Some thoughts on the Halo series.

Oh Halo the only reason the original Xbox had any success at all despite the fact it had other games on it that were way better and I don't mean Halo 2. Halo was the title that had so much potential until Microsoft in their infinite wisdom snatched up the developer Bungie and had them put out a castrated version of the game on the Xbox console. I've played all the Halo's up to Reach which I will probably never play because I no longer own a 360 and I don't plan on buying another one.

I like many other people bought Halo with my Xbox console. It was the game to own the "killer app" if you will. I got my machine home hooked it up and slapped Halo in the drive. A few hours later I turned the game off and I don't think I ever put it back in the machine. Having already played most of the game at a friends house before having my own I had seen most of what the game had to offer but what it offered wasn't enough to keep my attention for a real playthrough and me actually beating the game. To me Halo 1 was just a generic sci-fi fps game with uninspired locations and the same 5 enemies through out the whole game. From the beginning I had little hope for the console Halo after all the promise the PC version was showing to see all the stuff Bungie cut out to make it work on the Xbox it was a shell of what it would of been. It's like FPS lite, huge redicule, big ass hit boxes bland visuals and a cookie cutter story. Now with Halo 1 it did have the multiplayer going for it, with some fun maps and it was just basically fun, for what it was. It lacked online but you could still have a blast shooting at friends on splitscreen, in the end it lacked the long term staying power because of the lack of online. When I look back at Halo 1 all I see is a failure due to the move to console and the dumbing down of the whole FPS idea.

Halo 2 came out and it was considered the greatest gaming gift by many people. I remember going to pick up my copy and rushing home to play it. I was thinking the addition of Xbox Live support would make the series what it could of been on the PC and make the multiplayer a lasting experience. I've written an article about Halo 2 already earlier on this very blog so I won't go into super detail here but I'll share some thoughts. We all know the campaign in Halo 2 was garbage, a piss poor story that was worse than the first game plus who liked playing as the Arbiter? I'll tell you who, no one! Even with the great Keith David doing his voice no one wanted to play as someone besides Master Chief. It was like Metal Gear Solid 2 when we had to play as Raiden, nonsense! Bungie introduced the new revolutionary ability to duel wield weapons and the console FPS fans were beside themselves with love but it wasn't a new feature to the FPS genre. The first game I remember playing with duel wielding was Rise of the Triad on the PC back when I was in high school so that's sometime in the 90's (94 to be exact). So then we had Halo 2 online yeah it was interesting and I had some fun with it but the maps were garbage. Bungie should of just put all the Halo 1 maps in part two so people could finally play them online but nope, they know what the fans want so we get garbage maps even though the fans were crying out for the Halo 1 maps. I know that Halo 2 was the most popular Xbox Live game for a long time but I have no idea why bland broken online and you had way better options out there.

So now we have Halo 3 the next gen Halo on the new shiny 360! The first thing that grabbed me on Halo 3 were the graphics. I know that graphics do not make the game but this game looked bad it looked like an Xbox 1 game. Halo 3 should of been the best looking game on that system blowing away everything out there but nope it wasn't even in true HD, it ran at something like 640p. This was suppose to be the end of the grand Halo trilogy and it did a decent job of wrapping up the story and out of the three games it did have the best story and it's really the best Halo game but that's not saying much. It added the ability to use items which you can pick up and it was the big new feature, the new feature back in the 90's with games like Hexen again something not new being lauded as the new hotness in FPS games. I can't rag on Halo 3 to much because I played through the game 5 times and it's the first Halo game I finished and this game on Legendary is actually really fun. Now the multiplayer, argh. Again it's a game full of crap maps that just weren't that much fun. It had reimagining of some Halo 1 and 2 maps but I didn't want to see reimagined Halo maps I wanted the original maps not this crap. But Halo's online overall just has an unbalanced feel to it. I can't even count high enough to keep track of the number of times I was one shotted by someone after I've unloaded a whole magazine into them and they didn't die. I'm not the only one who I know whom had this issue but it's been the defining Halo online thing for me. When ever it happens in another game I always describe it being like Halo online. It's just a bad online experience I know it's popular but I think Halo is the online game for people who aren't really good at FPS and if you try to play the game like a FPS that needs precision to play you will fail.

