that they were still new to that whole thing.

>>10201779
dookie + farts.

>>10204373
Even the 1st half with levels like The Truth and Reconciliation or Assault on the Control Room the recycled rooms goes overboard
>a blatant showing that they were still new to that whole thing.
Well they made the Marathon series before that. It had more to do with the fact that they had to hit the deadline for the Xbox's launch. The game music wasn't even implemented just two months prior to the game shipping. That's why in some areas the music feels like it was added the very last second in random areas like *see level mentioned above*
Had they been given more time I think it would've given more depth to the latter half.

>>10201779
it's a solid first entry but the series didn't come into it's own until the 360 era.

>>10204002
>What could the AI have done differently compared to those games?
Like I said the AI wasn't a problem, I expected more not because I was used to more but because a lot of people said it was amazing, not the game's fault.
>Please explain how Halo lacks depth by itself or compared to any shooter released before or since
Although beautiful, level design is boring regardless of copy-pasting and backtracking. Please don't misunderstand this, I'll repeat, the enviroment has a great atmosphere even for me who doesn't like sci-fi, but there's nothing engaging about it besides being visually pretty. Everything is what you saw at first, no surprises.

The weapons don't have any strong particularities making your weapon choice trivial, and that's aggravated by enemies that also don't have enough pratical differences to make you change your tactic.

Take Half-Life that came out 3 years before in 1998, the level design is constatly changing, going up and down, underwater, air vents, trolleys, platforming, puzzles.
Enemies are all unique compared to one another, requiring different tactics to be dealt with and the weapons are also unique in a way that you will want to use each one for a different purpose.

>>10203638
I'm going to remember this post in the future when I see people saying that they played Halo but complain about it. Reading this made my head start to spin.

Shit tier

>>10203762
This game is 42 years old.

>>10203638
This is like school grade levels of lying.

>>10201779
>Give me your honest opinion of Halo: Combat Evolved
I will not.

>>10204723
>>10204671
what

>>10201779
Why do all the interiors look the same?

I could never understand the praise this game gets for music and sound design. You can see O'Donnell's face in every interview or essay about Halo like he's a big shot or something. Yet Combat Evolved has bland and forgettable score and underwhelming sound design. It's probably the weakest part of the game.

>>10201779
Started the campaign several times throughout the years. Never finished it, the main story is a slog. I had more fun playing with friends in deathmatch.

>>10204932
This is what happens when you've been using a mono TV since the 90s.

>>10204890
>I actually haven't really used the alien ones, they were kinda bad, human rifles seemed to be the strongest, so I beat the game with the rifle and pistol. Pistol was good for killing the small guys. Maybe some alien weapons are good and I'm retarded, but I only used grenades and human weapons. There was an alien weapon I used occasionally that was effective, but I don't remember what it was. The explosive claw thing, maybe.

Nothing about this post is convincing apart from "the pistol was good for killing the small guys".

>>10204965
What do you mean "it's not convincing" retard? The default human AR and pistol are better than everything else, alien weapons are shit aside from one
And the shotgun was good, only the human weapons are any good in the game

It took me multiple tries to get into it, I believe the snow level was where I dropped off before I got into it, and was where it clicked for me on the time I beat it
Actually pretty fun, especially as you learn weapon rules and most importantly that Energy weapons are for stripping energy shields. I love both the Pistol and Plasma Pistol a lot and would put them as some of my favorite FPS weapons.

Progenitor of the modern fps on consoles.
Beyond that the level design is completely all over the place. Some maps are great, some are repetitive hell holes

Completely honest answer incoming, be advised.

I was following along with Halos development from quite early on when the game was still slated to be a PC-only game, and at that point the game was marketed as quite free and "open world", something like Far cry where you had wide open areas and multiple ways to tackle problems, along with state-of-the-art graphics (as shown in the early in-game promotional video where soldiers run around, they drive a jeep, and so on). Then the game was changed to be Xbox-exclusive and I was dissapointed but didn't care too much, there were plenty of other games to play.

Then some months after the console release there was a Halo demo on CD-gamer, I installed and played the demo, and the game was... ok. It just felt like a bog standard FPS-game with some minorly interesting mechanics (regenerating shields), and pretty fun multiplayer, but not better than say, UT99. Most of the things I had anticipated from before seemed to be gone (no open maps with many different tactical options, the graphics weren't improved since the gameplay videos from way back and were now simply alright instead of state-of-the-art), and the game felt quite slow and clunky. I played the demo a few times, logged a couple of hours on the multiplayer part, and then just disregarded the game as was it is, a perfectly okay FPS-game, but nothing spectacular.

>>10204978
What difficulty did you play on?

I don't think Halo needs defending, but I don't really get the theme around "all the rooms look the same" and "you play the same game in reverse". I can understand the basis for those criticisms, but the atmosphere, objectives and options vary pretty significantly after the Library, and I think you'd have to be wilfully ignorant to not see that. Isn't the entirety of Doom made up levels that follow the same tricks, colour palettes and layouts? I haven't played Halo for years, but when I see these criticisms, they seem exaggerated. One of my favourite console FPS games is Lifeforce Tenka, which isn't a widely well-regarded game, but that is a game that comes to mind regarding liberally re-used assets and levels in particular (I still don't mind it).

>>10205024
I said heroic in the first post

>>10201779
Overshadowed by Metroid Prime's single player, makes up for it with its multiplayer. That was an era when the mainstream sperged for FPS titles. I think Metroid saved the GC.

>>10201779
the only Halo i liked.

>>10201779
It's great

Played it through on PC (which I understand is ugly compared to the original) a few years after it came out. I thought it was average and didn't understand the hype. Rather plain graphics, un-interesting repetitive levels, bullet sponge enemies. To this day I think Halo 3 is the only above-average Halo game and it still has the bullet sponge enemies.

It's a good game, but severely hampered by the cutbacks during development. Lot of repeat areas and level design quirks. I do like it more than Halo 2, but overall Halo 3 was the best in the series.

>>10201779

Grenades/10. For me the game shines brightest when you pretty much use grenades as your primary weapon. Hundreds of plasma grenades will drop over the course of a playthrough. Use em.
Pic related, mfw an elite goes AAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>>10204932
Bait needs tuning friend

it's pretty fun in multiplayer, the single blows though. Everybody kind of knew this which is why you rarely saw people playing single player and mostly reminiscing about the system link. The PC exclusive maps were good and it's a shame they didn't have a good way to add them to the Xbox one.

I love it and the rest of the Bungies games.

>>10201814
This board is full of retards that cant place a game in the context of its era.

>>10206782
How is "the guns don't feel good to shoot" not appreciating the context of the era?
Doom still feels good to just walk around and shoot stuff in.

>>10204570
>it's a solid first entry but the series didn't come into it's own until the 360 era.
wrong. every game after the first was a failure at living up to CE's quality. not uncommon for a series unfortunately

>>10204640
>Like I said the AI wasn't a problem, I expected more not because I was used to more but because a lot of people said it was amazing, not the game's fault.
What were you expecting that it lacked?
>level design
I agree that hl's level design, variation and flow is outstanding and to me it's still the best in video games as a whole. It's not that apt of a comparison though, since Halo is more of a sandbox design where the enjoyment comes from encounter design. In Half-life you (mostly) are up against small clusters of 1-5 enemies in tight corridors, allowing you to take them out one at a time. In Halo, the levels might have stretches of geometrical sameness but the counters themselves are varied and well designed around them, which is the meat of the game.
>The weapons don't have any strong particularities making your weapon choice trivial, and that's aggravated by enemies that also don't have enough pratical differences to make you change your tactic.
I can't think of titles where this rings less true. Each of Halos weapons have large handicaps pushing you to use them in specific ways. Depending on your loadout, health, the rank of the enemy your facing and what weapon they are wielding you have to change your approach drastically. You can't run up on an elite with a plasma rifle, but you certainly can if they are holding a needler. Is your enemy shielded or not. Are you carrying two ballistic weapons. Do you have 'nades to backup your weapon choice etc
Half-Life you can complete easily with any of the encounters if it wasn't for the ammo, except for maybe the heli and tank.

