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Halo 3 Has Gone Gold
The official Bungie site has the word that Halo 3 is done. In games industry terms, they've 'gone gold'. "That means we delivered a final version to our internal certification group that passed all the tests and is now being whisked away to top secret manufacturing locations to be turned into retail versions of the game - and eventually packaged and sent to stores in various cases, tins and cat-helmets. We can't wait to share it with you guys on September 25th and 26th, but we have to say thanks."
Umm, didn't that happen yesterday?
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
Please note, my post above it an unsubstantiated rumor. Chances are, it's false but I just thought I'd throw it out there.
I'd love to be at those developers' post-Gold party. (And I'm sure they have them)
This means they've made double-double sure to delete the hidden minigame where a lady soldier invites the player to come over to her base for some nice hot bubble-shields.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I like Microsoft. Thye make cool games, good mice, and comfy keyboards.
So what if I don't like Windows and Office?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I seem to recall there being a Vista only version that was announced pretty long ago...
you must be new here.
my sig is an honor student
You must not have tried very hard. I bought Bioshock and Blue Dragon within the past week and a half - and both times saw dozens of copies at the stores.
Not that I have anything against Metroid...but Halo 3 is breaking records before it is even out. Lots of people are interested in it and people submitted the story. If you really cared you could have submitted Metroid stories but you can't even post with a user name. But there really isn't anything all that significant about Metroid other than it finally gives hardcore gamers who own a Wii a reason to dust off their console while they wait for Smash Bros and Galaxies.
Yeah, we all know the Xbox is Microsoft. Gamers (for the most part) don't care. If they make a good console with good games, we will support it. It is not like they have a monopoly on gaming...it takes a lot of guts to try to compete against established competitors like Nintendo and Sony.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Well, it's not my fault if the local stores didn't get enough copies of it.
Indeed. Why, he (or she) has a five-digit UID that starts with 1 -- what a n00b!
Stereotypes? Just what I'd expect from a Wii-tard. (Don't feel rushed to reply. Let the irony wash over you, like a wave in the ocean.)
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
...while I'm not going ape shit over Halo like a large portion of the "console-only" generation (I have yet to meet a long-time FPS PC gamer who thinks Halo was anything beyond "entertaining") I did rather enjoy Halo 1 and 2...Halo 3 will hopefully bring a nice close to this story arc.
Strictly speaking of the Halo franchise, I'm more excited about Halo Wars than Halo 3...but what do I know, I grew up on Zork.
Living With a Nerd
Indeed. Having owned Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 2 and now Metroid Prime 3, Halo is in a far different category than Metroid. While Metroid is long running and beloved franchise, Halo is a fever pitched hyper hysteria that can draw people from all over just to play a game tourny. It's more competitive than Metroid, which is far more story driven.
With that said, the 60mins I spent with Metroid Prime 3 (after starting over having missed scanning a spaceship and remember previous versions being completely screwed if you missed some scans, I'm being extra cautious scanning stuff), I'm really liking the story line, but the controls are still growing on me. They definitely tightened up the cross-hair movement compared to Red-Steel, but there's still some sluggish feeling trying to quickly change modes.
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
No, Bungie makes good games. Like Marathon and Myth.
It's not like 1 million people have ever been wrong before, majority wins logic?
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
Cue the Nazi Analogies in three...
two...
one...
"But there really isn't anything all that significant about Metroid other than it finally gives hardcore gamers who own a Wii a reason to dust off their console while they wait for Smash Bros and Galaxies."
The Metroid Prime series is one of the most polished & rewarding gaming experiences you can have if you are a serious gamer. Halo is a fine series too, I personally have enjoyed the back story to that game also, but underneath it is a simple FPS.
A simple FPS which has a polished production & awesome exposition.
Looking forward to both, but as a pure gaming experience, if its any thing like the older games, MP:Corruption will be my choice, even though I will probably dig the more visceral experience & movie like exposition of Halo3 probably more.
1. I hope you're control interface is on Advanced. It makes a HUGE difference in responsiveness compared to the default controller setup
2. IMHO the control scheme is SO much better that it pretty much makes any dual analogs unusable. Well, I wasn't much of a console FPS fan to begin with, but Metroid 3 is the first game that I can say comes a lot closer to intuitiveness and control that PC keybopard/mouse gamers take for granted.
Bye!
Did you happen to notice the green text in the bottom left corner of the screen during the match making lobby? Looked like debugging output. I wonder how close that build was to the gold build.
I don't know if I would personally call the whole series "polished" I hated MP's control scheme so much that I stopped playing it after about 15 minutes and never tried again. Not being able to strafe unless you are locked on an enemy? wtf mate. That being said, MP3 controls feel very nice comparatively, and I'm not a huge fan of the Wii controls either.
But the flood really do relate quite well to hitlerian ideals. The idea that those dirty humans don't deserve to live!
Unfortunately Bungie was swallowed by the whale and we don't get good Mac games from them any more.
I'll give $75 to anyone who can get me a PC / winXP version. I'd LIKE to give that money to the game developers, but MS doesn't want that to happen. And I'm not going to buy an xbox just to play Halo3. So I have $75 ready for whoever gets me Halo3 for the PC first.
