Halo is a very lucrative item for Microsoft. They knew better than to hand control over to another Uwe Boll, like so many of the other video game adaptations before it. That's why Microsoft is having someone else do the script but keeping close creative control over it, and only submitting it to holywood when it is pretty much finished.
Granted, 28 days later may or may not be your cup of tea, but it's certainly better than any of those festering shitheaps like Alone in the Dark or House of the Dead. I'm glad Microsoft didn't take the easy way out and sell the rights to the first person who came to their doorstep.
However, with close creative control, now we have to worry about an hour and a half of the same sets over and over again, but that's anotehr story.:)
I'll straighten out your exaggerations, because it's clear that you've never really played Halo for any extended period of time. There were ten levels in the campaign. Out of all of them, three of them had you backtracking through certain parts of earlier levels. Two Betrayals had you going backwards through the second half of Assault on the Control Room, plus some added places that were only accessable via Banshee. Keyes had you backtracking through the second half of Truth and Reconsiliation, with an added section on the on the ground. The Maw had you going through some portion of the first level, plus an added romp through the reactor room and an escape in a Warthog.
What really bothered me, and the reviewer, however, was not the fact that one backtracked so much. The situations in each of the levels had changed that it made it a quite unique experience, even going backwards. My problem was that the architecture in general was repetative, and made it waaaay too easy to get lost. There were literelly dozens of rooms in many of the maps that just looked the same, or at least very very similar. Only Halo and the Silent Cartogripher seemed to provide any sort of real variation. (And The Silent Cartogripher is also avalable in the Halo PC demo, along with Blood Gulch CTF for multiplayer, so if you really want a good taste left in your mouth with Halo, I suggest you play the PC Demo)
This was remidied quite a bit in Halo 2, where there were lots of varying rooms and rarely saw the amount of repitition that you saw in Halo 1. Sure, some of it was still there in H2 (The convinant homeworld comes to mind), but not nearly as much.
Other than that, Halo 1 (and 2 for that matter) arent really that much more repetative than any other good first person shooter. The only FPS that I remember with more variety off the top of my head is Half Life 2.
To adress the parent, I don't really see how you could say the reviewer is a fanboy if he essentially agrees with you. I've also met people who don't really care about the repetative levels, so he was probably putting it a little more delicately than you would have.
And about the guns? What exactly did you expect from the weapons loadout?
They're just as much of a gamer as you and I. And they seem to be the reason that the Playstation 2 is dominating this generation.
In my fantasy world, Microsoft would have bought Nintendo (Impossible until the old leader of Nintendo is dead and six feet under), and their combined might might have been enough to drive out the Sony/EA blight on console gaming, or at least force them to up their standards.
Microsoft and Nintendo both make some kickass first party games in lots of different genres, not to mention the Xbox getting the creative end of SEGA's stick with Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future and Gunvalkyrie. And most third parties seem to be decent on X-box, while the offerings seem to be paltry on Gamecube's platform.
Rockstar, Square, Polyphony and EA seem to be the only things that seem to keep the PS2 on top as far as I've seen, and the first two seem to at least want to branch out.
Anyway, these were just random ramblings by a guy who owns all three consoles, but only seems to play his Xbox, his friends Gamecube and his PC anymore.
Try any build of X-Chat for Windows (preferably not the 'official' one maintained by zed, as that has turned shareware. Legal? Probably not, but that's another discussion.). Doesn't feel anywhere near as clean as a native windows app
"Holy shit, no huuman player could have gotten that headshot, the bots must have been cheating!!!11111"
Honestly, bots can't really compare to a good true online experience, especially in team based games. Howeveer, like you said, they're probably the next best thing.
I wonder if the behavior of the bots will change based on radio communication. "Team, fall back", "Roger That" That might be an intuitive way to 'control' your teammates without having to go through a seporate bot commands menu.
But in the name of all that is holy, I hope that bots are only for local servers and not playable on the internet. Or if they do, have a 'hasbots' dmflag that one can filter out. I can't tell you how many times I found a server that was playing my favorite Q3A map only to find out that it was filled with bots.
Re:Xbox will gain in the short term
on
State of the Xbox
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not interested in Halo or Halo 2, because I've been playing that game for the last ten years on my PC.
Halo has only been out for around 3.
