Bungie Celebrates 2-Year Anniversary Of Halo Release 93
Thanks to Bungie.net for their feature commemorating the second anniversary of Halo's Xbox debut. The piece starts: "What started life as a pseudo real-time-strategy game for the Apple Mac has turned into the number-one-selling Xbox game of all time and a driving force behind much of the console's overall success", and goes on to elicit Ed Fries of Microsoft's remembrances of the scary moments ("Our first E3 press event went REALLY bad. The Xbox didn't even power up. Halo was the grand finale and we had some serious framerate issues and hiccups"), and the Bungie developers, fans and media's favorite anecdotes ("Halo rage is a beautiful thing. My plaster walls are free from damage now, but the amount of controllers I go through is atrocious.")
Re:Just one question... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ugh (Score:2, Informative)
It's the little things. The huge variations created simply by approaching a fight from the other side, or using different weapons. The complete disregard for the Doom mentality that's plagued PC shooters since forever (weapon x is better than weapon x-1! your health starts at 100 and is chipped away tediously bullet by bullet!) in favour of a far more revolutionary and interesting system (each weapon is equally good, and the tremendous differences between them create wonderful interplay between you and the enemies, depending on what you're equipped with. Your shield recharges, so you're forced to make use of every scrap of cover that's around, and the level designers clearly realised this from the outset). The stunning, unpredictable AI. It's genuinely one of the most important games ever made, but no-one can stop shouting "console-selling mediocrity" and look at the big picture, save a few (hence the vitriolic reaction from most corners when Edge magazine rated it 10/10).