Halo 3 - The Final Word 106
In anticipation of Halo 3's release later this month, EGM and the folks at 1up have been creating a veritable altar to the Halo deities over at the website. This edifice has tons of information on the two previous Halo games, commentary from numerous Halo-literate folks on the subject, as well as weightier articles like a preview of the co-op mode (four players, mind), a primer on the story if you've missed something, and a breakdown of the good and bad in Halo 3 . Yes, there are even some things they don't like about the game. From the co-op breakdown: "The Achievements offered tantalizing hints of the game's structure, features and techniques, a welcome morsel of information for the faithful to contemplate and speculate about. The co-op news was greeted with even more warmth, because it put to rest ill-founded rumors that Bungie was planning to deliver a half-completed game. On the contrary; up to four players will be able to take control of the Master Chief, the Arbiter and two Elite warriors, N'tho 'Sraom and Usze 'Taham. (Don't bother trying to pronounce their names; just appreciate the promise of joining up with three friends to conquer the game.) And somewhere in the middle, these two topics are connected by something even more intriguing. Halo's co-op game and its Gamerscore-grinding intersect at a point enigmatically referred to in the game's Achievements as the 'Meta-game.'"
3? (Score:2, Funny)
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The Final Word on Halo... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I enjoyed cliches so I bought some of the novels. They're dreck. gr. 10 reading level, simple exposition, cardboard characters. basically typical of the cheap pulp sci-fi fare. It's a well made games and a sort of interesting rehash of old storyline so I'd play it and like it b
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Halo multiplayer is about the social aspect. While co-op isn't new by any stretch of the imagination, you couldn't before sit down with a friend in front of the TV and play it. Not unless he stuffs his machine in the trunk and drives it over to your place anyway. I hate to generalize, but if you're a lone gamer type, you won't enjoy Halo much at all. It's a game that truly shines when you have multiple people over and the fragging gets intense, which you simply cannot do in the PC world.
To add to that, it
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What is in Halo that you cannot get from playing online with Counter Strike, Half Life, Day of Defeat, or America's Army?
If you say vehicles... I will say Unreal Tournament.
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The ability to get a group of friends together and have people take turns playing their own custom variants without someone having to sit and change settings on the server each time. And even creating those variants on the fly.
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If you say vehicles... I will say Unreal Tournament.
The vehicles in UT (in UT2k4 at least) are ok, but not as good as the ones in Halo. The tank is about the same, the flying vehicle is ok in either game (although I don't use Banshees, ever), the Manta is probably slightly better than the Ghost, but the Warthog equivalent is a hell of a lot worse. Every time I play that game, I want to shoot the guy who came up with the idea that steering should be separate from look, it's aggravating... especially considering no other vehicles in UT do it that way.
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What is in Halo that you cannot get from playing online with Counter Strike, Half Life, Day of Defeat, or America's Army?
Being in the same room as your opponent. If you're someone who values hanging out with his friends as much as gaming in and of itself, this is a very huge bonus indeed. I don't play Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and other such PC multiplayer games for the same reason I don't play Halo on Xbox Live - the legions of smacktards who are simply no fun to play with. I do, however, relish an opportunity to sit down with my friends and kill each other, trash-talking the whole way.
Yes, you can accomplish sort o
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dude... get a clue!
Cant do in the PC world? me and my friends get together EVERY saturday for a LAN, we've been doing it for the past 10 YEARS!!! We dont have to lug 4 TVs around to get a decent gameplay experience (cause everyone know split screen is just THE greatest *sniggers*)
seriously man... dont come spouting that console babble here... your lible to get (as they say in the 1337 PC gaming circles) PWNT!
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Can you do it with no equipment and one pc? Split screen on my little 47 inch tv is fine by me.
Here is the difference between PC gamers and Console gamers:
4 Gamming Class PCs (3,000 + total), networking cable (50+), router (50+), 4 legal copies of the game (100 +) = 3200 +
1 console (350 +), 1 tv (800 +), 1 game (60), 4 controllers (120+ (one comes with the console)) = 1330 +
Main reason I like console gaming is due to the hardware race involved with PCs. I decided to give up having to spend console level
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i havnt upgraded my PC in 2 years, guess what... still plays Bioshock without a hitch and high resolution and nearly maxed settings... i'm guessing it looks beter than its console counter part. The best part- i'm a mid range buyer... i'm only using an AMD 4800+, 2gb ram and an ATI 1900xtx, total price for me to build the machine... $1
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How much have you have spent in 6 years? By your numbers, has it been a new computer every 2 years? I have spent 1,500 across 6 years.
