Tag Archives: Halo

Reaching for a Good Pun to Use as a Title

Well it certainly has been quite a while since my last update. Unfortunately I don’t have any great excuse for why I haven’t posted in the last 2+ months but honestly writing for this blog is probably one of the lesser of responsibilities I’ve shirked recently. Perhaps one possible explanation is that I haven’t done a lot of gaming during this time, and indeed I’ve done (relatively) little, yet all together I’ve certainly done more than enough to report on:

“Enjoy General Knoxx’s millions and millions of miles of less than scenic highway!”

I worked my way through both The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned and The Secret Armory of General Knoxx expansion packs for Borderlands via local co-op. Other than not realizing I had to manually select to go back to “playthrough 1” which resulted in us having to replay the first 10 minutes of the single player campaign, and then have our brains instantly devoured by living dead who horribly out-leveled us, Zombie Island was pretty fun. Perhaps a bit monotonous, but no more so than the rest of the Borderlands tends to be to me. General Knoxx was a little more fun, or at least it would have been if it weren’t for the obnoxious driving requirements in lieu of the absence of fast travel. I appreciate them wanting to put more emphasis on vehicles for that expansion but since I generally consider the vehicles in Borderlands to be godawful, the effort seems to have been a bit of a waste. I’d wager that even if you somehow enjoyed the vehicle sections of the game the lengthy back and forth travel required for many of the quests combined with many long, road centric areas and annoying, respawning enemies probably at least grated on you a little. We never got around to going after Crawmerax (our characters are still relatively low level) but we’ve still got a Robot Revolution to possibly investigate sooner or later. Despite all my seemingly negative comments I’d say that if you’re any sort of a Borderlands fan you should probably own all of these, period.

“No stupid caption, just Jun looking like a badass.”

What else? I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again way too heavily which has included me finally getting my “main” to level 80, making several new “alts” (including one who I’ve been leveling exclusively via the Random Dungeon Finder) and even making it into the Cataclysm closed beta for some so, so sweet early access to these hotly anticipated new changes and additions. More on WoW later in some separate updates but hopefully I won’t burn myself out again before I get too far into the proper release of Catacylsm next month.

Finally, and most importantly for this update, Halo: Reach has fallen from the heavens into our unworthy hands. Being a Halo fan since playing the first game on my brother’s newly purchased Xbox back in 2001, and continuing to enjoy the latest additions to the franchise in the form of Halo 3 and ODST, I was definitely anticipating Reach. Of course it was also an insanely safe purchase to make both because of Bungie’s great track record and the Halo franchise’s long, long legs on Xbox Live.

“Us owning some Covenant in the campaign.”

It has been such a long time now since it was released that my analysis of the game is going to be a bit more muted than it might have been if I had actually posted about it in a bit more of a timely fashion. I’ll sum up the single player pretty quickly though: continuing Bungie’s high level of production value and polish combined with improvements made from lessons learned in all previous Halo iterations, including ODST, yet never straying all too far from the conventions of the series, Halo Reach is almost certainly the best of the Halo single player campaigns so far. It may not be my personal favorite campaign (Halo: Combat Evolved holds a lot of fond memories for me and I’m idiotically nostalgic after all) and I might have been a tiny bit disappointed that I didn’t get the Rainbow 6, Ghost Recon, or SWAT style squad based, tactical experience that my imagination ran wild with when we got our first glimpses of Reach early on, I do concede that it might be the best Halo yet. The action, story, variety and the pacing, etc. – it’s all awesome. That’s not to say it is perfect – we had some pretty funky AI issues with the other Noble Team members in particular when playing the game via co-op, and some other bizarre occurrences, but I chalk most of those up to Halo charm rather than any sort of real annoyance.

“Jet pack melee kills are one of my favorite additions!”

