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First Impressions of Halo 3
1up and EGM have had some time in the last month with the next iteration of Microsoft's Halo series. Several folks at the site have put up their impressions of the current build of the game, including some multiplayer feelings from EGM editor-in-chief Dan Hsu, a bunch of nice crunchy details from Mark Macdonald, a nostalgia-laiden look at the game from Luke Smith, and a potpourri of details from Crispin Boyer. From Luke's writeup: "Maybe it was the first shooter I played that had some substance? Maybe it was that my best friend bought me a copy of the game for my birthday and I didn't even have the console yet. Maybe it was all of the traveling to play in Halo tournaments on weekends in college, but somewhere between Halo: Combat Evolved's release and now, Halo became my Mario. It is the game that made me care about video games like I did when I was 10."
Sounds like the entirety of the Halo series to me. Not that interesting. I'd rather go for something with some substance, like Half-Life 2.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Links for the Luke Smith and Crispin Boyer articles appear to be identical.
!sig
"Maybe it was the first shooter I played that had some substance"
Some how the above quote makes me think he's a fanboy and not someone we should be listening to. FPS games have substance before halo and if anything lost a lot of it's substance in the Halo generation.
I like muppets.
Maybe.
How we know is more important than what we know.
As in Ninja Laiden? Score one for the editors!
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Because it seems few 360 games have split-screen options. Given how heavily Microsoft are pushing Live, it wouldn't surprise me if Halo 3 only offered co-op and MP via Live.
Why did Bungie have to copy the names of Nine Inch Nails records? Halo 3 is the Head Like a Hole maxi-single.
Interestingly I can remember thinking the exact opposite when I first sat down and played Halo - "where's the depth to this?" The actual combat seemed relatively repetitive and the at-times impressive graphics didn't seem to have much effect on the gameplay.
This guy needs to get a Ninty and play some Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, then perhaps an old PC and really get into some serious Half Life, Unreal Tournament, BF1942 and Quake II action if he wants to legitmately use the word 'substance.'
Read Pynchon.
At least that'll be the case if you buy the super-dooper collector's edition of Halo 3. Granted, the internet isn't a 100% reliable source of information but apparetly the replica helmet you get with this edition will be cat-sized. So presumably we can look forward to Halo 3 hitting the news with reports of cat owners having to take their sweltering animals to the vets after cramming the helmets onto their moggy heads and being unable to get them off again.
Trolling? I can think of at least a dozen games with more substance than Halo.
Or maybe when he said "...it was the first shooter I played that had some substance" he meant that it was the first shooter he had played that had some substance.
I don't see anywhere where he indicates that it was the first shooter EVER with some substance.
Back when Halo was released there were still a large number of people who were still impressed with that 'shiny metal' effect. It was synonymous with system power. For many of my pc developer friends 'bumpy/shiny' metal was the Holy Grail of graphic effects. It was almost all they worked on or were impressed with.
Fast forward to late 2007 and Halo is going to be facing probably some twenty, or more, other 'guys in bulky shiny armor' games already on the market to have to compete with. And the 360 hardware isn't getting any better/faster, so Halo 3 will face the same problems current 360 games face - the EDRAM problem. Either deal with the jaggies that 720p and no tiling give you or bite the bullet and write a performance draining tile renderer to fit into the too small 10megs of EDRAM to allow 4xAA.
As anyone who has seen the real, not the silly touched up/high rez marketing, shots of gears of war, the gap between the perceived and real graphic power of the 360 is huge. And the Halo team has recently come out and stated that they are not going to be able to match Gears of War due to the larger scale of the Halo environments.
High rez renderings and highly touched up marketing shots will most likely keep the core Halo audience on board till next year, but any hope of Halo 3 being some savior that will attract significant new console fans to the 360 is certainly false hope.
Than most console FPSs. For starters I was only into computer gaming until I got a playstation, then I had a fall out of gaming altogether. I bought PS2 at launch, bought GTA3 and all that, but it just never stuck with me. Then I got a taste of Halo at a friends and it was over from there. It turned into my new mario or zelda. Halo 3 is the one true game that I'm looking forward to and I think whatever bungie does following halo will be at the same caliber and possibly better.
Agreed.
(oh yeah, saying that word makes me sound so important)
Quake 2.
And yes, I remember Wolf3d and Doom. And Quake 1 even.