>>10201779
Fun repetitive combat and a few areas so tedious it damn near ruins the game.

>>10205029
It's the same peope who would cry about Castlevania: Order of Eccelsia being mostly straight corridors instead of having smaller rooms with exits in all directions. They seem to completely disregard encounter design and just want to get to the next level theme or setpiece.
That said, Tenka always looked like a slog to me

>>10206764
Being a Macintosh kid, I grew up with their games. Stopped playing after Destiny launch month which was straight ass.
I have to give their p2w Marathon remake a try, but I'm not expecting anything.

>>10201814
>there's no other feedback your shots have landed besides visual
What the fuck are you talking about. Do them screaming shit like "oh my god" or "aaaahhhh" not count as feedback? What feedback, other than visual, are you looking for? Rumble packs? The smell of burnt flesh? Are you legit retarded?

>>10202905
A constant problem with Halo as a franchise is that the Flood are just never fun to fight against.

>>10201779
I remember it being good, didnt mind the repetitive nature of the later levels, but it felt like a barebones experience. Like a fisher price toy.

It was a good show!

the only good halo campaign, even with the obnoxiously repetitive levels like the library. multiplayer was fun too but it was lan only and i didnt know anyone else who had an xbox

>>10201814
you played the shitty, inferior original pc version. nothing you say matters.

>>10206762
no one thought the campaign sucked you mong. probably thinking of hl2.

anyway, halo ce was an incredible experience at the time, similar to the craze stirred by half life in 98. ive played it to death so age has definitely tainted its replayability for me, but im still blown away by what was achieved for the time. It's still excellent and well deserved of being regarded as a classic.

>>10201779
This game has a vibe that no other game has matched. it feels very alone and foreboding.

>>10201779
>great textures
>innovative system of grenades and only two weapons at once
>floaty gravity

>shitty mulitplayer levels
>shitty weapons
>shitty enemies
>shitty music

>>10201814
not really even a halo shill, stopped playing after 3, but this is a garbage opinion
>ended up dropping it after a few hours
what a pointless post. the only thing more wasteful than you writing it is me replying to it

>>10207508
no I i meant CE though 2 was the same. the game is only good for multiplayer. IIRC you don't even unlock anything by beating single so there was no reason to do it besides wanting to see the plot. timesplitters was mechanically older and stiff since you couldn't jump, but gameplay overall was much better and single player had a purpose in addition to being more fun. Halo was useful for lans and filling around, but otherwise? stick to TS

>>10207575
>great textures

Not if you played it on PC. Bump mapping is completely broken.

Bump Mapping: The Game

Halo triggers a reaction on this board similar to Metal Slug.

>>10207057
>That said, Tenka always looked like a slog to me
It's dependent on how much you're willing to tolerate a 1997 console-shooter. The game is average, sure, but I like its atmosphere and design enough to have played it extensively and learned all its oddities. A lot of the missions are of the "you must visit this facility" variety and then "you must visit this second facility" in which it's just a previous level with some different hallways.

>>10204978
the AR (and halo) are absolute garbage and anyone who defends them are halobabbies that grew up and can now unfortunately post here

I hated gay regen health and I thought the game was really really gay in the truest sense of it - enemies were all vividly colored blobs of unimposing height.

>>10207679
>I CANT UNLOCK STUFF!

zoom zoom lil buddy, zoom zoom

>>10207876
always loved the AR and never understood the hate. ar and pistol complimented one another very well. i think its a skill issue, really.

>>10207894
The AR is a weapon that required you to work to make it effective. I actually like that because it suitably ups the difficulty curve. My only wish with Halo is that the Marines just used full spray instead of firing single rounds intermittently.

>>10207303
Kids today, they don't know..
Kids today, they missed out..

>>10204640
>Take Half-Life that came out 3 years before in 1998, the level design is constatly changing, going up and down, underwater, air vents, trolleys, platforming, puzzles.
There are people who still wish that "FPS" games peaked with Dora the Explorer puzzle "engaging environments". I thought it could be taken for granted now that this was a dogshit tendency that made every game that did it unpleasant. Half Life's gimmick of "oh no the doors are locked what do you do" gets boring immediately but carries on for the whole game. Scanning a room for something which isn't a door but leads out (hole in something that you get to by going up/down a ramp that ISN'T A RAMP GUISE YOU HAVE TO USE YOUR BRAIN TO FIGURE OUT YOU'RE MEANT TO WALK UP A COLLAPSED PILLAR IN AN OTHERWISE EMPTY ROOM HOLY FUCK BOOMER SHOOTERS ARE SO FUCKING CEREBRAALSAAAFAAAGGHGHGHGHGHGHGH).

Fuck things which look nice that I can move through and engage with naturally, I need my intelligence flattered by knowing that "traversed" the "environmental design challenge" every 30 seconds by finding the ramp that leads to the vent to the next room. What good is a "level design" that doesn't function as a down syndrome puzzle box to let me know I'm smart because I got out? The point of video games is to make me feel good for finishing the boomer shooter, I'm totally cool like the bald 35 year olds on the internet who call me casual now.

I hate Half Life so much. I hate Valve so much. I lose more sympathy for them every day. The fucking insects are enslaved by Indians now and they deserve it.

The actually interesting thing about Half Life is its "cinematic" aspect. The parts that are like a Call of Duty campaign. Stuff happening in engine that you can react to spontaneously in a way which makes sense to drive the experience forward. Then you find a locked door and have to play Dora the Explorer to get to your next cool movie moment. Halo is also cinematic. It's half life without vents. So better.

>>10201779
Concrete corridors.

>>10208037
In the realm of retro FPSes, why is this a criticism specifically on Halo? Isn't everything before it basically a mixture of hallways, rooms, bigger rooms and some composite of elements that make up an outdoor space?

>>10207907
that was one of my wishes too. marines could've used extra juice, would've been even more fun to fight with them.

>>10201779
Overrated as fuck and only praised so highly because it was good by console FPS standards. The level design in most levels is so fucking bad and many areas are straight copy and paste (not just pointing out the library like everyone does it's multiple stages). I forget which stage it is but the one with the bridges (assault on the control room I think) and the entire level is just going from shooting gallery to shooting gallery through the same bridges and hallways in between.

The levels had no reason to be as long as they were other than to pad out length. Unlike something like Turok 2 which only had 6 levels they had a large amount of variety and tons of unique weapons. The first fucking level in that game probably has more design variety than half of Halo.

Halo CE is great in regards to it's combat, no matter what other anons say here. Many of them blame it for the wave of modern military shooters which followed in the mid 2000s. I disagree. They borrowed from the health regen, but that's it. They were just the logical follow up to the mass of WW2 fps we got at that time, which in themself were more a follow up to Medal of Honor. And Medal of Honor was a follow up to Golden Eye, but you never see people blame that game for the downfall of the fps genre.

CE's loop can be discribed simply as "Hey, there is a group of enemies. Now you gotta decide what are your options for the given encounter. Here's what you got for weapons, here's what you could get from the enemies, here's the terrain and cover you got to work with."
Sounds basic but you can do a lot with that. Let's look at an example. Level 3. Do you reach the interior of the covenant ship with a good amount of Sniper Ammo left? If not, you will experience a lot tougher fights since ammo for a classic "noob combo" will be rare. If you managed to save more, you'd probably had a tougher fight at the grav lift. Every encounter becomes a puzzle to figure out. What are my priority targets, what options do I have to deal with those, how do I use the behavior of the enemy A.I. to my advantage. An Elite in cover? Use a grenade to force him out, punish his recovery animation after his dodge jump, finish him of with a quick headshot. There is also the classic hunter dance, the jackel 2 shot and other stuff. Even with the flood can there be an engaging loop. Use carries to knock flood around, stay on the move. Use their leaping to your advantage.

>>10201779
as a CS player, halo always angered me to no end because of how many shots it took to kill players in online.
i'd see the other person first and start shooting, maybe break through their shield after a full mag, then by that time they've turned and killed me instantly or someone else from behind has.