The aforementioned Xbox Live goodies are amazing too with Bungie continuing to raise the bar on console multiplayer experiences. The changes, as subtle as many of them probably seem to casual fans of the franchise, make a huge difference. The changes to Halo 3’s equipment being the most notable, particularly with the addition of the ever popular jet pack. Once you start to master the use of some of the new items you’ll probably wonder how you ever stood playing Halo 3 and who doesn’t love jet pack stomping on someone’s face? Bungie also took some nice cues from Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 (amongst others, of course) with their persistent stat tracking and career advancement and, while it isn’t as over the top as it is in those games, it is definitely an improvement. The new Forge (and Forge World) is incredible as well – I personally spent a few hours in it recreating a very sad approximation of one of my favorite old Doom deathmatch maps (available here!) I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth with the multiplayer alone and I’ve barely played any of the new Invasion mode and haven’t even tried the new Firefight yet. Awesome!

An interesting facet of the release of the game that has almost nothing to do with the game itself is that fans of the series are now left to wonder about both the future of the Halo franchise now that Bungie is doing new things, and exactly what new things Bungie will be getting up to. Rumors of MMOs and perhaps returns to older franchises (Myth, mainly) abound, but in any case it is definitely going to be a fascinating few years while we watch both situations unwrap.

Dropping on to the Lost Planet

Oh shit, it’s game log time and I actually played some things this time!

As predicted my next 360 foray was Halo 3: ODST. ODST has pretty much been talked about to death lately on all of the gaming forums, blogs, podcasts, and the like so I won’t go into it too much. I played through it co-op via splitscreen on Heroic difficulty and enjoyed it quite a lot. It’s nice and short but well paced and a lot of fun. If you’re a Halo (particularly Halo 3) fan then this is a must buy despite the lack of the iconic Master Chief. I plan on going back and getting more of the achievements, including going after all of the audio logs, in a subsequent playthrough sometime soon. I also dabbled in the new Firefight mode a couple of times with some friends and, as predicted, enjoyed the hell out of it. There’s just something to be said for working together with friends in just about any game and the Gears of War 2 “Horde” mode template that everyone has been shamelessly copying lately really seems to nail a certain pure aspect of that.

“Silenced pistols are the new black.”

Next up I decided to play Lost Planet: Extreme Condition on my 360. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps it was the ever increasing nip in the air around here as we move into the fall that made me want to jump head first into Lost Planet’s abundant virtual snow banks… or maybe I just dig mechs? Who knows. I remember thinking the game looked cool since well before it was released but until the relatively recent announcement of its upcoming sequel I feel like it has been overshadowed by newer games. I’ve got a couple of friends who really dig the game though and one of them, NetworkShadow, even demoed it for a few of us at his place one day not too long ago. I really got into the idea of trudging through the beautiful snowy environments. The graphics might be fairly dated nowadays but people were blown away by them at launch and they’re just stylized enough to remain easy to appreciate even now.

“E.D.N. III has some pest control troubles…”

I managed to beat the game in just a few sittings and although there were some tricky sections (including lots of old school set piece boss battles) I found the game to be fairly easy. In fact a lot of my difficulty came about from trying to collect the achievements for all of the “target mark” collectibles for which I had to replay a few sections, even a few entire levels to complete. The character’s movement and control felt slightly off to me (though admittedly I play relatively few 3rd person action games) but once I got used to the controls it all felt quite smooth and I was generally quite happy with it. I was a little disappointed by the last boss fight which hit on a pet peeve of mine – throwing entirely new game mechanics at you in the last level. I didn’t feel like Lost Planet’s case was as gross as a lot of other game’s and I once I got a good feel for it I could more or less tell what they were going for. Still, it was fairly annoying and I ended up having to replay it like 15 times before I finally managed to beat it.