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http://linuxgazette.net/124/smith.html [linuxgazette.net]
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I used to be a huge LAN gamer myself, but eventually the hassle of shoving a tower, monitor, keyboard, mice, etc, into your trunk (making sure they don't get jostled around TOO much) and driving it all over to someone's place is simply too much to do often. As compared to console gaming, where you just plug in 4 controllers (worst case scenario everyone brings their own, but I've never had that problem) and off you go.
Console LANs are fun, 16 player Halo in the same room with 4 TVs is something else. But
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definitely should never be in any Top 10 games of all time list. Anywhere.
I guess there's no room for opinions, eh? The fact that you don't like some of the game's elements doesn't mean that no one should. Call me a Halo fanboy (well, you already did in a way), but I DO think the game's story is breathtaking. No FPS, certainly has delivered anything close to that level of amazing plot which keeps me hanging on to see what happens next. Not a ton of RPGs, which are all about story, deliver a story as good as Halo's.
Mind you, I don't think everything about Halo is great. It's no
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Hell, I don't even own either generation of Xbox, so what little point you may have had completely falls apart there.
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The only redeeming quality I've seen to the Halo series is its use as a multiplayer game with a bunch of friends. I find it's multiplayer to be very well-balanced and very fun. The single-player campaigns though....somehow they were just missi
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I really hate doing this whole quote and respond shit, but you seem to need it.
No FPS, certainly has delivered anything close to that level of amazing plot which keeps me hanging on to see what happens next. Not a ton of RPGs, which are all about story, deliver a story as good as Halo's.
What plot? I have played both Halo & Halo II... the plot is so weak that I don't actually think anyone wrote the plot, it was mo
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Opinion is one thing, but claiming that something has a plot when it clearly doesn't, claiming that a game that has survived for years is overrated is a load of bullshit.
No, what you just said is bullshit. See, I'm entitled to think whatever I want to think, and I assure you (although I obviously can't prove it) that this IS my honest opinion. No fanboyism, nothing else. You want to call it bullshit, fine, that's your right. But in the end, you can't prove it. Hell, you can't even prove that Half-Life is good, or that Halo is bad. There is no such thing as an objective definition of quality.
Halflife is one of the most popular games of all times for good reasons... mods...
That's not a valid reason at all. Judge the game, not stuff the game is modded to
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So, you didn't like it - others do.
Personally, I've had more game time playing Halo and Halo 2 than any other game - replaying the single player mode every now and then and playing against friends or online.
It'd definitely go in my Top 10 Most Played list, but perhaps not in other lists (e.g., will never forget the story of Deus Ex, and always loved the feel of Q3A).
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But thanks AC.
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Until Halo, anyone who played games online or off was a computer/gamer dork. That's how the rest of the world viewed gamers. Somehow people realized it was more fun playing the games than it was making fun of the gamers, and things switched. Halo was the first multiplayer game that was socially acceptable to play. And since it was the masses first, of course they are going to latch onto it and proclaim it king.
Quake.. Doom.. Unreal.. HL1/CS.. even G
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How old are you, log0n? I see the incredibly low Slashdot ID. Surely you're old enough to remember back before arcades became dark rooms full of upright video cabinets. When I was very young, I remember the arcade being a sort of carnival without the rides that teenagers of all varieties would go to. And most of them would at least dabble in playing the video games present. It wasn't "online" play but it was certainly social
I'd have to agree with log0n (Score:1)
H1 happened to arrive at the right place, at the right time. Subsequently there has been a boom in the use of various communications tec
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Multiplayer, until Halo I think, was difficult with consoles because it was ei
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to you sir, I say... (Score:1)
Re:Halo 3 - The Final Word: Fail (Score:4, Insightful)
Making beeeeeeautiful water. Duh!
Seriously, I realize you're just trolling, but even trolls need food now and again so here goes.
1) Looks almost identical to Halo 2, just with the resolution bumped up and some higher rez textures. It's the same old last gen style engine. Three years of work and people getting confused in comparison shots between Halo 2 and Halo 3 is shockingly bad for what is supposed to be the killer first party tour de force for Microsoft.
I assume you're thinking of the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. It's been said over and over that the rendering engine used in the beta is not the engine that will ship with Halo 3.
2) Has the same networking setup as last gen. The rumored dedicated servers turned out to be a pipe dream. Instead Halo 3 has the same old last gen 16 player cap per game and lag prone P2P networking for games. With all of Microsoft's money you would think they could have hired someone to actually updated the networking code to next gen levels.