>>10208503
Stop using the AR against full shields.

>>10208503
The high time to kill is what makes it so good. I fucking hate modern multiplayer fps where you just run around and down another player in the quarter of a second with your full auto laserrifles. I like it to have to think in an engagement instead of just being the first to fire.

>>10207303
>>10207981
>this is how 80s boomer furries reacted to people saying hey arnold was pretty good while they defended their toy commercial tv shows

>Hey /vr/ what do you think of X game?!
>Gets shit-tier contrarian opinions

Yep, pretty much expected.

honestly, it's the best game I ever played.
I first played the gearbox version on a pentium D with radeon x800
I didn't have a console since the snes, and I was used to playing things like quake iii on PC

I remember thinking "wow, this really is a modern game with amazing graphics". I couldn't believe my computer was powerful enough to run it with great performance at the highest res
even though I now know that some of the effects aren't correct in the gearbox version, I never played the xbox version, and the POM and lighting and especially the shader effects with regards to the plasma pistols was amazing. wow, the colour grading, those purpley greys and blues!

going into the underground area with the first vehicle you get into was so atmospheric. that light bridge. as was "shafted". 343 guilty spark and the flood. the ring killing all life in the galaxy. wow, the story was amazing. I thought every avenue of story telling in our culture had been exhausted at that point. I couldn't believe I hadn't seen this idea in a movie

>>10206987
if halo didn't copypaste the first half of the game for the second half and just kept everything humans vs covenant i'd agree with you.

it's not a bad game but 3, ODST, reach and even 4 to a lesser extent were better.

>>10207989
Bait

>>10209392
Halo copy-pastes 3 levels of its 10 and the final level is different enough from the first that I wouldn't even count it. The first level it copy-pastes is almost entirely different from an encounter design perspective and serves to showcase the different factions infighting. It's a divisive level among with some thinking it among the best and others hating it (I hate it). The second level it copy-pastes sucks and nobody really likes it.
You get The Library (not actually that long but incredibly boring), Two Betrayals (longest mission in the game, which you might also hate) and Keyes (sucks) in sequence which feels horrible from a pacing standpoint though.

>>10201779
It’s the GOAT! The vehicles were fun, enemy combatants were rememberable, the guns are all unique, the story is interesting enough, the multiplayer was god tier! LAN parties and campus groups playing this game and Xbox live. It truly is a masterpiece and a massive pop culture phenomenon of its era along with The Matrix, TLotR, Harry Potter, 9/11, MGS2, and so many others!
This was a pre 9/11 world which truly was different. Everything has been shot ever since. Maybe a hit here and there but overall it’s been downhill.

>>10208485
What is Jackal 2 shot?

>>10207989
I respect free speech so I will not comment any further on your post.

>>10209703
>This was a pre 9/11 world which truly was different.

What's with American millenials and thinking a couple fallen buildings destroyed their world?
More people die every month from car accidents.

It walked so that halo 2, the best game in the series, could run.

>>10207989
posting on 4chan is not the time to pop devil trigger anon

>>10209790
The war just ended recently and we’re in another war now. Military Industrial Complex took full control of the world. Internet became a house hold commodity. Survivor and reality TV took over. Cellphones started becoming commonplace. All of this happened after 9/11. Things drastically changed after that event and hasn’t slowed down. It’s a very pivotal moment in world history. Get fucked kike!

>>10209824
Is this bait I actually cannot tell.

>>10209837
Why? He's right.

>>10209894
You could just use the year 2000 to mark when those things started happening. Using 9/11 makes it seem like he's implying the terrorist attacked caused reality tv lol.

>>10209935
I think he's talking about stuff like the Patriot Act which was pushed through in the aftermath of the attacks. Never would have passed otherwise.

>>10201779
A lot of fun once you get into the zone on the controls. Peak Halo is Halo3 and ODST with bros.

>>10207891
It didn't have regen health though.

>>10201814
>The guns just don't feel great to use, it's one of those games where it feels like you're shooting paper targets
Finally someone who isn't the missing link.

>>10207989
I agree Half Life is absolutely overrated. Obtuse platforming puzzles and FUCK XEN.

Vehicles were fun but overall a dull game compared to the peak shooters of the 90s.

I fucking love Halo 1 so god damn much it's unreal

>>10210184
Can a redditor explain what’s going on here?

>>10201779
fun.

>>10201779
it was revolutionary for its time

>>10210184
Halo emergent behaviour is always funny.

>>10207303
>ukinojoe
that fucking guy; randomly remembered him the other day.

>>10209743
Shot to the hand followed by a shot to the head. Alternative you can force them to jump with a grenade or just punch the shield. If they flee that's also an easy backslap. Options options options.

>>10210184
One reason why I'll never buy the "same stages but in reverse!" argument is how the atmosphere on this stage is so rich and is totally different tonally to the mission that uses the same map (you are also completely alone during it, versus the first time when you have a whole group of marines and a tank).

>>10203430
The alien pistol combined with the plasma rifle were OP in multiplayer once you mastered them.
Hitting someone with a fully charged pistol round completely knocked out their shields (long as they didn’t have an over shield), then you can quickly finish them off with the plasma rifle

>>10210378
I would explain but I'm sadly I'm not a redditor, sorry

I made the first post in this thread and several people are challenging the
>it's one of those games where it feels like you're shooting paper targets, as in, there's no other feedback your shots have landed besides visual
part
All I can say is that I feel sorry that you never played a game that had visceral feeling to shots landing.

>>10212417
to clear this up before someone put words in my mouth, Half-Life lacks this feeling too. I never said the shooting in itself was better, just that the weapons were more characterised.
I'll name Painkiller and Doom as examples of games were you can know your shots hit the target even with your eyes closed.

>>10201838
He's a zoomer! Everyone get poo on a stick and POKE him with it!

It taught me the valuable lesson to not get hyped for triple A titles in the new millennium.

based zoomer triggering halokiddies
>>10202613
its shit

>>10212417
>>10212448
I want to believe this is one of those epic pranks where you own everyone by pretending to have an IQ of 83 and just repeat yourself without acknowledging any points made beyond your initial statement for an entire thread, but this is the internet of the third world so just as likely this is actually you. Either way you should have your internet connection taken away and be made to work in a supermarket for the rest of your life.

Halo CE doesn't get enough credit for how exploitable its loading and checkpoint system is, you can really open up some interesting spawning opportunities between you and the enemies.

multiplayer was amazing and still holds up today, single player is pretty good for the first half of the game, but then just becomes literally copy and pasted corridors with enemies

>>10211048
It's just not because the map is in reverse, it's also because the map uses a lot of the same hallways over and over again between the separated valleys. The repetition sets in even in
the first map Assault on Control Room

>>10208485
>I disagree. They borrowed from the health regen, but that's it.
You're forgetting the 2 weapon limit.
>>10208640
>contrarian opinions
You have people both praising or denoting it so I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If by chance you feel people are being too negative, just keep in mind Halo was frowned upon harder on /v/ 14-19 years ago, especially when Halo 3 came out in 07. This was a general consensus among much of the internet since most people who enjoyed Halo in a pre-social media era tended to not be internet dwellers and those that were were more likely to be playing FPS's on the PC.

>>10201779
The Bluebird vanilla ice cream (or is it Bluebunny?) of space combat games with some colored m and m's chips ahoy crushed up and put on top. You will enjoy it enough to eat it time and again but you will also be aware that it's still a bit shallow of an experience.

I compared it to other PC games at the time, CS and RTCW in the multiplayer aspect it's fun as hell at a LAN. Problem is that there's not much of a ceiling to get better since it's made for Xbox and by an extension made as a FPS for a controller.

I don't play Quake with a controller, it's just not right man.

