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Halo For The Game Boy Advance A Possibility?
etoychest writes "To be honest, I venture over to IGN.com about as often as I find myself in the all-natural food section at the local supermarket. That is, next to never. Still, occasionally some information does leak out of the site that makes you wonder if there is a reason to go back. This time, thanks to our friends over on the Penny-Arcade forums, I was made aware of a tidbit tucked away in the current IGN Pocket mailbag, as written by Craig Harris: 'Well, this was something that I've known for months about, but was literally sworn to secrecy by the people involved (just like many OTHER things I know but can't say). But since it's been mentioned in another publication, I can confirm that, yes, Halo is in the works for the GBA. That's all I can say, on risk of having my fingernails ripped off with a bottle opener.'" But are we sure they're not talking about this GBA Halo? Update: 06/12 12:05 GMT by S : There's a rather definitive official denial of this rumor over at Bungie.net.
This has apparently been dismissed as a false rumor from Bungie themselves.
I don't know, Metal Gear Solid took the move to the GBC pretty well, and this is more powerful hardware.
No advanced first person shooter for the game boy will ever exist, just like they didn't exist on the super nintendo. Sniping would be impossible, the z-axis would be horribly crippled with no analog stick, and the aiming would just be nightmarish. That said, I may have believed this if the rumor had been "a 2-d sidescrolling version of Halo is in the works for the GBA."
schild
editor, f13.net
You should take a look at the GBA versions of Splinter Cell and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.
Think franchise instead of port.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
So long as its confined to Doom/Duke Nukem 3D style autoaiming on the verticle axis, it's doable. Unfortunately, the maker of the James Bond FPS games on the GBA seemed to overlook this fact.
Yes, but Metal Gear was a game whose gameplay was flushed out on the NES*, a system not very much more powerful than the GBC. Halo, however, relies upon the third dimension. Could you imagine the charging guns, dramatic landscapes, etc, etc working on a 2D plane with vision limited to 7 or 8 character widths? It *could* be done, but it would be a dramatic reinvisioning of the franchise with as little to do with Halo's current gameplay as Mario Sunshine does to Sonic Advance.
*actually, it was a computer system from the time before the NES, but I don't remember offhand which one.
The ______ Agenda
Metal Gear originated on the MSX2. The two original Metal Gear games were works of absolute genius - and completely in 2D. The "Solid" part of the title of the Playstation game was there to indicate the move to 3D, and should really have been dropped for the GBC conversion...
As a huge fan of the xbox version I am very happy to hear that this is most likely a false rumor - as much as I love Halo I just can't see what they could do with it on the GBA.
:D
We would likely either get something like Wolf 3D or a side-scroller like Splinter Cell, neither of which really sound that appealing.
However one thought that struck me was that if they wanted to, they could go in an entirely different direction with the handheld version. After reading the Halo books (they are better than you would think) and noticing the focus the books have on space battle between human and covenant ships, it got me to thinking that a Halo game similar to Escape Velocity could be pretty cool.
EV is a very fun game, and you could prolly recreate something pretty close to it on a handheld. Anyways, just a thought
Oh, and to the submitter of this story, you really come across as a little lame with your huge disclaimer... You realise that more than half of your story was you telling us that you don't like IGN? Either you or the editor should have chopped that.
When thinking about a suitable way of porting Halo to GBA I couldn't help but think of something similar to Advance Wars, using more stuff from the novels, and not just attempting to port an FPS which clearly wouldn't look any good at all.