Considering that Halo 3 supports 4-player online co-op, I tend to doubt that the exact same netcode drives both games. I also tend to think that the game's netcode was improved and worked on just like any other part of the game. Speaking of online lag, I'm not sure what dedicated servers would solve. I could be mistaken, but usually lag in online games is due to the players' Internet connections to the host. These connections are subject to varying disruptions and considering the realtime nature of the game, any disruptions will be very noticeable. Until everyone has 10Mbit fiber connections with 3ms latency between consoles I think lag is going to be something you just have to deal with in online play.
The same almost entirely US Xbox fans who bought the first two Halos will buy Halo 3. The rest of the gaming world will go right on not caring about the game
Uh, that's usually how sequel game releases go. Previous fans buy it, people who didn't like the first couple games won't.
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I assume you're thinking of the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. It's been said over and over that the rendering engine used in the beta is not the engine that will ship with Halo 3.
That's a bizarre choice, completely changing out the rendering engine between beta and gold. I hope they did some damn good internal testing before unleashing the new one on their customers.
Considering that Halo 3 supports 4-player online co-op, I tend to doubt that the exact same netcode drives both games.
Well, maybe this is a nitpick, but the actual networking code shouldn't have needed any changes for that. It's just a new game type, like CTF vs. deathmatch. The delivery and handling of packets, synchronization of game state, etc. are all the same for co-op and deathmatch; the only differences are the maps and the gam
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Dude, the XBOX 360 GPU is the most powerful GPU on any console right now. PS3 whomps its ass on physics because of the Cell, but for
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Not true. The PS3's GPU is based on the updated G71 architecture, which is that of the GeForce 7900 series, not 7800. The primary advantage the G71 architecture has over the G70 architecture is a reduction in power consumption (and reduced heat output as a result.)
"the 360's GPU is based on early versions of ATI's R600 series"
No. The Xenos is based on the R520 architecture, and its performance is more in line with that of the top-end Radeon X1800-series (which
Enough! (Score:5, Interesting)
Online Co-Op For Halo 3 Launch Confirmed [slashdot.org]
Halo 3 Preorders Top 1 Million, Marketing Begins [slashdot.org]
Halo 3 Almost Done [slashdot.org]
Halo 3 Has Gone Gold [slashdot.org]
A Look At Halo 3's $10 Million Ad Campaign [slashdot.org]
Halo 3 - The Final Word [slashdot.org]
This whole thing is turning into the bastard child of Vista and the iPhone. And this list doesn't even include the articles (about the 360 and ilovebees) that were about Halo but didn't have Halo 3 in the topic. Despite this we still have two news posts about Halo 3 *marketing*, two about it going gold and one correcting an incorrect earlier /. article (I think that was a first).
Did /. ever push any other game like this?
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We also have quite a bit on Manhunt 2, no?
Re:Enough! (Score:4, Funny)
I bet you'll find lots of references to Duke Nukem Forever
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(Yes, yes, this is Slashdot and so you have to declare that Halo sucks, etc, but you also have to admit that it's popular. Unless you're completely delusional, in that case, status quo.)
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go go slashvertisement!
And... (Score:4, Insightful)
Enlighten us, messiahs, with your ever-precious judgements!
Clearly, you know more than the staff of EGM who has actually played the game. Gah.
Seriously though, a couple things:
1)Article about Halo 3 isn't newsworthy, but that seems to be the trend here anyway.
2)Halo 1/2 may not have been God incarnated into video games, but they were still worth my 50 bucks. I don't think we need the over-the-top bashing of anything even remotely Microsoft related here...
3)I'm going to get rated troll for not calling Halo 3 a complete pile of poop.
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GRRR! (Score:5, Insightful)
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People can't be lemmings, running off the side of cliffs following the person in front of them? You are about this?
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Re:GRRR! (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, Halo has a different feel from a lot of other shooters. It's slower and less instantly deadly. It sounds minor, but it's not. It allows some friends of mine who get queasy easily to play with us. A lot of people who were turned off by Quake/Half-life uber-speedy take-3-steps-die gameplay really like Halo.
Does that make it worth all the hype? Well, probably not. But I've never really run into another shooter that plays quite like it (aside from Marathon, naturally...) and rather than trying to get a group of friends to all migrate to Death Hell FPS Satan Shooter and waste my money buying FPS after FPS trying them out until I find just the right one, it's nice to just say 'oh cool, next version of Halo is coming out, my friends will get it, we'll very very likely enjoy playing it, can't wait'.
I think it's more about inertia now, but that doesn't make it a bad game.