Unless you are implying that all FPS games are alike, in which case I then ask you how many FPS's do you have on your computer. If you are one of those guys who still plays Doom and ONLY Doom after all these years, my hat is off to you (Hell, I still play it a ton), but I think chances are that you've picked up a few more since then. Give Halo 2 a try. If you look past the hype, you'll find a very solid game beneath it, with very unique (and excillent, in my opinion) multiplayer. That's what is nice about FPS's, there are so many things you can change about weapon loadout, gameplay mechanics, movement physics and level design that can deliver two totally different experiences.
As for Crimson Skies, it almost like a totally a different game when played online. Kinda like mechassault, the single player was forgettable but the multi-player was very very awesome. If you didn't find DOA3 to be very furfilling by yourself, DOA Ultimate is now out, and from what I hear it has fantastic online play.
Tao Feng and Shenmue II, yeah I didn't like them either. Same with DoA: XBV. And although I loved Panzer Dragoon Orta, I can understand why someone who doesn't like rail shooters wouldn't like it.
There are also a ton of other games out there too. Project Gotham 2 is a fantastic racing game with controls that just 'feel right'. Not arcadey to the point of Mario Kart, not simulation to the point of Gran Turismo, it just feels right. Rainbow Six is also a pretty neat game that plays similarly to counterstrike in team adversial game modes. Ninja Gaiden, on the other hand, frustrated the hell out of me, but I've heard rave reviews about it from others.
Also in most cases (i.e., unless you enjoy Electronic Arts games), you're getting the best ports out of all three of the systems. This goes double for the Grand Theft Auto, after playing Vice City on Xbox, I could hardly play San Andreas on PS2, it just looked terrible by comparison and the controls didn't feel right. SSX3 is also a dream to play on the Xbox (aside from a lone framerate drop in the city level).
Re:Xbox will gain in the short term
on
State of the Xbox
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· Score: 1
It's showing it's age.
(I did, by the way, play the game. Quite a bit, a friend of mine had it)
Plus there are active communities of people who play Doom 2. Although, pureists still prefer to LAN doom2.exe, for a quick Doom 2 internet fix, you can use one of the many internet-centric source ports.
The most popular one is ZDaemon at http://www.zdaemon.org and is probably the best place to start, however it's running on top of an old version of ZDoom, and lacks some of the features that other source ports use. It is open source, however the next version will close parts of the code off to prevent cheaters. Chat room is at irc.freenode.net channel #zdaemon
Skulltag, at http://www.skulltag.com is the second most popular, which means that hardly anyone plays it. It uses a more current ZDoom as its base, though, and it does have loads more game modes than ZDaemon. The next version will contain great bots and lots of bugfixes for Oldschool mode to make it more like doom2.exe. It is 100% closed source, but the one person maintaining the code does a bang up job of it, and shouldn't be discounted. It has a chatroom at irc.oftc.net channel #skulltag if you are interested in playing a game.
There is also a doom playing service called Doom Connector found at http://www.codeimp.com, which allows you to use any internet ready source port you wish (ZDaemon, Skulltag,vanilla ZDoom, Doom Legacy, and more) , plus adds extra features (chat rooms). If you just want to play ZDaemon and Skulltag and don't want the extra fluff, you can use Internet Doom Explorer located at http://nfdfn.jinr.ru/~bond/csdoom/ to browse servers.
Also, integrated into ZDaemon's server browser, IDE and Doom Connector is a neat little program called GETWAD. If you do not have a certain map that is required to play on a server, it will search through all major doom map repositories and find it, download it via HTTP/FTP, and unpack it into your map directory, AUTOMATICALLY. Kinda like Steam's download map from URL, but requires no server input. (It will not however, find doom.wad, doom2.wad, plutonia.wad, tnt.wad or any other of the resources associated with the store bought games, but you can get all of them for real cheap, just pick up a copy of Doom Collector's Edition or find your old doom or doom2 diskettes and update your version of doom(2) to 1.9.)
If you use a banned account to access content, yes. The solution is to not pirate shit. If you're pirated a copy of one game, why does anyone care if you can play the other? Honestly - screw you.
I'm starting to appriciatre reading at -1.
Seriously, if you don't want to get locked out of your games, don't pirate. I don't see what the big issue is here.
For the record, at this particular moment in time, 12:15 EST on a Friday night, here are teh stats from both major contenders...
