Halo series

[Spark Of Spirit]

Halo freaks tend to dislike reach (I'm guessing for the multiplayer), but the single player is the best since the original Halo. If I had to rank the Halo campaigns it would be:

Halo
Halo Reach
Halo ODST
...
Halo 3
Halo 2

As for Halo 4, if it's a corridor shooter I'm not interested. Halo ceasing to be Halo is not something I'm interested in playing.

[Foggle]

What would you call a "corridor shooter?" A good portion of Halo 1 featured what I'd consider corridor shooting. 2, 3, and ODST were much more open, iirc.

[Spark Of Spirit]

What would you call a "corridor shooter?" A good portion of Halo 1 featured what I'd consider corridor shooting. 2, 3, and ODST were much more open, iirc.

I'm not referring to shooting in corridors (Doom is not a "corridor shooter") I mean in terms of gameplay you being funneled along a corridor and unable to access combat situations that way you want to or tackle objectives the way you want to. Shooters are getting worse and worse at letting the player do what they want in any given level and are more about pushing them down a corridor that they want.

Halo 1 has a lot of moments when you can choose what way you want to approach a combat situation. Even in the corridors you can usually go up other hallways and find hidden weapons. In a lot of modern games you wouldn't even have that option.

[Foggle]

I'm sure it'll be fine. 343 is made up of ex-Bungie employees, isn't it?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Halo freaks tend to dislike reach (I'm guessing for the multiplayer), but the single player is the best since the original Halo.

I've noticed this as well. On the multiplayer front I can understand. I'm not a huge fan of multiplayer, but I prefer Halo 3's multiplayer (its not like Reach's MP is bad or anything, though). In terms of the campaign mode, though, I just don't understand how they can complain about it. Then again, they seem to care more about story and shit that I honestly never cared about in Halo games to begin with. So they can just go shove their opinions up their asses for all I care. I think Halo Reach's campaign mode is on par with the original (having played both Reach and Anniversary back to back).

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

What would you call a "corridor shooter?" A good portion of Halo 1 featured what I'd consider corridor shooting. 2, 3, and ODST were much more open, iirc.

Desensitized already explained this well, but to add to that, its not a corridor shooter in the same way that the original F.E.A.R. is not a corridor shooter. Sure, you may be going through some enclosed environments, but that doesn't stop you from utilizing the environments to your personal advantage and generally coming up with multiple different strategies to overcome various situations. I also like how Halo will actually occasionally reward you for deviating from the main path a little bit, or even trying to "break" the game. That is to say, it allows you to do things that you're not really supposed to, but in a way you kind of are since Bungie clearly knows that players want to experiment with the levels as much as possible. For instance, some classic examples are like how you can take a shortcut in Assault on the Control Room by taking out an Elite before he gets to his Banshee and snagging it for yourself and using it to fly to the main control room (that alone shaves off a good 20-30 minutes of the level), and its just fun to be able to play through the game and find out that you can do things like that. Also, its a ton of fun to take vehicles into areas that you're not supposed to have them. Aside from making later fights easier, it just feels really fun and rewarding to do.

Of course, Halo does have plenty of open areas for you to really experience the game at its fullest, whereas the typical CoD clones have nothing of the sort in favor of stringing you along more tightly scripted set-piece events. A good example of how Halo gives you an entire "sandbox" of sorts to completely play in your own style is the last area from the level Exodus in Halo: Reach. I swear that every time I replay that level (and I replay it a lot), I ALWAYS find a completely different way to play through that section. That may honestly be my favorite part of the game, since its both challenging (unless you just skip all of the enemies) and full of strategy.

[Foggle]

See, all this time I thought Doom, F.E.A.R., and to a lesser extent Halo were corridor shooters. I guess I understand better what people mean when they use that term derogatorily now. The more you know.

For instance, some classic examples are like how you can take a shortcut in Assault on the Control Room by taking out an Elite before he gets to his Banshee and snagging it for yourself and using it to fly to the main control room

Haha, yessss! I love doing that.