>>10201824
100% agree, I fuckin love it

>>10201838
The highlight of Halo's AI is in the behavior of the grunts and elites and how they interact with each other. Grunts are cowardly and don't fight aggressively, unless they have an Elite commanding them, in which case they will act more boldly. You can take advantage of their cowardly and stupid nature by sticking a plasma grenade on them, which will cause them to run back to their allies, possibly heavily damaging or even killing their commanding Elite. Elites behave more how you'd expect. They are aggressive, but are smart enough to dodge and take cover, unlike Grunts, and when you stick an Elite with a plasma grenade, he'll charge straight at you. This was groundbreaking at the time, and unfortunately most games even today don't have AI as good as Halo imo.

>>10214980
I tire of those dorks, who have always been wrong and time has been unkind to them. Too many "PC classics" have I played, tried to find the good in, only to be left empty handed. It's clear all the pretense and praise was contrarianism and insecurity. The classic fox and grapes situation.

Always felt totally soulless and lacking in humor, fun or creativity for my liking. Cut scenes felt like watching fucking Star Trek or some shit. The Covenant did nothing wrong.

>>10201779
zoomer here, its fantastic except for the flood level
still one of the best enemy rosters of any shooter, and the weapons/vehicles are still fun as fuck. the co-op was genious

Love this moment

>>10218135
>zoomer here
opinion discarded

>>10201779
Stood on the shoulders of giants. If it was on PC when the gods walked and not a console noobs cherry popper.

Nobody would remember it. It's fine, nothing special as a FPS.

>>10218138
>>10218142
>>10218148
QRD on the broken PC port

>>10218138
>tfw the remake version of this stage is completely wrong and daytime

You don't get away with ruining a perfect, cozy snowy night level.

>>10203160
TimeSplitters FP was pearls before swine. The fact that Halo succeeded when games like that didn't is proof that ad shekels and shilling matter more than games being good.

>>10218171
MS outsourced Halo PC to Gearbox

MS outsourced Halo 2 Vista to Hired Gun (the whole "In Gravemind Legendary, you die as soon as the level starts" thing was introduced in Halo 2 Vista. The OG Xbox version actually gave you a couple of seconds to register that Brutes were in fact in front of you)

343 outsourced CEA and H2A to Saber Interactive using the inferior PC ports as the base

343 outsourced terminals in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary to Sequence

343 outsourced Reach DLC maps (Defiant Map Pack/Anniversary Map Pack) and Halo 4 DLC maps to Certain Affinity (Former multiplayer, online, and UX design lead for Halo 2 and Halo 3)

Halo 4 campaign just feels half-baked. It has sections that feel empty, lacking content. Removed point scoring. As a result, the timer was also removed(used for speed runs). You can't view the campaign terminals ingame; you must go to waypoint. Forge Island gives us ten times less budget than Forge World. Removed Race, Territories, Stockpile, Headhunter, and Juggernaut. “Infinity” gametypes include instant respawn, perk packages and customized loadouts (COD). "Legendary" gametypes fixed this.

Halo 4 and part of Halo 5 are the only game 343i actually put together themselves with their in house studio, MCC and especially infinite has been nothing but wrangling contractors and contract studios. Infinite has something like 5 confirmed studios that worked on it. That is why their dev cycle takes so long and fucks shit up constantly(besides the technical debt). 343 is just an umbrella studio that directors other contract studios into making broken messes of games. Its why everything except Halo 4 is a broken retarded mess because Halo 4 was the only 343i title actually done in house and not through 20 corporate suit games of telephone and Zoom meetings

>>10218156
How in your non-white poserbrain are Duke Nukem 3D and Halo:CE like experiences?

>>10218171
>>10218196
what the fuck

>>10218406
Your goal is to get to goal and shoot shit along the way, FPS isn't really complicated.

>>10218441
That's sort of like saying the point of a movie is to make it to the end credits. Very fucking retarded. Look at how much each game has going on. Are you going to say that everything beyond Ultrakill style obstacle course bullshit was wasted/superfluous effort because the only part that matters is "get to goal and shoot shit along the way"?

"FPS isn't really complicated" because "FPS" is a retarded reductive framing. Anything you choose to read as an "FPS" becomes simple. But just because the marketing team says that the thing is an "FPS" and then you choose to interpret "FPS" as "get to goal and shoot shit along the way" that doesn't mean that that's an intelligent or appropriate way to assess anything. Choosing to compare any two pieces of art/media as like experiences aiming to provide a general class of experience is a degenerate waste of time. These things aren't pointless or meaningless. There IS more we could say about each. But you're choosing to be a dumbass about them. Why? Probably because you're half a moron and half a coward. You can't think of much and are afraid that you'd lose hard if you tried. If this is all you want to get out of anything in life why not just do heroin until you die?

>>10217492
>I tire of those dorks
You're on /vr/, perhaps Reddit is a better suited place for you.
>Too many "PC classics" have I played, tried to find the good in, only to be left empty handed.
Sounds like a skill issue

>>10219248
I think he's talking about the webcomic.

>>10201779
Looks like a gay nightclub and made me laugh cuz it looks stupid to me (no offense)

>>10209816
can you retards ever shut the fuck up? no one, i repeat, NO ONE thought halo 2s campaign was better, and it still isn't. You have bad taste which means you're fucking stupid. Halo 2 is not even in my top 100 sp campaigns.

>>10218179
Yeah, it's a real shame what happened to that series.
>EA insisted that no one would buy a game where the premise is "everything", so you had to play as the space marine for the whole game, and they had to put that on the box
>they did that, it was great anyway, still didn't sell crazy amounts, and then the sequel got cancelled
Great.

>>10201779
Overrated.
It was unremarkable for an FPS game of the time, and the only reason it was popular was because it was the first FPS game for an entire generation of retards who didn't know better.

>>10221230
Sour grapes.

>>10202770
>>10202865
>>10203146
The UNSC is the least interesting part of Halo. The Covenant, Flood, Forerunners, and Precursors are all much more interesting and unquiet, both visually, thematically, and narratively.

In particular I think Covenant aeshetics are really engaging (iridescent/pearlescent armor, vehicles, and weapons with smooth, sleek shapes inspired by things like deep-sea marine life and insect exoskeletons plus designer cars, see pic, tho even this I think is one of the less interesting examples) and in terms of themes/narratives, the Forerunner book triology is unironically one of the most interesting and absolutely wild/novel stuff i've ever read.

The final book in particular is like insane cosmic horror meets biblical/mythological epic but is far future (well, far past) sci-fi at the same time. It's wild, and I highly suggest the triology to people even if they don't give a shit about Halo (it';s so far removed from anything else in the series temporally that you don't need to know anything about the series) if you want a sci-fi thing that really delivers on having otherworldly and legitimately novel technologies and concepts and really executes on having unfathomable sense of scale in both space and time.

>>10203638
In general, bullet based weapons do better against things without energy shields, but plasma based weapons do better against things with energy shielding. It's a little more complex then that, especially because not all human weapons use bullets (explosives =/= bullets) and not all alien weapons use plasma (like the needler doesn't) and there's some unique interactions (the sniper does very little damage vs the flood compared to other human weapons) but it's a good rule of thumb.

Per what I said above, the Plasma Pistol and Plasma Rifle are both good against energy shields, such as the literal shields jackals hold or the full body shield layer elites have, but they're also solid as general close to mid range weapons, because while they do less damage vs flesh then say the human assault rifle, they're not as inaccurate while still having a faster fire rate then say the human pistol (though the human pistol is like the best gun in the game if you go for headshots still).

The Plasma pistol in particular allows you to hold down the trigger to overcharge it, and charged shots both home into enemies, and also automatically removes all shielding. It's also good vs Sentinels, though you wouldn't have gotten far enough to encounter them.

