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 purplefood wrote:
It's pretty grim...
The Spartan 3's are 12 year old children recruited for the express purpose of being cut price super soldiers sent on suicide missions. Not missions where the chance of detah is high. Missions where death is certain.

Welcome to 40k 102: Creation of a Space Marine, except the kids that are recruited for Astartes live on deathworlds where toads are biological nukes!

TheSGC wrote:

 purplefood wrote:
It's pretty grim...
The Spartan 3's are 12 year old children recruited for the express purpose of being cut price super soldiers sent on suicide missions. Not missions where the chance of detah is high. Missions where death is certain.

Welcome to 40k 102: Creation of a Space Marine, except the kids that are recruited for Astartes live on deathworlds where toads are biological nukes!

Most of Halo is grim, just not the level of Grimdark that most of 40k is, but Silentium is more Grimdark than most of 40k.

And I don't remember the Astartes recruiting from Catachan (also it should be noted that Catachan is a whole new level even in-universe).

As for what I think of Halo, I like it a lot. It was my first FPS.
And now I cry while Karen Traviss desecrates it.

TheSGC wrote:

 purplefood wrote:
It's pretty grim...
The Spartan 3's are 12 year old children recruited for the express purpose of being cut price super soldiers sent on suicide missions. Not missions where the chance of death is high. Missions where death is certain.

Welcome to 40k 102: Creation of a Space Marine, except the kids that are recruited for Astartes live on deathworlds where toads are biological nukes!

Oh I'm sorry I forgot that 40k being grim means nothing else can be...

 Tyran wrote:

And now I cry while Karen Traviss desecrates it.

Hey man. I'm here for you.

SheSpits wrote:I do not like the fact you can pretty much glide when you jump.

Redeemer31 wrote:Personally, I'm not entirely sure what the big fuss is. It's nice but as mentioned before, I don't like the 'floatiness' of how the jumping works. The story did not seem terribly exciting to me as well.

Necroshea wrote:Why people are rabid about the series to this day I have no idea.

Agreed on these. Aside from the briefest go of Halo 3 multiplayer (which had me quickly bored) I only played the first, and have never felt bothered about the rest of them since.

Perkustin wrote:It also (for the most part) introduced vehicles to the FPS game in a way that made them both effective and balanced.

This, however, is worthy of tons of heaping praise.

To those complaining about the lack of aim - Halo first came around in an era when iron sights largely didn't exist. It wasn't too long off the heels of true twitch shooters like the Quake series or Unreal Tournament.
Which brings me to my last point...

DemetriDominov wrote:It was the best game available for my LAN parties of my teenage years.

...LAN party being PCs, you don't have the console excuse. Where were Quake 3 / Unreal Tournament during this time? Hmm? ...HMMMMM?! *glares*

XBox Lan parties were widely practiced with Halo CE.

 Super Ready wrote:

SheSpits wrote:I do not like the fact you can pretty much glide when you jump.

Redeemer31 wrote:Personally, I'm not entirely sure what the big fuss is. It's nice but as mentioned before, I don't like the 'floatiness' of how the jumping works. The story did not seem terribly exciting to me as well.

Necroshea wrote:Why people are rabid about the series to this day I have no idea.

Agreed on these. Aside from the briefest go of Halo 3 multiplayer (which had me quickly bored) I only played the first, and have never felt bothered about the rest of them since.

Perkustin wrote:It also (for the most part) introduced vehicles to the FPS game in a way that made them both effective and balanced.

This, however, is worthy of tons of heaping praise.

To those complaining about the lack of aim - Halo first came around in an era when iron sights largely didn't exist. It wasn't too long off the heels of true twitch shooters like the Quake series or Unreal Tournament.
Which brings me to my last point...

DemetriDominov wrote:It was the best game available for my LAN parties of my teenage years.

...LAN party being PCs, you don't have the console excuse. Where were Quake 3 / Unreal Tournament during this time? Hmm? ...HMMMMM?! *glares*

Like Hats said, I've actually been to more XBOX LAN parties then I have with my PC.

Also, IMO Iron Sights are a terrible mechanic that only slows down the pace of games. I want the age of arena shooters back. Everything is way to slow....

feth it, I'm going to install UT2k4 again and play on my old 120% speed server.

I love the Halo games mainly for the story.

Halo, Star Wars, and Warhammer 40k are my 3 favorite universes right now. (Though there are a gak load of books from all those universes I havnt read, there are a lot I have read)

Starcaft gets an honorable mention

 Soladrin wrote:
Love it mostly for the story/lore. I actually enjoy the novels more then the games nowadays though.

This. The book series is fantastic (especially the Eric Nylund novels). I just started reading the Promethian series, and it's been just as good as all the others.

As for the games, I think they're fun. Simple, but fun. My favorite of the series being ODST, with Halo 4 a close second.

 Soladrin wrote:



Like Hats said, I've actually been to more XBOX LAN parties then I have with my PC.