Number of people playing Halo 2: 91,837 (source: Bungie.net statistics) Number of people playing Counter Strike: 77,405 (source: Steampowered.com statistucs)
I was actually quite surprised. I thought that CS players would outnumber Halo 2 players. However, if you take into account the other two versions of Counterstrike (CZ and Source), that adds about 30K extra players, putting it ahead of Halo 2.
Casual Halo 2 and Counter-strike player here. I take no sides.
And you honestly don't think that valve won't release a patch to compensate for it? I mean, when Valve stopped supporting WoN and changed over to Steam, they gave everyone plenty of time to patch the game before they shut down the WoN authentication server.
Take off your god forsaken tinfoil hat. There WILL be a legal way to play Half Life 2 when or if Steam shuts down, mark my works.
I'm simply playing devils advocate here, I love my Xbox, but this is rather stupid of Microsoft to refuse to replace defective drives for a well known defect like their compeditors are doing.
Of course, if you know what you're doing, you can replace the DVD drive yourself.
Your guess is the activation servers will be up for years to come? I sure am glad you know what the fuck you're talking about. This sets a bad precedent and I find it abhorrent that people like yourself will apparently accept your already-paid-for, spoon-fed content on someone else's terms, rather than yours.
What if Microsoft's authentication servers go down. No more Windows XP. (insert windows troll here)
I'll take Steam over Starforce any day, thank you. I know, in the ideal world we wouldn't have copy protection, period, but this isn't that ideal world, and to me, a simple internet authentication is a lot better than the alternatives.
Re:Here is what all the hype was about.
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1
I have a great repituare of FPS's, begining with Wolf3D, through Tribes 2 and Unreal 2004. Hell, I still play Doom 2 over the internet.
I am now anxiously waiting to pick up my preorder of Halo 2. Beyond anxious. This is seriously the most anxious I've been for a games release, EVER.
Please don't generalize me.
And by the way, the port of Halo to the PC had so much potential, but Gearbox fucking blew it. Probably is the reason why Bungie does not have an interest in porting Halo 2 to the PC or Mac
Re:Looks like Slashdotters Loves Microsoft
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1
You hit the nail on the head with all but the last point. Without Microsoft, Halo, and therefore Halo 2 would not exist, as it was really close to being canned.
Slashdot Mirror
Halo is a very lucrative item for Microsoft. They knew better than to hand control over to another Uwe Boll, like so many of the other video game adaptations before it. That's why Microsoft is having someone else do the script but keeping close creative control over it, and only submitting it to holywood when it is pretty much finished.
:)
Granted, 28 days later may or may not be your cup of tea, but it's certainly better than any of those festering shitheaps like Alone in the Dark or House of the Dead. I'm glad Microsoft didn't take the easy way out and sell the rights to the first person who came to their doorstep.
However, with close creative control, now we have to worry about an hour and a half of the same sets over and over again, but that's anotehr story.
I'll straighten out your exaggerations, because it's clear that you've never really played Halo for any extended period of time. There were ten levels in the campaign. Out of all of them, three of them had you backtracking through certain parts of earlier levels. Two Betrayals had you going backwards through the second half of Assault on the Control Room, plus some added places that were only accessable via Banshee. Keyes had you backtracking through the second half of Truth and Reconsiliation, with an added section on the on the ground. The Maw had you going through some portion of the first level, plus an added romp through the reactor room and an escape in a Warthog.
What really bothered me, and the reviewer, however, was not the fact that one backtracked so much. The situations in each of the levels had changed that it made it a quite unique experience, even going backwards. My problem was that the architecture in general was repetative, and made it waaaay too easy to get lost. There were literelly dozens of rooms in many of the maps that just looked the same, or at least very very similar. Only Halo and the Silent Cartogripher seemed to provide any sort of real variation. (And The Silent Cartogripher is also avalable in the Halo PC demo, along with Blood Gulch CTF for multiplayer, so if you really want a good taste left in your mouth with Halo, I suggest you play the PC Demo)
This was remidied quite a bit in Halo 2, where there were lots of varying rooms and rarely saw the amount of repitition that you saw in Halo 1. Sure, some of it was still there in H2 (The convinant homeworld comes to mind), but not nearly as much.
Other than that, Halo 1 (and 2 for that matter) arent really that much more repetative than any other good first person shooter. The only FPS that I remember with more variety off the top of my head is Half Life 2.
To adress the parent, I don't really see how you could say the reviewer is a fanboy if he essentially agrees with you. I've also met people who don't really care about the repetative levels, so he was probably putting it a little more delicately than you would have.