The Needler is probably the most esoteric gun in the game; it fires homing pink needles/crystals that do like 0 damage themselves, but they explode if you get a specific number of needles into the enemy at once. So rather then depleting an enemies health, using the needler is more about trying to land a specific number of shots on them within a short duration: You either do that and they'll die instantly, OR you don't and they basically take no damage. It's good against elites since they're a large target and have enough health/shields to make it worth it, but it's geneally not worth it against any other enemy because they're weak enough other weapons can take them out easily anyways

>>10221371
>In particular I think Covenant aeshetics are really engaging (iridescent/pearlescent armor, vehicles, and weapons with smooth, sleek shapes inspired by things like deep-sea marine life and insect exoskeletons plus designer cars, see pic, tho even this I think is one of the less interesting examples) and in terms of themes/narratives, the Forerunner book triology is unironically one of the most interesting and absolutely wild/novel stuff i've ever read.

Why did classic Halo fans hate Halo 4 and The Forerunner Saga?

>>10221453
3 ended it well.

>>10221453
>>10221463
I think the big problem with public perception of 343i's Forerunner lore is simply that it's too esoteric for most authors, writers, and media to handle well.

The actual Forerunner book triology is, as I said, really fucking cool and does the alien weirdness and insane advancement and the absurd sense of scale that Forerunner civilization and a flood outbreak at their galaxy-wide height complete justice and actually plays it up to beyond what most people would expect. But it can get away with doing wild shit because it's a book and doesn't have to worry about visually conveying things or making them playable or approachable to normies.

An actual game or comic or other such things don't have that same luxury, it's harder for them to pull off huge scale things or stuff that's really uhorthodox, and on that note, a lot of the stuff in the Forerunner novels is just really fucking wierd: It works in context and with the writing style, but it sounds fucking stupid in wiki summaries or when handled by other writers, so a lot of it comes off as dumb outside the context of the novels that information or those concepts were made for or were introduced in.

Like, i've read the fucking things and am praising them and even i'd struggle to explain what a geas is or what neural physics are or some other pieces of Forerunner technology mentioned in the novels, because it's legitmately so creative and out there there's not any actual real life devices or concepts that are that similar. How the fuck do you adapt that into gameplay or in a AAA video game that has to appeal to the lowest common deminotor, or for it to be handled well when it gets distorted through a game of telephone to a dozen different authors and writers, only some of whome read the original novels or correctly understand them?

The answer is you just don't fucking try, or you do try and people get confused.

>>10201779
Babby's first FPS. Before playing Halo CE, I've played Half-Life 1, Max Payne 1, Serious Sam Second Encounter, DOOM, BLOOD, Quake 3, a lot of other FPS games I can't even remember now, and after all that palette, I've launched Halo and was like: that's it?
Halo CE feels very plastic to me, like every gun is made of plastic, enemies are wearing plastic armor, environments are plastic. Very cool music, shallow story. This game is American through and through, hence why they love it so much: it has bombastic presentation of epic proportions that has nothing of substance.

>>10201779
It was absolutely mind-blowing playing it on release locally with a friend

>>10201779
10/10
>I played it for the first time earlier this year, PC,
post discarded

>>10221573
It's said that Halo 2 was the last American game made exclusively for white people

>>10201779
Very solid first person shooter that led to two other solid FPS titles. One of the few FPS games to be remotely playable on a controller, however that's only because the game is easy as shit. Very good beginner's shooter.

>>10221371
You seem to have missed the visual, thematic, and narrative significance of how the UNSC looks. Especially in CE. The UNSC are grey, sparse, efficient, flat, unadorned, big grey and earth toned solid shapes built for purpose. If they're impressive it's in the scale and dedication to purpose. The seriousness. This is something that they have in common with the forerunners. It's a visual theme shared across the cultures which suggests a likeness of mind between them which is not shared by even the most advanced covenant.

A fascination with ornamentation, decoration, excessive incidental detail, these are the traits of lower cultures and minds. The covenant are able to take far more direct inspiration from the forerunners but they choose to make everything a gaudy renaissance vatican naturalist kitsch nightmare of overdesign because they're wearing shoes that don't fit them.

Humanity with no connection to the forerunners build instinctively more and more like the forerunners. The Covenant, who can look at and build upon forerunner stuff for their whole history, are not inclined to build like them.

And you can say "yeah but the covenant stuff looks better" but that doesn't mean the game would be better if all forerunner stuff was purple, wavy, and glowing. The look of the forerunner creations is supposed to tell you who they were. They were a civilisation and culture which was beyond fascination with colour and decoration. They were too serious and high minded. Their works were too great for such things to matter. Maybe you think a gun with flames painted on it would look badass. But can you imagine the big bald alien from Prometheus doing that? That's why the forerunner stuff looks as it does, and why the UNSC designs look somewhat novel and organic but approaching that same standard of brutal high minded efficiency.

>>10221630
Honestly so true.

>>10221573
>Half-Life 1
Cool game and the one most comparable to Halo in your entire list
>Max Payne 1
Not an FPS, you outed yourself
>Serious Sam Second Encounter
Garbage only worth your time in co-op
>DOOM
Doom has too many quirks unique to it to even be considered a "normal" FPS and it's pointless to compare it to anything else since the main selling point of Doom isn't even the main selling point of FPS games as a genre
>BLOOD
Overrated as fuck e-celeb wank that has a garbage enemy roster, where all enemies can be cheesed and only serves to filter brainlets with poor reflexes; has two or three memorable levels and is otherwise forgettable despite all of it's wacky references
>Quake 3
Multiplayer only (or bots lol) so not really an apt comparison, unless you compare Halo's MP to Quake 3's and again, they're trying to do completely different things
>a lot of other FPS games
Name more
It's also funny how you critique Halo for having a "shallow story" after comparing it negatively to Serious Sam, Doom, Blood and Quake 3. Half-Life is the most comparable and even then Halo's story is deeper and more developed if anything.
>everything feels like plastic
Literally everything in Halo has a lot of weight behind it, this argument makes no sense.
And I don't even like Halo that much, since it has too much wasted potential, but this is such a shitty post that reeks of tourist holy shit.

>>10221505
>too esoteric
That's funny considering the Bungie lore is lost on virtually everyone who has ever heard of Halo. Bungie's lore is esoteric in that you can stare at and memorise every single exoteric detail and still completely miss the point and miss the forest for the trees. Is 343's lore esoteric, or is it just dense and wide?

I have read all of the Bungie novels (up to Contact Harvest) and stopped there. I've sort of looked into the 343 novels and they don't interest me. It looks like the backstory to a "sci-fi" tabletop campaign. I probably *should* read these things to better know my enemy (Frank O'Connor and fans of junk buttscifi in general) but my gut says no, this stuff is bad.

Halo CE was envisioned as multimedia, the novel came first, but the stuff in CE isn't a worse novel installment that's worse because it has to accommodate "gameplay". The stuff you "play" is Halo. The point being felt by you directly rather than suggested at through literary iteration.

The original Bungie Halo vision (which only I have ever explicitly named as far as I know) is served by being a game in addition to novels. The 343 O'Connor vision, is not. It's just buttscifi that has to be games in addition to pointless doorstopper novels. Fuck it, I have to read these things now.

>>10221630
Halo is absurdly white. So much more white than anybody else would dare suggest. Moviebob was actually FALLING SHORT when he said it had superficial Nazi stuff going on.

>>10221573
I wouldn't say "plastic", but Halo (CE especially) has a pleasingly balanced artifice to its three dimensionality. The dimensions of 3D objects are *just a bit* exaggerated. The balance of polygons and surface detail of all characters, objects, and environments creates an extreme sense of *definition*. That there's only as much detail as the game's mechanics can be true to. The game's terrain is extremely flat to the point of jaggedness. Little to no non-interactive incidental detail such as foliage. It's all *3D you can touch*. Maybe you didn't mean this by "plastic" but it's the only way that I think the game is notably different to others. Its particular balance of *3D* which maybe some might dislike for personal reasons, but which I love.

As for the other games you've mentioned, I think you would have to be some kind of moron to really think that they're directly comparable. Yes, the marketers call both "FPS", but can you really play Serious Sam, Max Payne, Halo CE, Blood, and Half-Life and say to yourself "yes, all of these are trying to do the same thing and I can rank them sequentially in their achievement of this one thing, their achievement as FPS"?