How'd this get marked troll? This is dead on my opinion. Half Life 2 was pure brilliance. Beautiful, great story and depth. Halo is severely overrated. It's this generations Goldeneye, which was also overrated. Call me sometime next year when there's a good shooter on the Wii, the only viable console to play a shooter on.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
You obviously havnt played Half Life 2 or if you have seem to be confusing it with something else.
Finding various scientists and assauling a tower?
The game spans roughly 14 chapters, ranging from fighting in a zombie invested rebel township to running through giant insect infected beaches.
In no part of the game do you have to find 'various scientists'. I believe what you may be refering to is the section of the game where you have to drive through City 17's sewers and water ways in order to meet Eli Vance after a failed teleportation. You could make the argument that this section is an unneccesary, and a waste of time, or that it is a interesting section of gameplay that helps immerse the player in the artistic universe of the game. Either way, that section is only an hour tops if you are exceptionally slow, and so refering to this as "all it was" is just misleading.
How can you say "I found that to be the worst FPS (single-player wise)"? Half Life 2 was one of the most critically acclaimed single player games of all time (for the PC), if you take the time to read www.metacritic.com you will find little to no mention of the multiplayer aspect.
As for only a level to play around with the gravity gun. A) you have the gravity gun for about half the game. B) The game is not split into levels put chapters, i can only assume you are talking about the brief 5 minute section you first get the gravity gun. If all you could find from 15+ hours of gaming was "finding various scientists, then assaulting a tower. Oh, and a level to play around with the Gravity gun" then i suggest you need to replay the game in order to make a better assesment.
What you are saying is baseless waffle, however, the post you are replying to that was labelled "trolling" has some grounding in fact, namely, based from current previews Halo 3 looks extremely similar to the previous games with a few new weapons and 1 new vehicle. The argument that we should withheld judgement as this is in the early stages is irrelevent and senseless, as if people were saying "It looks AWESOME!" no one would be saying wait till the finished product comes out. That is the point of a preview, you comment on the available information.
Half Life 2 may have some flaws, but if you are going to criticize it at least make it relevant to the game, not just spray whatever you can remember from screenshots.
That the game is not delayed impossibly long like 2, that tons of features I was looking forward to are not removed like 2, and that the game looks at least as good as 2 was supposed to look. Even as different as it was from the hype, Halo 2 still rocked, and I would bet that Halo 3 will as well.
Goldeneye wasn't that overrated, and you could do some much more fun things in multiplayer with it. Hell, the levels were more original and varied than Halo's, and they were patterned after a frigging movie. Then you had Halo. I used the pistol whip, the sniper gun, and the pistol itself. That was it for multi. The other guns were just crap. Meanwhile most of hte guns except for the AK clone weree fun to dick around with. Not to mention explosive mine goodness.
Agreed completely, sounds like the Halo fanboys have the modpoints today.
Yep, HL2 sucked.
;).
I bought it after hearing all the good reviews and people raving about it, and found it to be the worst game I've ever bought. It sucked that much (and I bought Constantine and Van Helsing for the XBox, so that tells you how bad I found Half-Life 2 to be
I see however, the Half-Life fanbois and the PC gamers are out in force with modpoints... I don't understand why they hate Halo that much. They seem oddly obsessed with trying to "prove" just how great HL2 and PC games are, even when the thread is about an XBox game...
Is it any wonder us "hardcore" long-time gamers just groan when people talk about Halo? The parent post is the perfect example..
Fucking Halo...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I've been playing games since Atari, Coleco, and NES. My brother had a 3do, and I mostly skipped over later Nintendo and Sony PS for PC Games. Halo MADE me get an XBOX because it was one of the first console games that captured the freedom/substance of PC FPS. Halo 3 is probably the only game I'm looking forward to in this latest generation because of it's history. Other games/consoles are good, but Halo CE was very groundbreaking for the console gaming industry. While there are of course better games today, Halo CE did bring something to the console market that wasn't there before. Compairing it to modern day equivilents is unfair. ...MHO
There is only one - once you play it you will not waste your time with any other FPS - thats if you don't poopy with being owned as a noob:
e ance
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Halo and Half Life are both good games you goddamn zealots. Stop acting like it's an either/or and embrace the synergy that is both/and!
I don't have mod points, so I'm just here to give an amen....
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Call me sometime next year when there's a good shooter on the Wii, the only viable console to play a shooter on.
Millions of of people that do play first person shooters may disagree with you. It's all about the control mechanism and game mechanics, as long as you build them with the target platform in mind, it's perfectly viable.