And about the guns? What exactly did you expect from the weapons loadout?
I bought an Xbox..... .....
....
I am supporting microsoft......
so what
They're just as much of a gamer as you and I. And they seem to be the reason that the Playstation 2 is dominating this generation.
In my fantasy world, Microsoft would have bought Nintendo (Impossible until the old leader of Nintendo is dead and six feet under), and their combined might might have been enough to drive out the Sony/EA blight on console gaming, or at least force them to up their standards.
Microsoft and Nintendo both make some kickass first party games in lots of different genres, not to mention the Xbox getting the creative end of SEGA's stick with Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future and Gunvalkyrie. And most third parties seem to be decent on X-box, while the offerings seem to be paltry on Gamecube's platform.
Rockstar, Square, Polyphony and EA seem to be the only things that seem to keep the PS2 on top as far as I've seen, and the first two seem to at least want to branch out.
Anyway, these were just random ramblings by a guy who owns all three consoles, but only seems to play his Xbox, his friends Gamecube and his PC anymore.
No, I love it and use it as my primary client, it's just that it just doesnt feel as responsive to me as native Windows programs.
Try any build of X-Chat for Windows (preferably not the 'official' one maintained by zed, as that has turned shareware. Legal? Probably not, but that's another discussion.). Doesn't feel anywhere near as clean as a native windows app
No, then they'll blame things on the bots.
"Holy shit, no huuman player could have gotten that headshot, the bots must have been cheating!!!11111"
Honestly, bots can't really compare to a good true online experience, especially in team based games. Howeveer, like you said, they're probably the next best thing.
I wonder if the behavior of the bots will change based on radio communication. "Team, fall back", "Roger That" That might be an intuitive way to 'control' your teammates without having to go through a seporate bot commands menu.
But in the name of all that is holy, I hope that bots are only for local servers and not playable on the internet. Or if they do, have a 'hasbots' dmflag that one can filter out. I can't tell you how many times I found a server that was playing my favorite Q3A map only to find out that it was filled with bots.
Halo has only been out for around 3.
Unless you are implying that all FPS games are alike, in which case I then ask you how many FPS's do you have on your computer. If you are one of those guys who still plays Doom and ONLY Doom after all these years, my hat is off to you (Hell, I still play it a ton), but I think chances are that you've picked up a few more since then. Give Halo 2 a try. If you look past the hype, you'll find a very solid game beneath it, with very unique (and excillent, in my opinion) multiplayer. That's what is nice about FPS's, there are so many things you can change about weapon loadout, gameplay mechanics, movement physics and level design that can deliver two totally different experiences.
As for Crimson Skies, it almost like a totally a different game when played online. Kinda like mechassault, the single player was forgettable but the multi-player was very very awesome. If you didn't find DOA3 to be very furfilling by yourself, DOA Ultimate is now out, and from what I hear it has fantastic online play.
Tao Feng and Shenmue II, yeah I didn't like them either. Same with DoA: XBV. And although I loved Panzer Dragoon Orta, I can understand why someone who doesn't like rail shooters wouldn't like it.
There are also a ton of other games out there too. Project Gotham 2 is a fantastic racing game with controls that just 'feel right'. Not arcadey to the point of Mario Kart, not simulation to the point of Gran Turismo, it just feels right. Rainbow Six is also a pretty neat game that plays similarly to counterstrike in team adversial game modes. Ninja Gaiden, on the other hand, frustrated the hell out of me, but I've heard rave reviews about it from others.
Also in most cases (i.e., unless you enjoy Electronic Arts games), you're getting the best ports out of all three of the systems. This goes double for the Grand Theft Auto, after playing Vice City on Xbox, I could hardly play San Andreas on PS2, it just looked terrible by comparison and the controls didn't feel right. SSX3 is also a dream to play on the Xbox (aside from a lone framerate drop in the city level).
(I did, by the way, play the game. Quite a bit, a friend of mine had it)
Plus there are active communities of people who play Doom 2. Although, pureists still prefer to LAN doom2.exe, for a quick Doom 2 internet fix, you can use one of the many internet-centric source ports.