Sure. Mac gamers have been mourning the loss of Bungie as a Mac developer since Halo disappeared from the G4 and reappeared on the XBox. But even worse, it must suck a little over at Bungie. ALL they do is Halo and they must be getting tired of it from a creative perspective. Taking a dip in your Master Chief-built money bin can only go so far to relieve creative frustration.
Another long-time PC gamer here, of FPS's and otherwise. I think we may look back upon Halo as being one of the most innovative shooters of this post-millennial decade. The reason is all about tempo, and specifically, the way Halo's "recharging shield" system dramatically alters the pace and experience of FPS games.
In a conventional FPS, the player character restores health lost through attrition by picking up some variant of "Medkit" liberally sprinkled throughout the level. Thus, the cycle of the typical FPS goes something like this: fight, fight, fight, pick up health, fight some more. This cycle is a relatively long one, in that there are generally substantial gaps between health restorations. This is necessary to maintain game challenge, and to prevent the whole "Medkit" conceit from becoming too self-evidently contrived. However, as a consequence, the "tempo" and "pace" of the game is dictated by this cycle of fight, lose health, find (or backtrack to) medkit. Because of this structure, the PC is also gifted with a substantial amount of health in order to sustain him from one cache of medkits to the next. Games are generally most exciting when the player is clinging to life, trying desperately to make it to the next medkit, but the very structure of the conventional FPS dictates that this can only occur so often per level, if at all. Indeed, many players simply choose to reload if they find themselves in perilous straights health-wise, knowing the next medkit is far off and rightly intuiting that the conventional FPS is not really designed to be played on a sliver of health.
In Halo and the health-recharging games that followed it, the cycle instead goes something like this: fight, recharge, fight, recharge, fight, recharge. The cycle is shorter, the recharges more frequent, and the amount of time the game allows the player to come close to death is thus much higher. Indeed, games with Halo-type systems its not uncommon to frequently take cover in the middle of a firefight to find some minor respite and desperately hoping to avoid any incoming fire in order to restore health. You may have noticed that it takes far less time to kill an exposed, inactive player in Halo than it does in, say, Quake 4. This is because the constant health restorations compensate for the increased risk. Thus in Halo-type games the risk of death can be more constantly exploited, and the tempo of a Halo game is much accelerated as the player constantly comes perilously close to death, and repeatedly takes a sigh of relief at restoring their health just in time.
You can already see an awareness of the superiority of an accelerated game tempo reflected in the design of subsequent FPS games. Gears of War is possibly the most recognizable incarnation of a "recharging shield" health system, but on the PC side Rainbow Six: Vegas also employs a similar system. Both games have perfected this idea to generate an incredible sense of tension as exposure to sustained enemy fire for any length of time results in a swift demise. The player feels naked and very vulnerable even when simply walking through a exposed courtyard. The unforgivingly swift tempo of these games is far more successful in evoking dread and terror in the player than the repetitive haunted-house antics of, say, Doom 3. Sure, imps may jump out of nowhere at me in Doom 3, but I'm loaded up on armor and health so I know I'm in no real danger. I'd say that Gears and R6Vegas demonstrate a far more sophisticated grasp of the design potential of recharging-shield systems than Halo does, but it was Halo that first introduced this concept and its utility to gamers.
I'll leave it at that. Halo also took the somewhat daring step of strictly constraining the player's weapon loadout, but I'm more hesitant to give it credit for that as there were plenty of similarly constrained, tactically minded shooters that preceded it. I'm also going to add that I own no copies of Halo or the Xbox, in any incarnation, and I'm almost exclusively a PC gamer myself, so to the ex
.it takes a lot of guts to try to compete against established competitors like Nintendo and Sony.
BNope, Microsoft has so much money there is no risk to them whatsoever, only potential gain.
Very interesting read, thanks. I guess this is what zonk is hoping for when he posts all those gaming stories that most /.ers hate.
I have been less than impressed with the public beta's. I think despite Microsoft will pay someone to give it GOTY, titles like Assassins Creed and BioShock will slaughter the Master Cheif IMO
Make SELinux enforcing again!
I must disagree with you about Microsoft's mice; I've had 4-5 of these http://www.microsoft.com/products/info/product.asp x?view=22&pcid=f918997d-8a10-49a2-86d4-350fc658f44 7&type=ovr
fail (left, right and/or middle mouse buttons cease working) under normal use (web surfing, windows navigation, NOT gaming).
And lets not forget their Habu which wouldn't work as intended if you followed the instructions for installation (something about the driver not recognizing the mouse as a Habu)
15975.... bitch.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I have a Microsoft Home serial mouse that I have been using since 1996. This thing is simply indestructible.
If anything the dirth of 232 ports nowadays is what'll do it in. I am to cheap to buy a 2 dollar adapter (which is why I am still using that mouse).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
You sir, have made a friend. Several minutes ago I had a post composed about my hatred for health paks. After I lost interest in writing that much, I closed the tab and found your comment. Well said.
IMHO, halos best innovation was seamlessly integrating ranking into online play with a level playing field and actually making attempts to keep it that way. I love how once I hit level 15 or so I no longer have to worry about team killers or n00bs or quitters, because the the level range is composed of people who are bound to win a few games. I generally don't get people who talk to much, and opponents who are fun to spar with.