Oh, how times have changed (Score:5, Insightful)
Does that make it worth all the hype? Well, probably not. But I've never really run into another shooter that plays quite like it (aside from Marathon, naturally...)
Then the MS buyout happened. Halo became an Xbox title; the PC version took second fiddle, the Mac version more like seventh fiddle. I've never been much of a console gamer, and NEVER been a fan of Microsoft. So I pretty much gave up on Bungie. But, a friend of mine bought me an Xbox and Halo for my birthday, so I gave it a shot, had a good bit of fun. It's a nice game, feels a lot like a modern, polished version of Marathon, which is exactly what I had always wanted (though getting used to the console controls was a bit of a trick at first). Like you say, Marathon and Halo play VERY differently than other FPSs, and I've never much been into other FPSs for that reason. In Bungie games you move slower and, to me it seems, much more realistically. It's a much more relaxing, flowing feel to the combat, less hyperactive twitch reflex. (Obi-wan's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age" feels somehow appropriate here). It also has coop, which has always been my favorite gametype; combines the social interaction and teamwork of a multiplayer game with the progressive, task-oriented nature of single player games, with a bit of the ol' Legolas & Gimli kill-count competition going on. So to me, Halo was the best FPS yet, and I actually went out and bought Halo 2 with my own money (the game I've bought for the Xbox that was given to me) and enjoyed it even more, especially coop on Legendary. And now I plan to buy Halo 3, though I'll only be playing it on my friend's 360. Seems a fitting way to end my involvement with Bungie, and I want to see how the series ends.
But, imagine my surprise when I looked about in the general gaming chatter online, especially here on Slashdot, and find out that apparently the only people who like Halo are dumbass pothead jocks and frat boys who masturbate with Microsoft brand hand lotion while shoving giant vibrating Xbox controllers up each others asses. Or at least, that's the impression you'd get listening to all the shit that people talk about it on the Internet. Certainly a surprise to me, the intellectual geek who spent much of high school pouring over mythological and literary references hidden away in Marathon terminals.
No, Halo is not the be-all end-all of all video games. But it's not utter shit either. I particularly hate the criticism that it's "old hat" and offers nothing new in terms of gameplay, especially in comparison to mainsteam PC games, which I spent many years looking down upon for lagging in relation to Marathon. (Wow, that new game has a story? Friendly NPCs? Dual wielded and dual function weapons? Cooperative play? Yawn. Welcome to 1994). When the latest sci-fi movie comes out, do you say "oh bah, I've seen a sci-fi movie before, show me something new"? No? So why can't a new game just be a newer, more polished version of the same sort of game that you liked before, with some new settings to explore, some new characters to meet, and some new situations to be resolved?
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Try Starseige Tribes on the PC. It's a multiplayer game circa 1997 which was ahead of its time by a WIDE margin, but it also shares the more slow-paced approach that Marathon and Halo both have.
Secondly: People on Slashdot aren't anti-Halo, they're anti-mainstream. Anything popular, they hate. Don't believe it, it's all just posing to look cool on the Internet.
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Tribes2 vs. Halo -- Re:Oh, how times have changed (Score:1)
The original Halo was one of those games that reached a critical mass in hype and consumer mindshare (before Microsoft bought out Bungie) with good reason.
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I believe you were looking for the word "poring", though my question may be mute.
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I love Halo. I (like you) will buy it just to play on a friend's 360. I met Bungie with Halo and after playing through it I had to go back to Marathon to see what else they've done. There's a stor
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As a long time FPS player, I enjoyed Halo. I don't think i
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Field of View (Score:1)
I have yet to play Halo 3. Is the FOV in Halo 3 the same as Halo 2?
Let's call this a near-dup... (Score:2)
http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/09/12/1912212.shtml [slashdot.org]
I suppose the editors deserve a pat on the back for not posting EXACTLY the same story on the same day, but I think the SlashDot faithful got the message: Halo 3 is coming out soon, if anyone still cares. Any TECH news go down today or is it just games?
I like Halo and being bashed (Score:1)
I don't think that Halo 3 is any more over hyped than any other big budget game out recently. Final Fantasy games are rammed down our th
That's funny (Score:2)
That's funny. I feel the same way about Halo 3.
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You get a free pass to praise Halo, but don't abuse it
Another Halo huh? (Score:2)
"new" graphics engine, same meh (Score:1)
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This comment is a nice demonstration of how insular some communities can get (in this case, I'm talking about Slashdot).
Most people don't have computers that can play recent games, if they even have a computer at all. And of those that do, a significant portion don't have broadband. And yet, those people may still be friends.