>cool music
yes
>shallow story
Have you seen Bungie's other games? Have you looked into who worked for this company? You should look at these things before making such conclusions. Is there something you missed maybe? A lot you missed even?

>American through and through
It's one of the few good games I would call distinctly American. Americanism in games I mostly define as STEM and silicon valley connections producing tech rather than aesthetically focused projects. Bungie had a strong tech element, but they were also an artfag operation. The latter were driving the project. Just they were subtle. Too subtle for you.

Played it for the first time about a year ago. Got up to where the flood are introduced and lost interest. I'm not saying it's a bad game, I just prefer fast and arcadey over open and strategic. The movement in Halo was just so lethargic. Makes sense given the platform it was made for and the type of combat encounters they were designing, but it's hard for me to get into these kinds of games when I don't find the movement fun. Also the general aesthetic just wasn't my thing at all

>>10221573
>>10221775
This first post is ridiculous, for all of the reasons the second one mentions. The story of Halo is way more developed (and far better told) than any of the other games you mentioned apart from Max Payne. I have no idea how half your post was about story and substance when almost everything else you listed hovers around vapid (HL1 excepted). Further, as much as I love Max Payne, it is far inferior in terms of gameplay. Halo also has greater replayability due to the gameplay variety, less reliance on heavy scripting, and presence of a well-developed multiplayer component.

>>10201814
>I also heard the AI in this game was supposed to be amazing, but as far as I got they didn't really do anything besides hiding behind cover when in low life, not sure if that changes in the late game or higher difficulties

You played the game on easy, didn't you. Play it on legendary, every single Elite will feel like beating an entire other game. And they are not cheating either, they are just actually firing the weapon as fast as you can.

>The guns just don't feel great to use,
To be fair, half the guns are crap or require specific use. The machine gun and plasma rifle are meh. Pistol is basically a sniper gun. Plasma pistol you don't use to go pew pew, you charge it up to break shields and then go full ghetto on them (stick a plasma 'nade, go for melee, switch to your other gun immediately and pump them full of holes etc). Sniper gun with headshots kills even Elites on Legendary in 2 shots max. The rocket launcher is your room clearing BFG and the Needler, you don't use it to go pew pew, you pump a full mag into the guy in the middle and watch him explode, possibly causing a chain reaction with the grenades it dropped. And the shotgun is the single most powerful shotgun in an FPS ever since Doom 2, plus it has a tight enough focus that it also destroys shit from max range.

And the single player gets a shit load of great moments a tiny bit in. The entire sniper infiltration mission, the one where you drive a tank, the twist with the Flood, the Library, flying around on alien planes, and the entire last level.

>>10202770
>I think the Halo universe feels very "sci-fi for people who don't like sci-fi". Aka, it's American military aesthetics in space

Halo is basically Aliens vs Predators. Human military is very clearly the Colonial Marines down to having a gun with an ammo HUD and the same motion radar, Flood is xenomorphs but even worse, and Covenant has quad jawed dudes in battle armor with a plasma gun and an invisibility gadget just like the Predator. And Master Chief is Robocop.

It's similar to how Starcraft is basically just Warhammer 40k (Terran - Imperium, Protoss - Eldar, Zerg - Tyranid).

>>10203061
>Hard to explain, but it doesn't feel satisfying fighting them in later entries.

It's because Halo 2 had those crappy dual wield SMGs where you had to pump 2 full mags into anything to do damage, while Halo 1 had you use the second most overpowered shotgun in video game history in narrow corridors. Feels much more satisfying when you can actually shred them shot by shot, instead of dicking around with those puny SMGs. Halo 2 had really bad weapons (the triple shot rifle and the covenant carbine were cool, everything else felt like a huge downgrade).

>>10203278
>yeah okay let me get close to an elite to mag dump and elite

It fires homing bullets, retard. You just pop out of cover, pump out the full mag in the direction of the enemy, jump back into cover and reload while you hear a chain reaction of explosives going off.

plasma pistol and machine gun really do suck, I agree on that. Machine gun is supposedly better if you burst fire since it doesn't miss half the bullets that way, but I still couldn't make it too useful.

>>10204640
>I expected more not because I was used to more but because a lot of people said it was amazing,

It was amazing for 2001 and many years afterwards. But in 20+ years, other games luckily managed to catch on.

The repeated levels kind of suck, but I don't mind it because I like variations on a theme. Also having a full all-out war between covenant vs flood going on, while you tried to skid past them, was pretty cool.

>weapons don't have any strong particularities making your weapon choice trivial,
lol, no

>enemies that also don't have enough pratical differences to make you change your tactic.
so you say an Elite and a Flood carrier form just requires the same tactic? did you play Halo or something else?

>>10210378
There's a war going around in the background and one flood form shot a rocket in your direction, but accidentally hit the ming of mongo who tried to jump on ya.

>>10222230
>most powerful shotgun
I agree with most of what you say, but I think (for just one counterexample) that the shotgun in Medal of Honor is even better. The Halo 1 shotgun is extremely good, though. They really massacred that baby for Halo 2.

>>10218459
>That's sort of like saying the point of a movie is to make it to the end credits. Very fucking retarded.

The point isn't to get to the end but the journey that takes you to it. And Halo CE has a pretty fun and entertaining journey.

>>10221573
>>10221630
>>10221775
>>10221817
>>10222092
A big thing nobody seems to mention is how visually appealing the environments are in Halo

. Compared to Half life, Max Payne, DOOM, Quake, Unreal, etc, Halo has much more color and a better balance of both larger outdoor playspaces and smaller corridor/arena style ones Even compared to something like the Turok titles, the Halo games ooze a lot more vibrancy and feels less grungy. The visual contrast of the UNSC vs Covenant vs Forerunner vs Flood vs Natural landscapes in the series also does a lot, and moreso in 2, 3, and Reach then CE, the series has god tier skyboxes

In fact, I struggle to think of another FPS with Halo's use of color and pristine environments in general. I guess maybe the original Far Cry? Splatoon, but that's a third person shooter?

>>10221453
>Why did classic Halo fans hate Halo 4 and The Forerunner Saga?
almost everyone hated those because they were trash

>>10207893
your worthless insinuation makes no sense; New games don't even have unlocks, you just get scammed into buying new shit with manipulative practices. Furthermore, kids wouldn't waste time defending games that are older than they are on a system that their dad played in college. Come up with an argument next time instead of acting like a twitter poster.
On the up-side to halo, however, you can just boot up a halo game and all the levels are ready for you, unless I'm forgetting something. It was cool as games got to have ludicrous amounts of stuff in them, but it got to being a real pain if you didn't have a savegame handy for whatever reason (ie. sold your games after college/moving house/having kids). Thank god for those gamefaqs 100% savegame uploads and other such files; Like I have time to redo an entire game unlock again just because I re-bought it, or bought the same game on a new system.
But anyway, I don't see a reason to stand down from my previous statement. Halo didn't have a very interesting campaign and there was little reason to play through it. The game's legacy is from its multiplayer with system link, and halo 2 goes further to prove that, even if ultimately all the halos are more fun for fooling around in multiplayer than for anything else.
>>10222427
true, it is a pretty game. Great soundtrack too. Felt it was a lot like goldeneye in both respects, though obviously managing much bigger levels due to the huge tech leap.

>>10218459
Anthony is that you?

>>10222443
The original games actually didn't have all of the levels available from the start, at least on Xbox. On a fresh profile you'd have to play through the campaign from the first mission. Multiplayer content was all open right away (obviously, excluding those that weren't on-disc and needed to be obtained through patches or whatever).

It's weird to me how the cutscenes in the remastered edition of CE look so janky in comparison to what they had to work in 2001. The animation and limited lip movements in the originall look so much more convincing than the over-animated, yet completely dead-eyed models they used in the remaster. The Chief no longer has any weight to him in the cutscenes either, not to mention, all the marines became fat and Keyes looked like Bill Clinton.

>>10222247
Everything is Starship Troopers, when you get down to it.
Even Mecha anime had some heavy influence from Starship Troopers.

