Halo series

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So the good news is that it's really cheap and easy to find copies of Halo on the PC. However, I have no idea if it runs on Windows 10 or not.

I really want to play SPV3, though, so I need to play a legitimate copy of the game.

[Mustang]

Here is a really good example of how good Halo: Reach's level design is.

Hot damn. I've never been a fan of speedrun's whatsoever, but this ish right here (inner Katt Williams voice..). I swear, in a course of a week, I watched all of that guy's Halo runs and they ignited a little spark that makes me want to start playing Halo again. Not do any attempts at speedruns or insane difficult stuff, but just enjoy the campaign again (considering my Xbox 360 has been put away for about a year now).

I've even been tempted to get an Xbox 1 just for the Master Chief collection. I haven't decided yet, but we'll see.

[Foggle]

I haven't played much of 343's Halo games, but this video does a good job of showing how different their design decisions are from Bungie's. Think some of you might find it illuminating.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Hokiebird also did a video about a year ago detailing why Halo 4 is a mechanically inferior game to the previous installments. The Act Man is currently doing a series of videos on why Halo 5 is so atrocious.

Say what you want about the Halo franchise as a whole, but playing all of these games makes it absolutely undeniable that Bungie put a lot of love, care, and passion into the games that they made. That's not to say that they didn't screw up at times, and the level of quality was hardly consistent, but I always still felt that there was at least some charm to any Halo game developed under Bungue that made it worth playing at least once. On the other hand, I feel like 343i never really got what worked about Halo in the first place. I'm not accusing them of being lazy developers or not having any talented programmers among them (hell, they even have some Ex-Bungie employees over there), but they clearly don't have any real feelings for what they are making. Sure, they can claim to be huge Halo fans in interviews, but as the video that Foggle linked to clearly points out, their priorities couldn't be more off. They are far more concerned about making a game that they think will please a modern crowd as opposed to making a game that will please themselves as gamers first and foremost; the latter of which is how Bungie always approached the development of these games, and it really shows.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I found this interesting list of every Halo level from the original up to Halo 4 ranked from worst to best: http://screenfellows.com/2015/10/every-halo-campaign-level-ranked/

Regardless of how you feel about Halo, I think that it's pretty undeniable that it does a good job of varying up its levels and giving you some truly great gameplay experiences (as well as a few awful ones).

As for the list, I agree with about half of it and either mildly or greatly disagree with parts of the other half. But in general it's still pretty solid. That said, Halo 2 and 4 get a bit too much praise for my taste, whereas Reach gets a bit underrated here (personally, I would've ranked ONI Sword Base in tge top 10 and Exodus in the top 5). But he does get a lot of worthy choices in his top 10 as well.

Most of his ODST rankings are pretty spot-on, but he ranks Kizingo Boulevard way too low. That's a really fun level, and easily should have been in the top 30, IMO.

As for his number one pick, while it's not my personal favorite level (still a top 5 for sure, though), it is undeniably the best designed one that Bungie has ever put out. Say what you want about Halo 3 (I certainly have my issues with it), but both The Ark and The Covenant on Legendary are two of the best segments of FPS gaming that I've ever experienced. So, those definitely deserve their spots.

I don't imagine that anyone would disagree with The Library and Cortana being the two worst levels in the entire franchise.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, I'm resurrecting this thread since I've been on a huge Halo kick lately. I've been replaying all of the campaign modes, and even finally got around to playing Halo 5 for the first time (specifically only the campaign mode) and I'm almost done with Halo: Infinite's campaign mode as well.