Halo ODST the 60 dollar expansion pack. Campaign was intersting, the fact it took a more stealthy approach was interesting and going back to a health bar made the game more of a challenge but in the end it was another crap Halo story with a to short overpriced campaign. Firefight which was a mode that teamed you up with 3 other people and put you against waves of Covenant much like Horde mode from Gears of War 2 could of been awesome but it lacked online matchmaking. Why make an online mode without matchmaking? It's a poor choice and I spent maybe 30 minutes playing it but with matchmaking I would of spent a lot more time playing that mode. I had some fun with ODST but it should of been a 20-30 dollar downloadable title, maybe in one of those summer of arcade thing they have on Xbox Live.

Now we have Halo Reach the last Halo game Bungie will be making. It's Halo with Jetpacks and for that I have one word... Tribes.


Overall I feel Halo is overrated and personally I don't think it's a very good series. I give Bungie their props for coming up with a decent console FPS control scheme but that's about the only revolution to the genre they've done. Lots of people love Halo but I don't get it you have way better games out there to play but to each their own.

Sniper Perch Groupies and a general rant on Sniping in games!

Ah yes the Sniper Perch Groupies (SPG) we all know them we all love (hate) them. Now this may not be a term you're familiar with but you know the definition. Let's say you're playing a shooter online. It can be Halo, COD, even Gears of War. Really just any shooter with an online mode. You find yourself a nice sniper perch. You start racking up kills you're feeling good then all of a sudden you notice something on the side of the screen. You turn thinking it'a an enemy but no! It's a team mate. Not just any team mate mind you, another sniper! Now you would think it wouldn't be a really big deal said sniper may just be taking cover before moving on or may not notice you crouched behind cover smokin' dudes with your rifle. Most of the time it's someone that has come to steal your spot. They see you doing well with a nicely placed sniper perch and they want some of your kills. This isn't something that really happens wth the well known sniper spots on maps. Usually they always have a few snipers running around them no matter what. It always seems to happen when you find that perfect spot and you're dug in so well the enemy can't get to you. This is a phenomena I've witnessed from the beginning of sniping in online FPS games.

I remember when sniping in FPS wasn't sniping it was camping the first online FPS I played was the first Quake over a 56k modem and it was great. Yeah it had campers but it was fun. I liked to run around and rocket people to death and all that crazy stuff, I was never into the whole camping thing. But one thing I've always had a thing for was the idea of the hitman sniper either in movies, books or whatever. Golgo-13 was a favorite of mine. When I first heard about FPS getting real sniper rifles I was intrigued. I wanted to try them out to see if I could be like the assassins in the media I was consuming back then. Now I can't remember what was the first online FPS to have a sniper rifle but the first I got into was either Counter Strike or Unreal Tournament. But they weren't the pinacle of my idea of what a FPS sniper should be able to do. Counter Strike had some good sniping spots in maps but nothing that screamed sniper hiding spots. Unreal Tournament had a few maps with good perches but you could get rocketed out of them no problem. When Battlefield 1942 came out I thought it would be a snipers dream and to a point it was. You had huge maps to run around in and hide to do your work. I was really enjoying the freedom this game gave to the FPS sniper but then they came. This was the first game were I really saw the SPG in it's purest form. Sure the game had dedicated sniper spots watch towers and things of that nature. What I didn't care for is you'd spend a good chunk of time getting to a great spot. Jumping off a jeep to get somewhere higher up then you could go normally or how some people would try and snipe from the aircraft carrier on Wake Island. Okay you spent all this time to get to a perch and someone comes along to be your buddy and hang out with you. Then all they do is draw attention to your spot. You're crounched down or prone, hidden from view and this person may be standing up in full view just unloading in the direction of the enemy drawing all kinds of attention and then eventually grenades. What's worse is when other people you team come to your spot and it's like a party in sniper town that one well placed grenade can clear out. I'm not saying, "Hey this is my spot and my spot alone!" Far from it, I'm just saying if someone is in the sniper perch let them be at least until they die and if you're running around basicly waving a flag at the other side causing the well placed sniper to die vacate that spot and let the original squater have his or her spot.

Another thing I've noticed is the amount of times snipers will go back to a place to snipe no matter how many times they get killed in that exact same place. If you go to a spot only to get shot or grenaded the only people you're helping are the other team, just stop. One thing I've read and seen when it comes to real life snipers is you take your shot then you relocate, hit or miss. This can be applied to games as well. I understand that not every game and the amount of snipers in most games doesn't really allow for this but it's a useful tactic when used right. Especially in the Battlefield games and I could see it being useful in MAG.

