The Official HALO 3 thread - Page 13

Anyone ready to call it better than BioShock?

Well, I just finished the campaign. It undoubtedly wrapped up these last three games in a neat little package, but the only thing I had problem with was the pacing of the narrative. At time I had to stop and ask my friend "Wait, am I on Earth or on a Halo? Or on a ship in space?" But I think I got the extent of what they were trying to convey with the plot. The game play was, well Halo, and if the whole game was fighting Scarabs I would have been fine with that.

I'd bet that we'll see another Master Chief FPS in the 360's life cycle.

I have a good group of 4 friends playing with me, so I am definitely ready to bring some bodies to some CHUD matches.

I played some 4 player Co-op, and the campaign really didn't do it for me on normal. This weekend we are going for Legendary to see what comes of it.

High Ground is a great, great map.

The packs and themes are in the bonus features section on the bonus disc for those who care. Also included is a hi-def update of the hilarious audio test from Halo 2.

4 player co-op is really fucking fun. It's great clearing out a room using squad tactics like an intergalactic Spec Ops team. We role-played it like Rainbow Six in space.

Too bad two of the guys demanded we do the 4-player on Normal. Made it far too easy.

Looking to beat the campaign tonight and then leap screaming into multiplayer with you guys.

It is better, people are going to be playing this for the next 3 years.

Yeah. Sphincters in Space. Just a murky, confusing, all-around poorly designed level.

Halo 3 is a better overall package than Bioshock, sure, but its single-player campaign can't hold a candle to what Bioshock did.

Plus, it's like comparing Crank to Pan's Labyrinth. They're both great, just in completely different ways.

The final action sequence is incredible.

The ending is hilariously bad. HEROES bad.

For this or BioShock?

Sometimes I want to cry at all the jackasses who have to bitch about stuff. Seriously, I can't believe that people are whining about aspect ratios again.

I (kind of) take back what I said about the ending. Apparently if you press a button during the credits like I did, you don't get to see the two-minute final scene that wraps everything up. Thanks, Youtube.

I'm annoyed that the diorama battle from the marketing campaign is nowhere to be found in the game itself. It's like a 1950s DC comic book where the cover shows everyone crying at Superman's funeral while the story inside is just Superman having another goddamn race with the Flash.

I was just coming here to post that. For some odd reason I was psyched for that to happen and have it play out that way, but then it was nowhere to be found. And there was a Superman book that came out about six months ago that had Superman fighting a dinosaur on the cover. Inside? Nothing to do with dinosaurs.

I didn't realize any of them were doing voices, but I heard a soldier say "Gorramn!" on the second stage, which I thought was pretty damn weird. Makes sense now, I suppose. Still kind of bizarre though.
My friend's new 360 has never even been online, and there was a required update as soon as we loaded the disc. It loaded off of the disc, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Unless it's a different update for LIVE that I haven't seen, in which case ignore me I'm talking about something else entirely.


In other news... I played the living shit out of this tonight, but no LIVE sadly.
Some random thoughts...

-I'm only a third of the way through the campaign(2 player co-op on heroic), but it's yet to blow me away(the scarab fight came close). The multiplayer however, is fucking awesome, I need to play this on LIVE ASAP.
-The sword is pretty useless now. I was happy they were tweaking it, but they just made it too weak and slow to "whip out" for my tastes. I'm sure a lot of people are pissed about this. The gravity hammer is the new sword.
-Not a straight-up bad map in the bunch. Great job, Bungie. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but the desert stage is fucking amazing.
-I haven't messed around with the Forge, which might make this point moot, but is the Scorpion tank gone? Even with all vehicles on it never popped up on any of the maps I played. Just an assload of Wraiths. I also never once saw an incendiary grenade on any of the maps(and only one flamethrower).
-Why oh why can't the Arbiter spawn with human weapons on co-op?
-The needler feels even more powerful now(and faster) than it did in the already suped-up beta version. It's actually worth grabbing.

Anyways, enough babbling. I'm digging it.