The thing is, my opinions on Halo have changed a lot since I grew up with it as a kid. I grew up playing the hell out of the first game with my older brother and our friends and absolutely loved it. Was initially disappointed by Halo 2's campaign mode and didn't have XBOX Live at the time so couldn't really experience it's multiplayer outside of occasional couch sections (which were infrequent since this was during the period of time my brother had mostly stopped gaming). I then remember being lukewarm on Halo 3's campaign mode but loving it's multiplayer. That said, around that time I kind of jumped on the bandwagon and somewhat turned on Halo just because I saw a lot of other people doing it and thought that I was just supposed to feel that way. After a bunch of replays and also spending a lot more time with the multiplayer in the MCC, I have to say that I was really fucking stupid back then. It's funny because most of the naysayers of this franchise have moved onto complaining about other shit since it's not the juggernaut of popularity that it once was and therefore isn't that big of a target anymore. However the devoted fans who have remained really do have a strong community to this day, and even just in terms of the singleplayer, these have to be some of the most replayed games in history. People are still attempting new and crazy challenge runs of every single game to this day (the Halo 2 Deathless LASO challenge literally just got completed a week ago and it was INSANE).

Anyways, I do actually think that Halo 3 deserves a lot of it's praise in retrospect, while still having my own issues with it. The core gameplay is phenomenal. It's hard to do it justice if you haven't actually played it enough, but the actual feel of the mechanics and gunplay is pretty unparalleled when you fall into the game's rhythm. My issue has more to do with some of the more lackluster campaign levels (Cortana is still fucking awful all of these years later), but on Heroic or Legendary difficulty, levels like The Ark and The Covenant are not only peak Halo, but also some of the best bits of FPS game design that I have ever seen.

I also like how it's not just considered "good for a console FPS" by a lot of people these days. I always hated people trying to attach that detractor to it. While mouse and keyboard is of course superior to a gamepad, and people saw aim-assist as some casual-friendly garbage, I think a lot of people really failed to understand that the game was also designed around this. Bungie knew that they would have to compromise on traditional aiming mechanics so they designed the entire gameplay loop around that fact, much like how Mikami made RE4 with the idea that you couldn't move and shoot at the same time in a way that worked, but people still complain about it anyways without really thinking about if it works well for the game or not. Since aiming with a gamepad ensures that it is much easier to hit your mark, the campaign mode ends up being more about finding a balance between the different weapon combos you can use and outflanking your enemies on higher difficulties rather than just gunning them down with power weapons. The big open areas and multiple different options that the game gives you in most scenarios means that there are tons of different ways that you can approach almost any given situation. It's funny since despite being lumped in with the big AAA FPS games that get churned out by big studios every year, Halo during the Bungie era felt like the complete antithesis to the more cinematic and constricted designs of many of those other games that released during this time. On the multiplayer side of things, the skill comes more from being able to out-strafe your enemies and having a key understanding of the map layout rather than having the best twitch reflexes.

Anwyays, Halo 4 I remember not liking when I first played it, but I literally haven't touched it since 2012, so I will eventually get around to replaying it to see how it holds up. As for Halo 5....yeah, it was just as bad as everyone says (again, only referring to the campaign mode, here). Perhaps it's better to say that it feels more annoying than outright bad. Like, the core mechanics are still there, but the forced squad-based mechanics make it feel like they are trying to turn the game into Gears of War, which just leads to so much frustration since the game isn't balanced around you doing things solo like the other games were, but you also have to deal with brain-dead AI on your side if you don't have any friends to play with, so you are just put into numerous situations in which you being screwed over by the whims of whether your computer-controlled partners want to actually be of any actual service to you or not.

Halo: Infinite is....interesting. I'm actually not going to post any of my thoughts on it just yet, since I haven't beaten the campaign mode at this point and haven't even unlocked ranked battles in multiplayer yet. I have both positive and negative thoughts on it so far, and you may find it surprising what parts of it I like and which things I don't, but I'll keep that for another day when I've had enough time sunk into the game to really grasp how I feel about it.

Overall, though, this is definitely a franchise that I love for the games it had when it was at it's peak. And don't get me wrong, I'm by no means a Bungie-stan. They have had their issues, and while I haven't played Destiny, hearing what's been going on with that franchise leads me to realize that even Bungie isn't immune to falling into shady business practices when under the thumb of a greedy corporate parent company to push for it.

Oh and while it's not really relevant to this topic, I thought I might as well just post that I did actually try watching the live-action Halo TV series, and it is in fact ass. That is all I'll probably ever have to say about that.