Compare, GRAW on the 360 vrs GRAW for Windows. Despite the PC version having more interactive environments and allowing for more fine grained controller of your squad members it's not nearly as much fun to play as the 360, which has a different control system and mechanics specifically geared for the platform (much like has been done for Gears of War).
I agree that Goldeneye was vastly overrated (I wasn't a big fan of it's control mechanism), and Halo was a little too (though it's got it's the best control mechanism and mechanics of any console FPS I'd played prior to GRAW) but so was Half Life 2. Personally I didn't enjoy Half Life 2 nearly as much as the origional.
Throughout most of the game I felt the visbily elderly graphics engine compared poorly to other games like ones using the Unreal engine or in the BF series (let alone something like PlanetSide) as the outdoor maps ended up feeling cramped and artificial. I also felt the game left much less room for tactical gameplay than was present in the origional.
This is because so much that happend in HL2 was heavily scripted meaning you couldn't really 'attack objectives as you want to' but rather you were placed in situations where very specific things happened when you triggered them (doors closing behind you, gangways falling down blocking your path), forcing the same tactics on everyone.
I'd much rather have an open map (like a large BF2 map - which are very detailed) where it's more of a sandbox, but where I'm guided to objectives and targets. Scripted events and triggers are good things, but people generally don't prefer "on rails" gameplay.
I would note that the best levels in the origional Halo were the ones where you had an outdoor enviornment that you could tackle in a number of ways, achieving objectives in any order (and conversely the worst were the levels in The Library (IIRC) where you are walking down a narrow corridor having enemies thrown at you for about 30 minutes or more).
I felt the same was true of Halo 2 - you can complete the tunnel section in under 5 minutes if you go back to get a Warthog and then put you foot down and race all the way to the other side (great fun too, with all the jumps, obstacles and enemy fire to dodge), or you can get in the abandoned Ghost that is left waiting for you by the entrance and spend a good 45 minutes slogging it out killing everything between you and the exit. Of course Halo 2, while interesting in some of the story being told - much more of a story than was present in HL2 I would note - was not so dynamic.
Multiple ways to meet an objective (while not really something GRAW had that much of, and was admittedly fun never the less) is definately something I think more games should aim to allow for.
I've been playing FPS's since Wolf3d. I hope that classifies me as a 'Hardcore' long-time player. In my expert, experienced opinion: Halo is the second console FPS to be worth playing. (The first being Goldeneye) Is it the greatest FPS ever? No. Is it a steaming pile of dogshit? No. It's a good game, and worth playing. I don't understand why people feel the need to be so extreme about these things. It's just a game, so get off your soapbox and chill.
Halo is the best he could come up with?
No: Medal of Honor series (started the whole WW2 game being popular), FEAR, SOCOM, Ghost Recon series (cept for #2), Splinter Cell series, Max Payne(s), Half-life, countless others, etc???
Shame those guys are now making "My Baby's First FPS" games.
Oh well, I wish Microsoft luck in releasing an incompleat game & in microtransactioning the hell out of Halo 3.
Well first of all, I forgot my tag, ie. I meant it mostly tongue-in-cheek.
But Halo was not the second worthwhile console FPS, IMO. Red Faction was reasonable, and Half-Life for the PS2 was a better game than Halo(not including MP). And there were some other really fun FPSes on the N64 too. Halo was certainly the best multiplyer console FPS of it's time. I played a decent amount of Halo. I was, in fact, a fan. I was eager to play Halo 2.
But then Halo 2 sucked =P
I was very disappointed by Halo 2. To me, the shields-only health system seriously screwed up the gameplay. The multiplayer maps weren't much better than the first game. And the single player campaign was boring and annoying. Maybe there was just too much competition by then. Killzone for the PS2, as so-so as I found it to be, was far more entertaining than Halo 2 for me.
But, I'll have you know, Steve Ballmer is on the record saying that Halo is THE BEST GAME EVER MADE!
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
that was supposed to read, "my tag"
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
And then there are those of us who *were* into pc gaming when FPS were just beginning to walk and witnessed Id's rise to glory in the age of Wolf 3d, and have still come to see the light that is Halo. Went through Doom, Quake, DN3d, Golden Eye etc.. etc.. then became totally bored with more of the same over the years. Halo re-awakened my love for the game, with it's overall appeal, the combination of story, music (yes to me that is a very important part.. and the music in Halo is second to NONE) and the sheer fun of it's gameplay has me begging for more. I must say that I am happy that it is on console, as I have come to find that the couch and a bigscreen with friends is a much more comfortable gaming environment than the solitary one of my pc work area.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?