>>10222427
The PC had a whole sub-genre of goofy FPS games like Chex Quest and Blake Stone.

>>10201779
Its got that egg nog after not drinking it for years feeling. Im so overwhelmed by nostalgia that I cant have an honest opinion other than "oh man, this brings me back"

>>10218156
This is also retarded, Bungie were pioneers of FPS games with Marathon already, they stood on their own shoulders.
>dual wielding
>alt fire
>inventory
>vertical mouselook
>an actual story
>vacuum levels
>primitive physics
>level scripting
And then they added underwater and ambient sounds in Marathon 2 as well.
The only titles that were as innovative as Marathon and launched around the same time are System Shock, Hexen and Descent, and Hexen and Descent launched after Marathon.

>>10223676
Good thing you can turn it back to classic graphics with a keypress then.

>>10223903
That's not really the point I'm making though, it's just surprising how with the advanced technology they had, it looks so much worse. Cortana looks like a complete afterthought in it, she's so expressionless, stiff, and doesn't even have the 2D animation when she disappears anymore.

>>10223876
Forgot to add but pretty much all of Marathon's additions tie into the gameplay and Duke's innovations are all presentation/ style. The interactivity is nice but it serves no purpose and lacks any dynamism as it doesn't happen without player input.

>>10221505
>>10221453
>>10221463
Ran out of space before:

The end result of this is just that a lot of 343i's Forerunner lore is confusing or isn't well executed or handled outside of the forerunner novel triology.

It doens\t help that Halo 4, Escalations, Initiations, the Kilo 5 triology )tho I don't think the first Kilo 5 book is that bad and thankfully it's the only one you NEED to read in the triology to then transition into later 343i era books), etc also just have writing problems and flaws even putting all of that aside. I think actually 343i\s worst period of quality releases narratively would be right whern they were starting out where the only well written stuff WAS that forerunner novel triology.

Some people defend h4's story these days and while I don't think it's complete dogshit, I do still think its fairly flawed and it's not really any better then 5's.

>>10221763
No, i get the importance of the thematic and visual contrast the UNSC vs Covenant vs Forerunners etc has (While I enjoy infinite, for example, I think it really suffers from lacking the blues, purples, and curvy shapes of the covenant for instance: UNSC vs Forerunner vs Banished bleeds into each other a bit), but the fact remains that at a glance the UNSC is definetely the most "generic" of the factions even if that's the point

>>10221785
The Forerunner novel trilogy is DEFINETELY esoteric.

As far as their lore and novels as a whole, as I said above, I think the forerunner triology aside a lot of their earlier stuff had issues, but they've put out plenty of other good novels and comics since. Troy Denning's work is widely considered to be on par with Nylund's stuff from the Bungie era, for instance. I enjoyed Broken Circle a lot too, etc.

>>10223903
>>10223951
CEA was a rushed budget project, they wanted to do a remake more in line with like how H2A got handled but they couldn't meet the deadline for the anniversary

>>10224602
You can call the UNSC "generic", but I really like them and know plenty of other people who do too. People who are aware of Starship Troopers and Aliens. And these are not people who grew up with the game as toddlers and so are programmed to worship it (not real).

As for 343 esotericism, impression I get is that there's a lot going on, but it's all kind of pointless. It's just stuff piled on stuff piled on stuff that doesn't mean anything. It looks to me like Frank O'Connor turned Halo into Skibidi Toilet.
>And then the forerunners get an even BIGGER AI
>THEN THAT AI JOINS THE FLOOD
>THEN IT FIGHTS THE OTHER FORERUNNER AI AND THEY BOTH CREATE GIANT SUPERFLEETS AND BLOW UP HALF THE UNIVERSE

I *will* read these things eventually, but my hopes aren't high. From what I've seen everywhere else Halo quickly becomes pointless outside of the hands of the original Bungie core team (Nyland and Staten seeming most essential).

>>10205052
Frankly, this

>>10226035
I like plenty of UNSC stuff too, especially if we're going off of Isaac Hannaford's art from Halo 3, ODST, and Reach, that's probably my favorite aeshetic for a relatively grounded human Sci-fi faction.

But it's still LESS interesting then the Covenant etc, which was my response to the person claiming Halo is generic and uncreative, I was suggesting they check out other parts of the series

>I *will* read these things eventually, but my hopes aren't high.

As I said, it's a mixed bag. I will say though that of the 343i books i've read, they actually have a slightly higher average quality level then bungie, but only slightly:

>God tier: Silentium (343), Contact Harvest (Bungie)
>High tier: Cryptum (343), Evolutions (both), Ghosts of Onyx (Bungie), Last Light (343), (Broken Circle (343)
>Good tier: Fall of Reach (Bungie), Primordium (343i), Hunters in the Dark (343), First Strike (Bungie), Thursday War (343)
>Okay Tier: Glasslands (343), Cole Protocol (Bungie) The Flood (Bungie)
>Bad tier: Mortal Dictata (343)

orders within tiers matter... though I don't remember liking thursday war more then glasslands, but that's what I have saved here

>>10226236
>>10205052
>>10206368
what did you dislike about 2

>>10206368
The MCC version of Halo CE's original graphical mode is mostly fixed now, if you're going off of the original MCC port of CE, CEA, or the old gearbox PC release, then yes, it's missing effects. The new graphics mode/anniversary visuals generally reuse assets from reach and aren't super visually faithfful but in some scenes it looks nice

>>10206382
whoops, forgot to reply to you as well in
>>10226281

Damn this anon >>10207508 too.

Halo 2 is pretty easily my favorite campaign in the series: By far the best narrative, IMO the best missions and level design, and some of the best music in the series as well as the best feeling movement and shooting until 5 and infinite

>>10201779
It's alright.

The enemy AI, or at least the concepts they shot for, was absolutely fantastic. I love how enemies react to grenades or getting shot, and how they work together as a squad was phenomenal. The fact that they're working together directly while not being all the same enemy type felt like a big deal, compared to previous games where different enemies usually work together by happenstance, or if they were squads they were all the same enemy.

But the weapons are kinda butt. The missions are kinda butt. Driving vehicles is pretty fun but then dying from a love tap is pretty butt. There's other good shit about the game, like the atmosphere, the co-op, and I think the game makes the slower pace work for it, but overall comes out to a mixed bag. I think it's still pretty fun and calling it "good for a console shooter" is a disservice to what the game did right (and the fact that I and a good number of other people really enjoyed it on PC for years), but a sequel really could've served to refine a lot of things.

It's a shame the series would then go on to basically never have a game that wasn't rushed through a hellish dev cycle

>>10226521
>the weapons are kinda butt
I didn't feel that way but I do have a missed opportunity type complaint.
WHY IS THERE NO GRENADE LAUNCHER FOR THE ASSAULT RIFLE

>>10226718
There was, during the Mac World build.

>>10201779

It was the next logical progression from Goldeneye.

Halo came into its own in split screen co-op, at 11pm after you'd come back from the pub/playing out with your friends. That was the best thing about it.

I know so many people who would stay up all night trying to complete it on Legendary, but it was rarely a solo activity.

I was a PC-shooter fag (and still am) and it's a fundamentally different activity; even if you're playing online - you're doing it in your own room, in whatever state you like to do that in. Halo and Goldeneye brought that gameplay to a different, more communal space, changed the way people and developers thought about FPSs, and massively broadened the maretable demographic. By the time online play came in with Halo 2 and 3, solitary PC players were fighting against 11 year old kids playing in their parents' front room together.

Whatever people say they hate - that's really it; it's essentially an extended meme on 'I liked FPSs before they were cool'.

>>10226284
I think Halo 2's campaign comes out when you think outside of the box and really exploit your opportunities. However, it felt like the spectacle was reserved for the first three stages. After that, the levels become quite long with areas that seem underwhelming and vacant. I didn't enjoy the vehicles in 2 at all, they all felt so flimsy and hollow yet constantly low to the ground, I don't recall ever getting any air time in the Warthog by going over a hill.