The most popular one is ZDaemon at http://www.zdaemon.org and is probably the best place to start, however it's running on top of an old version of ZDoom, and lacks some of the features that other source ports use. It is open source, however the next version will close parts of the code off to prevent cheaters. Chat room is at irc.freenode.net channel #zdaemon
Skulltag, at http://www.skulltag.com is the second most popular, which means that hardly anyone plays it. It uses a more current ZDoom as its base, though, and it does have loads more game modes than ZDaemon. The next version will contain great bots and lots of bugfixes for Oldschool mode to make it more like doom2.exe. It is 100% closed source, but the one person maintaining the code does a bang up job of it, and shouldn't be discounted. It has a chatroom at irc.oftc.net channel #skulltag if you are interested in playing a game.
There is also a doom playing service called Doom Connector found at http://www.codeimp.com, which allows you to use any internet ready source port you wish (ZDaemon, Skulltag,vanilla ZDoom, Doom Legacy, and more) , plus adds extra features (chat rooms). If you just want to play ZDaemon and Skulltag and don't want the extra fluff, you can use Internet Doom Explorer located at http://nfdfn.jinr.ru/~bond/csdoom/ to browse servers.
Also, integrated into ZDaemon's server browser, IDE and Doom Connector is a neat little program called GETWAD. If you do not have a certain map that is required to play on a server, it will search through all major doom map repositories and find it, download it via HTTP/FTP, and unpack it into your map directory, AUTOMATICALLY. Kinda like Steam's download map from URL, but requires no server input. (It will not however, find doom.wad, doom2.wad, plutonia.wad, tnt.wad or any other of the resources associated with the store bought games, but you can get all of them for real cheap, just pick up a copy of Doom Collector's Edition or find your old doom or doom2 diskettes and update your version of doom(2) to 1.9.)
I'm starting to appriciatre reading at -1. Seriously, if you don't want to get locked out of your games, don't pirate. I don't see what the big issue is here.
For the record, at this particular moment in time, 12:15 EST on a Friday night, here are teh stats from both major contenders...
Number of people playing Halo 2: 91,837
(source: Bungie.net statistics)
Number of people playing Counter Strike: 77,405
(source: Steampowered.com statistucs)
I was actually quite surprised. I thought that CS players would outnumber Halo 2 players. However, if you take into account the other two versions of Counterstrike (CZ and Source), that adds about 30K extra players, putting it ahead of Halo 2.
Casual Halo 2 and Counter-strike player here. I take no sides.
Not only that, but they overheat pretty quickly from what I hear. A friend of mine had one and his died within a week of purchase.
"lol ps2 is flat" is the new "lol xbox is huge"
Major OOPS. Online play is one of the major reasons I play my Xbox a hell of a lot more than my Gamecube.
Take off your god forsaken tinfoil hat. There WILL be a legal way to play Half Life 2 when or if Steam shuts down, mark my works.
I hope not. If a popular title is delayed, it probably was delayed for a good reason.
Quit giving Xbox fans a bad name
Thank you for actually having a clue. *tips hat*
There are no plans for single player DLC, and there have been no decided-on schedule for DLC yet.
And with your defenition, almost every other PC game is "incomplete' because of Downloadable Content.
Opera handles everything the way I like it out of the box, without needing to rely on plugins.
Sony repairs theirs for free.
I'm simply playing devils advocate here, I love my Xbox, but this is rather stupid of Microsoft to refuse to replace defective drives for a well known defect like their compeditors are doing.
Of course, if you know what you're doing, you can replace the DVD drive yourself.
Your guess is the activation servers will be up for years to come? I sure am glad you know what the fuck you're talking about. This sets a bad precedent and I find it abhorrent that people like yourself will apparently accept your already-paid-for, spoon-fed content on someone else's terms, rather than yours.
What if Microsoft's authentication servers go down. No more Windows XP. (insert windows troll here)
I'll take Steam over Starforce any day, thank you. I know, in the ideal world we wouldn't have copy protection, period, but this isn't that ideal world, and to me, a simple internet authentication is a lot better than the alternatives.
Apples and Oranges. Seriously.
I am now anxiously waiting to pick up my preorder of Halo 2. Beyond anxious. This is seriously the most anxious I've been for a games release, EVER.
Please don't generalize me.
And by the way, the port of Halo to the PC had so much potential, but Gearbox fucking blew it. Probably is the reason why Bungie does not have an interest in porting Halo 2 to the PC or Mac
You hit the nail on the head with all but the last point. Without Microsoft, Halo, and therefore Halo 2 would not exist, as it was really close to being canned.