Well, I got my feet wet. I didn't have a lot of time to play last night, but I checked out the beginning of the campaign and tried multiplayer for a few minutes with strangers (went well... so far). I didn't want to jump on with any of you guys since I didn't know when I'd be on and off and didn't want to bail on anybody (other stuff was going on at home) but hopefully soon. My time is not my own for the most part, but it looks like saturday is sort of clear for now...

edited for spelling.

Hey Wehman, it's working! Time to get fucking owned by all the chewers who are a lot more skilled than me.

100% OTM. Some of the level designs seemed pretty poor. This game is going to earn its kudos with multi-player. Campaign has some really fun moments, but its not earth shattering.

Finally, on the second to last level (the snow board) did anyone else find that weird room up in the cliffs? Not the one you're directed to when you're attempting to get back to the frigate. Its back towards the front of the board in the crevasse you pass through before enter the huge snow valley. Its up in those fallen support collumns in the snow. Just shimmy your way up and hunt around.

Its bizarre. As far as my playing partners and I could tell, it serves no purpose to the narrative. It has a big forerunner computor console that you can interact with, and its full of all of these journal entries from when the rings were activated long, long ago. The rub is once you're in there, you can't get out. No door. The floor disappears behind you and you can't jump across the span.

Either my partners and I missed something completely, or this is some weird design flaw or discarded idea that accidently made it into the final game. Any one have any info?

So has anyone even seen any of those skulls?

Who has time to look for skulls when they're busy getting run over by you? I swear you looked like a drunk dolphin on the bike thing in the sand level.

Damn fun last night, and I haven't even played team stuff yet, infected, or the Forge. Can't wait to get home!

I got the skull on the first board. Do you just need to find them, or do you have to carry them to the end of the level? I wasn't sure. I would hang onto it, drop it in the jungle when fighting started, then hunt around for it and pick it back up and continue on. It was a pain in the ass carrying that thing.

You gotta activate it.

I still haven't played this but I have to give a big "what the fuck is wrong with you?" to the guy who chose and/or designed the packaging for the metal case version. Has this person not seen the steelbook case that Best Buy uses? My copy was intact but, holy shit, is that plastic nub a cheap, worthless piece of garbage.

It sounds like one of the terminals you need to activate to get the 'Marathon Man' achievement... but it's strange that you can't get back out, unless activating it once is enough. That still seems pretty strange.

Marathon Man.

I get it!

This reminds me of when Superman addressed the U.N. in SUPERMAN IV.

Just finished the campaign on Heroic... this game is far, far too fast. I think I managed to get through it in 7-8 hours, which isn't nearly enough for me to feel like I got my money's worth out of the campaign. I'm sure I'll get it back through multiplayer and potentially on Legendary.

I'm really looking forward to playing through some of the campaign levels and especially the multiplayer with some of you folks, so send me an add if you have the inclination

'Space49' is my XBL Gamertag.

Did anyone else have some glitchiness through the end credits? I got to see the slow scrolling landscape, and then eventually the end sequence, but I didn't see any credits whatsoever... I'm glad I left it run!

Can we have more pictures of people in their "Spartan" outfits? This makes me laugh.

When I get home I'll see if I can upload a vid of it, and how we got there.

Oh yeah, I might as well post my gamertag for those interested in adding me: Surface 360

Play a fair amount of team games. I either rule, or I'm worst player on the map. No middle ground, and no rhyme or reason behind it hahaha.

Holy shit dude, you've been on my friends list for a long time. I think we played Ghost Recon 1 together when it was new.

So is this worth the purchse if I'm really only interested in single-player/co-op?

No, I wouldn't think so.

Yeah, I just realized that since I finished the fifth level, I'm more than halfway done. And I'm really irritated about that, because I have only played the campaign for maybe 4 hours.

Depends how much you liked the previous two single player games, because this one shares pretty much all of their strengths and faults. Lengthwise, it's slightly longer than The Darkness, but co-op extends that considerably. And once you turn on campaign scoring and you and your buddies are sprinting after each kill, it changes the game's tone even more.

So yeah, I'd say you'll get your money's worth.

I've never finished any of the Halo single player modes, and I'm not sure I'm going to be finishing the HL3 story, either. I'm completely out of practice, so I'm warming up with single player ... but if you're expecting a visceral campaign experience a la Bioshock, Half-Life 2, or Gears of War you'll probably be disappointing.