Also, IMO Iron Sights are a terrible mechanic that only slows down the pace of games. I want the age of arena shooters back. Everything is way to slow....

feth it, I'm going to install UT2k4 again and play on my old 120% speed server.

To expand (I was sleepy last night) a notable aspect for the early success of the XBox and Halo CE were College Dorms. By 2001 even older dorms were wired such that they could support LAN games. Lots of college age people bought the first wave of XBox and its games and before XBL went live they were using the dorms to play large LAN games as four XBoxes and tvs could get a game going as opposed to PC where everyone needed their own machine to play. Halo CE thrived in part to LAN.

I liked Warthog Jump well enough.

 purplefood wrote:

TheSGC wrote:

 purplefood wrote:
It's pretty grim...
The Spartan 3's are 12 year old children recruited for the express purpose of being cut price super soldiers sent on suicide missions. Not missions where the chance of death is high. Missions where death is certain.

Welcome to 40k 102: Creation of a Space Marine, except the kids that are recruited for Astartes live on deathworlds where toads are biological nukes!

Oh I'm sorry I forgot that 40k being grim means nothing else can be...

Bingo! GRIMDARK (tm)

I liked Halo 1, 2, 3 and ODST I loved.


Halo 4 I just sold on ebay. The game was terrible compared to the other 4. I was not excited about this game, it should of ended in halo 3.

 Asherian Command wrote:
I liked Halo 1, 2, 3 and ODST I loved.


Halo 4 I just sold on ebay. The game was terrible compared to the other 4. I was not excited about this game, it should of ended in halo 3.

*Notices that Reach was not mentioned. Laughs on the inside*

I loved the first, found the 2nd okay, enjoyed 3, enjoyed 4 (apperently unheard of now a days. Im actually optimistic about this new trilogy)

I HATED ODST. I literally felt like the game was a choir. It just failed to feel at all like a Halo game to me. The Weapons were wrong, (did 1/3 the damage they did in Halo 3) the game play was wrong (you spend the first half of the game walking around randomly and alone looking for ANY type of guidance) the story was empty till the last quarter in which it remembered it has yet to tell a story.

ODST has a lot of love though (and hate)

REACH is an odd one, I think it is a good game, I think it is a decent Halo game. However it is a HORRIBLE game about Reach because the fact it feths over canon hard and it just doesnt make sense. (smaller individual things like why there are human civilians that dont speak the common tongue of the UNSC living on the UNSC's fortress world or the Covenant sending a few scout ships to half ass a stealth invasion)

Make the game about any of the hundreds of other battles in the war (or even take place on Earth) and not worry as much about destroying canon. You could even leave almost the entire game intact with just minor differences in who you are talking to.

Remarkably over-hyped series of boiler-plate first person shooters.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Remarkably over-hyped series of boiler-plate first person shooters.

I love you.

Get a room.

I still haven't played Reach....and I kind of refuse to. From what I know, the story changes a lot of things from the book, "Fall of Reach", which I completely loved.

Halo, huh? Alright, since you asked...

These days, I'm just kind of indifferent about it. Just like other posters before, I can't "get" the hype, but then again I'm sure there are some who would say the same about my affection for 40k. I remember that many, many years ago, I saw a trailer for Halo when it was still a PC game. I loved the music (even downloaded the MP3) and the open world aspect this trailer promised, and I was always a fan of the driving/shooting combo, especially when you get to have NPCs to accompany you. Plus, the designs looked cool.

Then, Microsoft happened. They acquired the studio and the game and turned it into a "console exclusive" title to pimp their new Xbox. This essentially killed the series for me. Needless to say, "console exclusive" titles have a tendency to show up on PC later, but by the time it happened for Halo, there were better games to be had and Halo wasn't special anymore. In my case, Microsoft, in its gamble to force players to buy their new console, just waited too long for the PC market. So the entire series just kind of vanished from my perception.

Occasionally I hear some people raving about it and even get to see a video or hear details, but it's just nothing that fascinates me like those very first videos of Halo 1 did. I'm sad to see Cortana got turned from a cool looking futuristic holo AI into a sex doll, though. Guess it just sells, and I should be glad not to have formed any sort of attachment to the series.

About the Forerunners having awesome technology, I remember in the Library level (which I actually loved, I don't care what anybody else says) guilty spark saying something like "level 8 armor is required for dealing with a flood outbreak, your armor only conforms to protection level 3" or something like that. There was also an easter egg where you could find a hidden room. A cutscene played showing master chief staring at an armor rack of some kind (you couldn't see it with the camera angle) and Corana saying "go for it, try it on!"

I remember a friend telling me about this easter egg back in middle school when Halo was new. I have seen videos on youtube, however when I tried to find it just now I couldn't since the original halo has been burred under easter egg viedos from all the other games.