[Spark Of Spirit]

It's not even that I hate them, I still think Modern Warfare 1 is about as good as those types of games can get, just that they make the developer's job easier when they force players to play the way they want through such an absurd degree.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, at least 1 good piece of news that I've heard about Halo 4 is that it has been confirmed that that there will be no Flood in the game. That's a damn good thing to hear.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I'm glad they've been written out. Hopefully they never reappear again.

[Foggle]

So, at least 1 good piece of news that I've heard about Halo 4 is that it has been confirmed that that there will be no Flood in the game. That's a damn good thing to hear.

I haven't really heard anything about Halo 4 that makes it sound worse than the previous games. Except for the fact that there will be no PC version.

Good to hear that there'll be no Flood, though.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

To be honest I haven't kept up much with the news regarding Halo 4, and I have actually tried to get more interested in this game, but I really do feel that I was content with Reach being the last game in the series. Personally it gave me almost everything I wanted from a Halo game, and the stuff that I didn't get was minor at best. Its the only Halo game past the original that I feel actually improved upon its core gameplay concepts.

As for Halo 4, I've only heard some people say that it sounds like its becoming more like CoD, but to be fair I think this is more in regards to its multiplayer than its campaign mode, which I haven't heard much about period. I could live with the MP getting the CoD treatment, though to be honest I wouldn't really like that either since I do at least find the MP of Bungie's Halo games to be fun, and they are a lot more appealing to me than CoD's MP which I just couldn't ever get into, personally.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I've been playing Halo Anniversary again recently, and I picked up where I last left off on my run-through of the Campaign mode on Heroic difficulty. I have to say that for the most part, the game still holds up remarkably well, and there are a lot of things from this game that I sorely missed in the sequels and even in Halo: Reach, such as the chain reaction grenade explosions and having more level detours allowing you to speed-run through entire sections of a level that you didn't like having to deal with.

Really, though, I just love the sense of strategy to the game. Playing through the section of the Covenant ship, Truth and Reconciliation (which is also the name of the level) forced you to use Covenant weapons when you ran out of you're typical marine weapons, but this also allowed me to experiment with different strategies and find the best uses of each Covenant weapon that I would have otherwise ignored had the game not structured a level based around a Covenant environment. This of course helped me formulate future strategies in later parts of the game that I would have been oblivious to had I not experimented with the rest of the arsenal of weapons in the game.

That said, there is one part of the level that I absolutely detest, and its the escort mission at the end of the level with Captain Keyes. Thankfully its short, but its so damn frustrating and aggravating if you play the game by yourself on Heroic or Legendary. The AI for your marines is insanely incompetent. They will frequently get in your way and often-times you will accidentally take them down by having them enter your line of fire. Captain Keyes himself does this and its insanely frustrating since you lose the mission if he dies, and he dies more often than I do. The mission would actually be actively easier if the marines did not try to help you fight, but instead just acted as meat-shields for Captain Keyes and maybe provided support fire for any enemies that managed to slip behind you and get closer to Captain Keyes. Since they all try to rush the enemies like idiots, if forces me as a player to stay ahead of them and play in a very rushed manner, when I typically like to be patient and use strategy, which of course leads me to many unnecessary deaths or if I'm lucky I'll only just lose a huge chunk of my health due to playing so recklessly. This was the only escort mission to ever appear in ANY Halo game in the entire franchise, and for good reason. Its just so damn frustrating and not at all fun to play through.

Anwyays, I really do think that the first half of this game is the best Halo has ever been. I actually don't mind the Flood entirely, but they are only ever fun to fight when you aren't forced to fight them alone in a level, which is why I like Two Betrayals, Keyes, and The Maw since those levels have the Covenant and the flood fighting among each other as well as fighting you.

Overall, though, I do think that Reach probably has the series's best campaign mode since its the most consistent and there aren't any levels in the game that I downright dread playing or even any enemies that I dread fighting (except for maybe the Drones/Buggers, but they occur so infrequently in the game that you barely even notice them).

[Foggle]

Yeah, Halo's campaign is still good. It's like Half-Life and F.E.A.R; it doesn't really age at all.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Yeah, what was good about the game when it came out is still good today because it was designed really well and is really fun to play. And, what's bad about the game today isn't bad because the game has aged, but because it sucked to begin with....which pretty much sums up The Library as a whole.