First Impressions of Halo 3 83
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."
Nothing for you to see here. Move along. (Score:1, Flamebait)
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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 a
Nothing to see? How about a hot, hot pussy? (Score:4, Funny)
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w3rd [kotaku.com]
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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 n
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Wrong URL? (Score:1)
WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Maybe he's a shill for Microsoft? (Score:2)
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly. I think the first one was called "Marathon". Shame those guys aren't making games anymore.
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(of course, this is coming from a person who liked the sequels to the Matrix--I'm just showing an example that will convince the majority of
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Oh, there was--wait, no.
Bottom line is that there just haven't been many. It's entirely possible that Halo was the first substance-filled FPS he played.
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I do like Halo
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Does Halo have the same depth as Marathon? No. But it has a cohesive story that isn't horribly cliche, and there is enough background developed to keep everything anchored. Plus, Bungie is really good at subtly, and they cram a lot of plot hints and details that many players completely overlook. (The same could be said for Half Life)
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Half-Life, System Shock, Deus Ex and Thief come to mind.
The problem with Halo is that the level design is ridiculously repetitive, and that really kills the game. After playing the aforementioned games, Halo seemed really lame.
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What do firearms have to do with it? You spend half your time in Thief shooting various kinds of things with various kinds of arrow. I'd say a first person game where you spend a lot of time shooting could fairly be described as a first-person shooter.
Besides, if a fire arrow isn't a firearm, I'd like to know what is.
Indeed (Score:2)
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.'
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Halo was fun, it was fluid and it was a good time at a party. The story was good for an FPS and it has a fairly well thought out plot. It Did have substance, so does HL, SS, SS2,Deus Ex, so do enumerable games in the genre. Why the hell do we have to act l
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Move on...and don't be a music snob.
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Um.... because the guy in TFA was the one who said that Halo was the first FPS he's played with 'substance', and this is a place to discuss the content and merits of the article? And because personally, I strongly dislike the whole 'console
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Eventually the console and "PC" will be dead, we will have moved onto another computing paradigm. I am an avid PC gamer, I enjoy mapping in Source and I used to like mapping in goldsrc. I hate CS with a burning passion. After 2 good years of playing it I got sick of it, it lost all its fun. Still fun for a quick lan match, but i think people should just move on.
I used to run a q3 or q2 dedicated server at my HS. We didn't do work in the l
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If you were talking about NetHack, you'd probably get lynched around here.
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Consol fps games are a different experience due to being a LAN in the box for 4+ players, as was said above. Internet gaming is cool, but I didn't know the goodness of LAN play until I went to college and blew someone's head off in unreal, only to hear "FUCK" shouted down the hall. What great feedback that was.
I hated bond at first, controls sucked, graphics sucked, the little tiny box in the corner of my scren sucked. But I kept at it, and by the end of the year 0
Not always... (Score:2)
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Um, it sounds like you're describing how to make a four-player
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This is surely easier than finding space in your abode to stick 16 pc's.
Or maybe.... (Score:2)
I don't see anywhere where he indicates that it was the first shooter EVER with some substance.
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Luke is a hard hitting whiner, I actually like it - he bitches on microtransactions and generally tries to get to the bottom of things.
That being said, one thing I can't agree with is his love for Halo, he's most definately a Halo fanboy.
As far as I'm concerned the game was ok, but is likely one of the most over-rated games of all time.
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But yeah, he is probably just a total fanboy. They seem to go hand in hand. If Halo is the first FPS/Deathmatch game you've ever played, you seem to come away thinking it's the best thing since sliced bread and you refuse to listen to any opposing opinion. Even when it's been done better many times prior and many times since, and even on it's own merits the game is very poor, especially single player. And it's not that hard to get MP right, and co-
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See also: all those people who thought Golden Eye was a good game!
It's the Septmeber that never ended for video games. Thanks, Microsoft and Sony.
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I like Halo.
I had more fun with H
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That's cool though, you fit right here in the compartment with me
Thanks for reminding me about Descent.. man, the times we used to stay at work till 10 at night playing that.. it's the game that showed me how much fun lan gaming is. I still have my 3d orb buried in a box somewhere, along with all my old thrustmaster joysticks and
Amen! (Score:2)
laiden? (Score:2)
But will there be split screen? (Score:2)
Head Like a Hole (Score:2)
Why did Bungie have to copy the names of Nine Inch Nails records? Halo 3 is the Head Like a Hole maxi-single [wikipedia.org].
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Re:Microsoft Is In Trouble With Halo As 360 Savior (Score:4, Insightful)
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Good! I'd rather have immersive huge-scale environments that merely look good rather than small environments that sacrifice gameplay potential to add a little extra smoothness to the zillion+ triangles already being pushed out by the GPU.
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I can't do the math, perhaps someone else can but what is 1280x720 in memory size? for the EDRAM to be able to re-sample it?
If I recall 1280x720 is ever so slightly over (12mb or something) so they can't AA the scene in a single pass, kind of making it pointless
That being said, they could always pull the cheap PGR3 trick and simply render at a lower resolution then use the TV chip to upsample it >:(
I have to agree. Halo does have more substance... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I have to agree. Halo does have more substance. (Score:2)
Fucking Halo...
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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 m
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I just hope.. (Score:1)
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IMHO, Halo brought PC game tech to the console (Score:1)
No "insert game here"? (Score:2, Insightful)
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???