P.S. in one of the Halo novels a random un-named ODST Marine made it about halfway through the library. Master Chief found his corpse at some point and was impressed about how an unmodified human could have made it that far. That must have been one tough guy!

 Tiger9gamer wrote:

 Corpsesarefun wrote:

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
So I got to post 116 and thought "eh, why not make post 117 special" So I'm asking you, Dakka, What do you guys think about the video game series Halo?


To be honost, Halo is one of the games that got me into video gaming, so I have some fond memories of it myself.

It's pretty slick.

(it's Diamond Droog but you get an exalt anyways!)

I kinda think reach was the best in gameplay. I loved the custimization for fire fights, and I think the Elites have some of the best enemy AI I have seen in most games.

Also, I still have fun with a firefight map with Nothing But Elites

feth, I had a bad feeling it was DD.

 dementedwombat wrote:
About the Forerunners having awesome technology, I remember in the Library level (which I actually loved, I don't care what anybody else says) guilty spark saying something like "level 8 armor is required for dealing with a flood outbreak, your armor only conforms to protection level 3" or something like that. There was also an easter egg where you could find a hidden room. A cutscene played showing master chief staring at an armor rack of some kind (you couldn't see it with the camera angle) and Corana saying "go for it, try it on!"

I remember a friend telling me about this easter egg back in middle school when Halo was new. I have seen videos on youtube, however when I tried to find it just now I couldn't since the original halo has been burred under easter egg viedos from all the other games.

P.S. in one of the Halo novels a random un-named ODST Marine made it about halfway through the library. Master Chief found his corpse at some point and was impressed about how an unmodified human could have made it that far. That must have been one tough guy!

You also find the corpse in the game...
He has an epic stash of shotgun ammo and there's one hell of a blood pool around him...

 dementedwombat wrote:
About the Forerunners having awesome technology, I remember in the Library level (which I actually loved, I don't care what anybody else says) guilty spark saying something like "level 8 armor is required for dealing with a flood outbreak, your armor only conforms to protection level 3" or something like that. There was also an easter egg where you could find a hidden room. A cutscene played showing master chief staring at an armor rack of some kind (you couldn't see it with the camera angle) and Corana saying "go for it, try it on!"

I remember a friend telling me about this easter egg back in middle school when Halo was new. I have seen videos on youtube, however when I tried to find it just now I couldn't since the original halo has been burred under easter egg viedos from all the other games.

P.S. in one of the Halo novels a random un-named ODST Marine made it about halfway through the library. Master Chief found his corpse at some point and was impressed about how an unmodified human could have made it that far. That must have been one tough guy!

Actually the category suggested by Guilty Spark is 12 and the MJOLNIR is category 2. In the novel Master Chief things that he really would want to try something 6 times more powerful than the MJOLNIR.
But I hadn't heard about that easter egg.

I'm sorry, it's been a very long time and I'm dredging the depths of my memory here.

If I recall correctly there's one room that's a massive elevator, and to find the easter egg you have to just start sprinting as soon as you reach it and haul butt across the entire room before the level loads and the elevator starts moving. If you make it in time you find a door on the far side of the room/elevator.

I'm sure there's a FAQ/video out there somewhere that talks about it, but as I said my brief search didn't find anything since there's been so many Halo games since then that easter eggs from the original have been burred and lost to time.

Love the Universe, love the story, the characters. The gameplay is okay, but after playing the game for 10 years, I've outgrown it.

I lol@ the idea that Halo is overrated though. It may have been, at one point, but no longer. Halo's now just a relatively solid franchise in a sea of gak, and I think most people consider it as such.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Love the Universe, love the story, the characters. The gameplay is okay, but after playing the game for 10 years, I've outgrown it.

I lol@ the idea that Halo is overrated though. It may have been, at one point, but no longer. Halo's now just a relatively solid franchise in a sea of gak, and I think most people consider it as such.

True! I had fun will all the halo games myself, and appreciate what they do for gameplay.

I like it. Feth everyone else.

 Lynata wrote:
I remember that many, many years ago, I saw a trailer for Halo when it was still a PC game.

Not just any Halo trailer, the Halo trailer, the one that showed off the world, the physics of the Warthog, the Elites and their fancy swords, and all sorts of things. It was going to be the "Half-Life killer", just like Half-Life had been the "Quake killer" before it. And then, as you said, along came Microsoft.

The strange part is I've seen people argue 'til they were blue in the face that it wasn't a PC game or that no changes were made and so on. Granted, Halo did start as a Mac game (and not even an FPS, IIRC), but for a brief moment in time it was going to change the way FPS's on PCs were done. Instead it just became the poster child for everything that has led us to the COD-filled landscape we have today.

I didn't know about the Mac part. Interesting.

Also, that final part of your synopsis makes me kind of sad.

Halo was originally a MAC RTS game. Then a Third Person Shooter, then a First Person Shooter. Arguably, Halo is one of the only games to go through development hell and come up not sucking for it.