Quoted for amusing typo.

I'm playing through on coop with my wife, so it's going to take me a while to finish up the campaign. Multiplayer is fun, though they really, really need a "Forge" matchmaking list so you can easily join up with other people who just want to fuck around. It was the first thing I wanted to do when I got the game, so I was sad there was no way to search for Forge matches.

Some of the GUI stuff for setting up your own rules for matchmaking is needlessly complex - those layers of nested text menus are already driving me nuts.

The system for downloading new map and game variants is nice, but I wish it were easier to find. It really ought to be on the main menu instead of something that you access through Start Button->Bungie Favorites or whatever it is.

Also - no clan support? Huh. That's going to make it more difficult to organize CHUD matches, I would think. There were a lot of people who were in the old clan who I never added to my friends list because I'm a lazy fuck. But I didn't need to since anyone could invite the whole clan to a game whenever they hopped online. Of course, this did lead to being spammed with clan invites every 10 minutes...maybe I won't miss it.

Save films are so much fun, it's easy to burn an hour playing around with a film of just one match.

Overall, it's really fun and I can see myself playing for a long time.

I'm going try out multiplayer later today. I love the saved replays of your progress on the campaign levels. I like to move the camera to the side of the enemies and see their point of view when we are in a shootout. Pretty cool.

The replay is ruined for me because I can't rewind.

I thought I couldn't rewind either at first, but it actually does work. It just moves time back in ~5-10 second chunks instead of in a smooth spool of time. So you have to bring up the controls, highlight rewind, and press "A" several times in a row to go back, say, a minute or something. You can't just hold down "A", you have to keep tapping it. It's clunky, but it works.

That does blow. And the camera can only move around in so many places. Taking a picture kind of sucks too. They're incredibly low-res.

Still need to get a group of buddies and fuck around with Forge for a while.

Ah, ok. I just don't understand why they just didn't take a cue from games that have been doing replays forever; you know, sports games. There's no reason for not being able to rewind with the LT.

Now I want to see a screen shot of Chief entering an End Zone.

Because the saved films aren't video files. (If they were, they'd be a lot larger than 3 megs.) It's just data that allows the game's engine to recreate every detail on the fly. So you're basically watching the game itself play the level while duplicating your performance exactly. Jump back five seconds in time and the game has to revert to a previous save state.

Right, and like the guy in the last Vidoc said, even the clunky system that they have now freaks his shit out every time someone rewinds a save film, because A) it works, and B) the system for making that happen is ridiculously complex.

Rewinding doesn't work in the Campaign mode, due to the way they handle the scripting and events, so it's a little harder to get the perfect shots. I'm glad to hear that it works for Multiplayer, because trying to capture great moments in the Campaign was pretty frustrating -- I kept moving past the ideal moment, and then it was lost.

Ok, is there a trick to killing the brutes that carry that big ass hammer? He's driving me nuts.

Yes.......Shoot them..............A lot.









Seriously I just stick em with a grenade and then it's hammer time for hippie.

You can't stick them with a grenade, it bounces off them. I found that those incendiary grenades work wonders, though. A couple of those will damage it a bunch.

A lot of dodging and weaving and jumping will get you the shots needed to take him down. Once his shield's down you can stick him with a plasma grenade to end it.

Honestly, they're not THAT bad but you'll usually find them hanging out with a ton of Brutes so that's why I have problems with them.

The hammer makes them slow, so if you have the general feel for the room you're in it shouldn't be too much of a hassle.


Is anyone else having a total blast when you have to take control of the Hornet?

The Brute Chieftains with the gravity hammers are usually packing an Invincibility power-up as well (at least on the higher difficulty levels). If you see white electricity crawling all over his body, just avoid him until the power-up runs out. Took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that's why my bullets weren't dropping him.

And they're not immune to plasma sticks, but they are really good at deflecting your grenades with the hammer.

Huh. I didn't know that. Maybe the power-up is what made the grenades bounce off them, because I have seen a few direct hits bounce off them like it was a regular grenade. Haven't seen them deflect it, though, that's pretty cool.