Lost Planet is also one of those newer Capcom games that seems to heap on a large amount of Western influence for some mysterious reason I don’t suppose I care enough to speculate too much about – something about increased international sales or a bold new direction or something, I don’t know. Indeed the game reminds me a lot, the setting, graphics, control, and the core gameplay, of a lot of Western 3rd person shooters, however there is an unmistakable Japanese feel to the entire game. I’m not just talking about the often silly extended cutscenes but the game itself often feels like somewhat of a 3D take on an oldschool side scrolling shooter like Contra or something. It’s hard to explain but I’m sure some of you who have played it know where I’m coming from. Regarding those cutscenes though, I’ve got to say that not playing many Japanese games, particularly the cutscene heavy JRPG genre, I do find an occasional dip into the cesspools of insane Japanese cutscenes to be pretty refreshing.

“What’s better than mowing down aliens with a minigun? Mowing down aliens with two miniguns!”

Next up for the 360 is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. An interesting note, and one I remember mentioning once or twice on the old podcast, is that I’ve had Call of Duty 4 since right around the time it was first released. I had the PC version and only really bought it to play multiplayer with friends however. As a result I never even started up the single player campaign and somewhere in the back of my mind I had always figured I’d probably enjoy it more on the Xbox 360 and that the achievements wouldn’t hurt either. So, here I am, nearing the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and I’ve finally tracked down a decently priced used copy of the game for 360. I can’t wait! I’ve heard so much about the campaign and, who knows, I might even give multiplayer on Xbox Live a try while I’m at it since it’s such a blast.

On a non-console related note I also continue to play Half-life 2 from time to time – I’m about to start Episode 2 and wrap the game up. I’ll talk more about Half-life 2 in a separate post when I finally get around to finishing it.

Some 360 Stuff.

I managed to finish Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (which I will mercifully refer to as “GRAW2” from here on out) over the weekend.

The game does indeed get more difficult but doesn’t quite reach the levels of frustration that I occasionally reached with the first game. I’d still have to say I enjoyed it more than the first GRAW in any case. That’s not to say I didn’t still have some complaints – indeed I did! One minor issue I had was that, while the 3rd person view looked great and even felt fine most of the time I often found myself thinking “cool, now to switch back to first person view!” Perhaps I should chalk that up to mere force of habit though. I did find myself often struggling to reload my weapon at the right times, that is, I either should have auto-reloaded and for some reason didn’t or I’d try to reload manually and wouldn’t, particularly when attached to cover. Similarly I also found using scopes when attached to cover pretty annoying as it often took several button presses to back out of scope mode back into your normal view where you could once again make sure you were in and/or attached to cover. This made using your scope more of a liability than probably intended. These issues are all most likely caused by unintentionally clunky features rather than actual bugs but either way they annoyed me often enough to note.

“In a startling turn of events our protagonist manages to lose his helmet! Ooooh… Ahhh!”

The ending wasn’t amazing but wasn’t too bad either. It definitely wasn’t the let down that the first GRAW ending was – after leading my group through a vicious firefight I ended up facing down a group of dozens of enemy fighters spread out along various distant walls and other cover. It seemed like a pretty tense situation as my squad mates bugged out and ended up taking cover nowhere near the fight with the exception of one particular mouth breather who was standing in the open dodging shot after shot instead of getting the fuck behind something. Jeesh. Anyway, as I tried to peer above the tiny broken wall that was somehow protecting me from the hundreds of rounds of automatic rifle fire raining down upon me I finally spot the my target – the boss if you will. I took a few potshots at him but it was far, far too dangerous considering the volume of fire I was receiving and how damn lethal shots are in the game in the first place. My target also seemed to sighted me as well and was aiming an RPG of some sort in my general direction. Not good! I hurl myself against the wall, cling to it for everything I’m worth, and… What’s this? I beat the game! It seems the dumbass terrorist leader didn’t have RPG training on his resume and accidentally shot the wall he was standing in front of. Ooops! Kind of anti-climatic don’t you think? 😀

I decided not to play through the campaign a second time on hard mode as I originally speculated I might. I didn’t whiz through the campaign quite as fast as I thought I might and my gaming time is far too precious to spend on a back to back second playthrough when my backlog is so large. I did go ahead and grab all of the single mission achievements as well as head online and install all of the free DLC content. There was a lot of that to go around too, most notably two large map packs containing mostly remakes of maps from older games. There are also two excellent sounding co-op map packs but those ones weren’t free. Not that it matters as I’ve never played a console Ghost Recon game online for various reasons. For those that feel compelled, however, this game looks like a great multiplayer value. I admit I wouldn’t mind trying it out myself, the co-op in particular, but I don’t have too many friends interested in the console Ghost Recons and I’d definitely want to avoid pick-up games on XBL with this title.

