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First Review of Halo
The Halo Guy writes: "Voodoo Extreme has posted the first review of Halo, the new first person shooter from Bungie Software that's an Xbox launch title and will be ported to the Mac and PC later next year. Included are some very cool high resolution Xbox game captures too." I guess buying the bundle will be a little less painful if you get good games with the system.
Yeah, except that the game was to be released years ago, and it was the Xbox holding up development, not Bungie. The e3 alpha version ran on a 266 with a tnt2. They were doing fine, it was going well, it wasn't "the project that wouldn't die". Oh, well.
Suck it up, Bungie. MS stole your soul and your ability to innovate.
Alternatively, MS provided the hard cash and commercial expertise to keep Bungie in business to work on wildly-overambitions projects.
Not everything in life is a conspiracy by Microsoft against the entire world, you know.
Actually, if you want to hurt Microsoft, buy the box, but don't buy any games. They are selling the box below cost, but hoping to make it up on games. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Bah. When I first played Marathon, not only was I a die-hard PC gamer, I was a die-hard anti-Mac person. They were toys, pure and simple, in my eyes. You couldn't get anything *real* done, whether it be work or entertainment. But Marathon stood all that on its head. It kicked the crap out of the FPSs available on the PC at the time. Sure, the basic concepts were still run around, shoot, find switches, solve puzzles, etc., but goddamnit it had a STORY! A story so engrossing that, until Half Life, no PC-based FPS could even begin to challenge. That was the first FPS where I really got into the game. Playing a co-op multiplayer game in a dark room with headphones...damn game gets creepy as hell.
As far as your revolution assessment, a FPS capable of scaring the crap out of the average fairly jaded gamer *is* a revolution. If nothing else, it's one hell of an accomplishment. The ability of the game to draw you in, to make it more than a game, that is a very hard and key factor. Look at this very review...even it talks about the importance of Half Life's story elements, and how that makes it the best FPS...until Halo.
And yes, I bought Marathon II for the PC.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
You know, I've followed this game's development pretty rabidly since the first rumors of "Project Blam" started surfacing in 1998. I think you're remembering selectively: Halo was never pitched as a persistant multiplayer-only game. It was always going to have a primary single-player component.
I suspect you're confused because all of the initial demos were of the multiplayer side. At the time, Bungie took pains to explain that this was a result of their internal development schedule, which slotted the engine and multiplayer sections for completion long before the single-player campaign was even demoable, much less finished. (The reasons for this kind of schedule should be pretty self-evident: artists, writers and voice-actors work on different time scales than engineers.)
The big change that did occur around the time of the MS buyout was a shift from third-person to first-person perspective, but I don't see any reason to not take their word that that was a gameplay and control issue brought out by playtesting.
Christ, grow up, will you?
First of all, in all likelihood, Microsoft saved Bungie from bankruptcy. If you cast your mind back to 1998, Bungie was on the tail end of a very ambitious expansion program that had produced mixed results at best. Myth and Myth II had gotten uniformly excellent reviews, but were far from best-sellers. They were having amply-documented (by themselves, at length, on their website) problems getting their boxes onto store shelves. They had sunk an unknown but presumably significant amount of money into opening up a California office to produce a game (Oni) that at the time of the MS buyout was over a year behind schedule and still slipping, and they had just started development on an insanely ambitious title (Halo) that was, at best, not going to ship for another two years. Add it all up, and you get a company in desperate need of funding, not to mention some marketing muscle.
Second, pissing and moaning about how a finished game diverges, a little or a lot, from whatever rabid speculation some of the designers indulged in while it was still in pre-alpha form only shows how little you understand about the development process. Here's the nutshell version: Shit happens. You start out with a design doc that says the game will have perfect realtime raytraced voxels and will also make you coffee and fetch your slippers. A year later all of your hair is missing because BigHardwareCo's graphics APIs are an undocumented mess, the playtesters insist that they want tea, not coffee, and half of the company's monitors explode during a cutscene in level 10 for no reason that you can determine. You have a finite amount of money to spend, a finite amount of time you can take before the online game sites lose interest in your screenshots, and a finite amount of prozac you can dispense to your engineers. All of those airy promises you made a year ago are now completely irrelevant. You fix the problems that are fixable, remove the parts that can't be done, polish what does work until it shines, and save the fifty great ideas you had to abandon for the sequel. Assuming there is s sequel. Assuming, of course, you ship at all.
Companies do not run on good intentions alone, and designers don't make games for their own amusement: they make them so that other people can see them. (And so they can get paid.) Given a choice between slowly slipping under the waves and suddenly getting a very, very large wad of cash from a company that was also going to market my product like nobody's business, I know what I, and any other adult, would choose in a heartbeat.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.