>>10226718
It's hard to articulate, but for the UNSC weapons, I don't really get a feel that I'm firing bullets. More like just pointing and the sparks/holes showing where you're shooting, but not because an actual bullet was shot. I dunno if it's because how the guns handle or how they sound or what, but it feels kinda fake. Even ones like the Sniper Rifle, where you get the tracers, feels like shooting and the line is spawned in, rather than actually having shot something. Might just be schizo rambling, but the sequels did feel like they fixed it a bit

And then a lot of the Covenant weapons were just too splooshy

>>10226770
You actually are firing a projectile. If you fire a ballistic weapon at a covenant hard light shield it will reflect based on the angle of impact. It can even kill things.

This kind of criticism, always written in the same kind of cuckold fetishist language which I associate with "its over" posters from /pol/, is always directed at good games. There's a kind of person who I believe gets off on this.
>Guys... I just... maybe it's not that good... just me but...

Imagine if you held anything else to this standard you've decided matters. What game *does* feel like shooting bullets? How many games don't fail on this? I'm making a more general point here now, you aren't *that* bad.

>>10226814
GPT Post

>>10201779
The first Halo felt like it put a lot more science fiction emphasis on the technology of all factions, with even the Spartan-II armor and marine plating feeling more unusual and far-flung compared to modern-day technology. The Covenant were also especially vibrant to capture a feeling of tribal war paint even with their futuristic gear, and that complemented the OST. Halo 2 and beyond made human tech and the overall artificial environments feel too modern and indistinct, and the Covenant's colors were toned down.

>>10228069
I definetely agree that toning down the iridesecence and holographic look Covenant materials had was a bad descision (though games after Halo 2 brought it back in varying extents), but I personally really prefer Halo 3/ODST/Reach (see >>10226281, pic etc) and H2A's look for UNSC stuff.

UNSC marine outfits in CE have a sort of goofy starship troopers look that I can see people liking but is hard for me to take seriously, though I do dig the 80's south-african-retrofuturist-firearm-design a lot of the UNSC guns have in CE and especially Halo 2, but as you say H2 marines look a little too grounded.

>>10226521
Halo 2 is already the best game in the series IMO, but i'd love to see how it'd turn out if it had a smooth development and wasn't rushed. Some people have modded in some of the cut stencil shading/shadows at least and that looks pretty neat

>>10226741
I mean, I guess the most spectacle is in the first 3 missions between the "Give the Covenant back their bomb" cutscene and the Scarab fight, but that thought never really occured to me given how H2's highlights for me have always been the worldbuilding, writing, etc with the Covenant side of thing and the Arbiter's journey, and while maybe it's not as overtly over the top, the Incubus and Breaking Benjamin sequences and the opening of Quarantine Zone are up there for me as "rock your socks off mid 00's energy" as the aforementioned earlier moments.

Even just from a level quality perspective, I think Delta Halo and Regret are even better then Cairo, Outskirts, and Metropolis, with Gravemind also being at least on par with them if not up there with Delta/Regret, and Uprising and Great Journey being not far behind.

I decided to watch a play-through of Halo 4, because recently I had thought Halo 3 was still in keeping with CE, and that it ended nicely. Halo 4 makes me really glad I don't keep up with new games, has that really shitty modern equivalent of quick time events (the "press F for respect" kind), weapons that somehow sound weaker than all of the previous entries, and how the graphics look like ugly film CGI from today.

I started playing Halo 2 but I don't like it so far.
Too many cutscenes, dual wielding and melee are awkward and the SMG/ BR just don't do it for me + the pistol sucks dick.
Then again I didn't like CE at first either so I'll finish 2 first and then maybe I can come up with criticisms that aren't just "different from CE".

>>10229317
I had CE as a kid, and 2 immediately struck me as wrong when I got it. Having played them all again as an adult I appreciate 2 a lot more. My personal recommendation that I consider very important. Play 2 and 3 in a row. Treated as one big Call of Duty campaign type experience they *almost* work as their own different combined thing.

3 unfortunately has a couple of really bad levels and the story generally shits itself, but it's a conclusion. You get *something* for the trouble and it's playable to the end. 2 holds up actually pretty well for the most part compared to my disappointed memories of it. It's not a game you go back to and mess around with like CE, but as a flowing experience it's good. It's a Call of Duty Campaign more than an old school Bungie game. They kind of read the mood of pop culture and predicted the future with halo 2 if you ask me.

As for the particular thing with the weapons, dual wield I think is mostly messed up by the fact they had to make the DW guns *half a gun* each to not make it absurdly powerful, which then just makes it lame. They're now awkward guns that force you into this slow reloading no punch stance. Also the pistol is a new gun and the battle rifle is your CE pistol wearing a disguise.

>>10229317
The Battle Rifle is Halo 2's version of the CE pistol, not the pistol itself in Halo 2.

Bungie felt like in CE, their pistol acted like a rifle, and their (assault) rifle acted like a SMG; so in 2 the Battle Rifle is the CE pistol successor, the SMG is the assault rifle successor, and the pistol is just a pistol.

But yes, in general, the guns in Halo 2 and 3 aren't as distinct or punchy as in CE (though I think H2A fixes that a lot even just through better audio design). The BR is extremely good though, even better then the pistol was in CE.

>too many cutscenes

Halo 2 has a big emphasis on worldbuilding and narrative, and has actually really excellent writing with a lot of shit you'll only pick up on on repeat playthroughs, but if you don't give a shit about the story in these games then that could impact your enjoyment of 2 quite a bit.

>>10229129
>Some people have modded in some of the cut stencil shading/shadows at least and that looks pretty neat
There's definitely more than that going on to restore cut Halo 2 content, and the fact that they're being bolstered/encouraged by the actual MCC dev team and their Digsite program is genuinely shocking. I mean, it's already well known that the B-Team assigned to MCC isn't like the rest of 343 at all, between the clear disconnect in their design/monetization strategies and the known new hires that were responsible for much of the improvements, but it's still crazy how much they've gotten done and how community-minded they are

>>10229581
I know why they did it, but the Covenant felt like such sub-Star Wars characters in 2 (probably better than SW in all honesty because SW is pretty dogshit).

I have a lot of good memories playing with friends, and then a lot of good memories meeting a few people online in this game and Gears of War and we played all through the 360 era together.

Then Microsoft ruined everything, vidya went to shit, and we all drifted apart.

I hate growing old.

t. 32 year old boomer

>>10201779
I was more into Metroid Prime back then. I tried a few times to play Halo: Combat Evolved on Xbox but hated the samey level design. I had way more fun with Halo 2 and 3.

>>10201779
It was OK, enemies were smart for an FPS of the day. Down side was way too much reuse of maps. You literally end up going through some shit like 4x, LOL.

Also it became too easy to predict when you'd be ambushed for my taste.

>>10229682
Halo 2 does the prequel political shit, but well done and actually interesting

>>10203701
That's why I hate halo. It's the same thing the whole game

>>10231769
So is every game though.

>>10201779
I wish the flood didn't exist

>>10209790
It's a lame way we make ourselves seem special and distinct from other generations.
>Hurr durr but 9/11 really fucked things up man
In reality 9/11 was a blip on everyone's day to day life, just another news story, unless you were personally affected or around NYC at the time. Everybody quickly moved on. So yeah, its sad seeing american millennials now treat 9/11 like a big deal when in fact they didn't give a shit when they were a teenager.

>>10209790
>>10232019
Because 9/11 basically put us on the permanent war footing and solidified the modern American surveillance state. 9/11 justified the "War on Terror" even though Al-Qaeda was closer to a loose organization than it was to this grand global terrorist conspiracy.
Some terrorists got a lucky hit caused by horrible inter-agency communication, and the Military, Intelligence (and their associated industries) world took advantage of a situation that would justify their existence in a way they had been struggling to do since their largest geopolitical rival collapsed a decade prior. On a lower key more immediate note, Dubya loved it because a war would boost his popularity. Only time he was popular was immediately after 9/11 and remained reasonably popular until Iraq, and it became increasingly obvious how long it and Afghanistan would be a quagmire.