I also checked out two Xbox 360 demos this weekend as well: Tom Clancy’s HAWX and Halo Wars.

First, since I was just writing about another Tom Clancy game let’s talk about HAWX. First of all “H.A.W.X.” (High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron) is a fucking stupid acronym. It’s in the same genre as games like Ace Combat. I’m not really sure what you’d call that genre though – definitely not any kind of simulator. Perhaps it is a “flight action game”? Who knows. It is basically an arcadey take on a flight simulator. I’m not knocking the genre though – I’ve certainly played my Rogue Squadrons in my day. Like Ace Combat 6 before it though HAWX failed to grab me. It looked great, I love flying jets around and locking onto poor helpless bastards on the ground, but neither game was a compelling enough of an experience for me to warrant a purchase. Like Ace Combat 6 I’ll reserve HAWX for a distant bargain bin pick up, if I get around to getting it at all.

Feedback on the net on the game seems to be pretty interesting and, as far as I can tell, mostly negative. I think a lot of people were expecting this game to be a more realistic (as implied by the Tom Clancy brand, perhaps) Ace Combat. What a lot of people got, however, was a strange near future plot with warring PMC’s that sounds like something out of the Ace Combat series (accurately it brings Strike Commander to mind for me and now I’ll lose sleep tonight for making that horrible comparison) possibly even less realistic planes, and some bizarre features (“assistance” and “ERS”) that make the game possibly even more unrealistic than it might otherwise. The majority of (vocal) people seem to hate it. I found the no-assistance mode to be utter trash – it’s only benefit being that it breaks up the gameplay a bit when used. ERS mode, however, I thought was pretty nifty. I don’t recall ever seeing anything like that in a flight game before thought most posters seemed to hate the hand holding aspect of it. Overall I actually enjoyed the demo, just, again, not enough to make me want to run out and buy the thing.

“Finishing off a Covenant base.”

Onto Halo Wars! What can I say? It’s a not-so-special RTS. It’s Halo. It’s pretty good. I’m not surprised it’s good, nor that it is such a cookie-cutter RTS given the developer which has a history of helping shape the genre. From what I saw of the demo (I played both campaign missions and a couple of skirmishes) it’s nothing too exciting. I will say that was pretty pleased with this attempt to map RTS controls to a console controller. My only issue with them was how hard it was to group units. After playing Warhammer: Battle March recently in which I was able to assign specific units to specific groups and cycle through them it felt like a little bit of a dumbing down in the strategy department. Maybe you can do it and I just didn’t run into it, however.

People will inevitably ask whether this is a good game for Halo fans that aren’t RTS players. I’d have to say yes. The game definitely oozes with Halo flavor. All of the troops and vehicles are there and, thanks to the tech trees, even have some yet unseen (to my knowledge) variations. The game’s single player campaign also seems to have a lot of story and plenty of decent cutscenes. So sure, if you’re a big Halo fan I say grab it. If you absolutely hate RTSes, however, I can’t imagine this one will change your opinion on the genre in even the slightest bit. I for one may grab it if even just to satisfy the Halo fanboy inside of me. I don’t play a lot of RTSes, especially on console, so this may be a rare purchase for me though I’ve also been eyeing Tom Clancy’s EndWar lately as well.

Err… Wow. Apparently me and Tom Clancy have a thing going on. 😉

Again, apologies for the crappy photos instead of decent screenshots. It’s the best I can do at the moment for Xbox 360 games.