Now that leads me into what made me want to write this blog entry. I've been playing MAG the last couple days and I've been having a lot of fun with it. But not with the sniping. I don't really snipe anymore in online FPS. I always try out the sniping class/weapons in any game but I just stay away from it mainly because of the reasons I've stated above and what I'll mention in a bit. I decided to try the sniper class out in MAG and it started out well. I had a really nice setup and I was tagging guys left and right on the Valor suppression map. Stay crouched, shoot someone to death then go prone to hide. They had no idea where I was at until some doofus decided to come stand right next me and fire into the crowd of enemies. Then another sniper comes up and tries to wedge himself between me and my sandbag barrier. I told them both in so many words to go away they were screwing up my for lack of a better word flow. No response but the enemy took care of that with a few rockets fired out way. The way these two were standing I couldn't get away and I was dead. Another thing I saw last night was almost just as dumb. We were playing Sabotage, attacking Raven on their map. For those who don't know sabotage is like a control point type game. Well our spawn was in an area where you couldn't really see the Raven base but we had seven snipers in and around the spawn and they weren't hitting anything because they couldnt see anything. Every now and then a Raven guy or two would come around and knife them all and we ended up loosing that match. Someone I was playing commented on the fact that a good chunk of our people were sniping in a forward attack game type, I had to agree with him it was crap.

Falling out of love with a game!

This is something we all as gamers are probably guilty of at one time or another. You get the hot new release, a sleeper hit, or just a straight up bad game. You get home pop it in and you just freaking love it. You call a friend or two, send out messages on Xbox Live/PSN, post on a message board, "Hey you all need to check this out it's fantastic!" Well then some time goes by, it can be hours or days any time frame, you start to see the flaws, or you're just not that into the game anymore. Someone will ask you, "Why aren't you playing such and such anymore?" You tell them you don't really care for it and you gave up on said game. It's not a bad thing lots of times you try anything new and you're all about it but as that euphoria wears off you're not that into it anymore.

I've done this a good number of times. I play a lot of games, I mean a lot. I always have something waiting for me when I finish whatever I'm currently on. The last one I did this with was Red Faction Guerrilla. I was blown away by the demo and went and managed to talk the guy at the Best Buy into selling it to me a say early. I went home fired it up and I was in gaming heaven. Capping dudes and blowing the hell out of buildings it was so good. Then I started to notice some of the small things that would keep me from loving this game forever. The overall combat was one thing. Mason is a fragile man, a few bullets and he's down. I've read online that I wasn't playing it right that I needed to be more like a Guerrilla soldier and that I can understand. I just couldn't get behind that concept sneaking around in what didn't really seem to be set up like a stealth game. The driving really bothered me too, it never seems consistant. When I was just driving around it was tight and responsive but then I would take on of those timed race side missions and it seemed like the controls just fell apart and the vehicles would slide all over the roads. But this is a just an example of this happening to me, I have another game to write about and that is Halo 2.

Halo 2 is I think the best example of this happening on a very large scale. When it first came out everyone loved Halo 2, if they were playing online or plowing through the campaign everyone was hooked, me included. Then as a little time went on the campaign didn't really hold up, why would they make a game where you don't play as the main protagonist through half of it? People want to play as the main dude not his sidekick (Metal Gear Solid 2) why leave the Master Chief out? It didn't really help the story, what little of it there was and I think hurt the series as a whole. The weak way they handled the cliff hanger ending didn't help either, kind of like we know you'll buy the next one no matter what and we don't really feeling like finishing this story so guess what we'll get you next time. While I'm at this duel wielding in Halo 2 isn't an innovation plenty of games before it had it just like items in Halo 3 it had been done before quit patting yourselves on the back for it Bungee didn't come up with the idea. Now a little on Multiplayer, the backbone of the Halo 2 hype! You can play on Xbox Live! Yay for us! Well from the beginning people were complaining that the maps from Halo 1 were not included, well guess what? I think if a company puts out a new game and all the people playng can talk about is how they want the old maps you made a crap multiplayer experience. I had fun playing Halo 2 online but Bungee should of just updated Halo 1 with all it's superior multiplayer maps added some new ones and called it Halo 2 multiplayer. Even with Halo 3 people still want the Halo 1 maps. "Oh! But we're giving you this map that's kind of like this map from the first one!" No one wants that give us the maps we want not your idea of what we want. I'm not really trying to review Halo 2 but just share some thoughts on the few examples I gave. It was called the best original Xbox game by a few gaming sites and publications and I've seen it on some lists of the biggest dissapointments of all time, so which is it? See one's feelings at the beginning won't always be the same down the road. Before you think I'm just bashing the Halo series because I'm aware that's how this could come across, I like the Halo games. Halo 3 is probably my favorite I played through it 5 times I liked it so much.