ugachaka :: Jacob was here

Download the new ViDoc from the Halo 3 crew when you get a chance. It’s worth the viewing.

‘Journey’s End’ is a collection of interviews with Halo insiders going through all the Halo games and the feel/emotion of the games from start to finish. Although it neglects going into a lot of detail about Halo 3–since it is still sort of pushing those final consumers to go pick it up–the ViDoc is a great book end for Halo fans who want a refresher or just want to watch a sort of “commentary reel” from the Halo team.

ViDocs are one of the great things that Halo 3 did throughout their production and marketing. Similar to a viral marketing plan, the ViDocs maintained the hype about the game all the way up until launch time and gave Halo 3 fans insight into how the game was coming along and new features. Rather than seeming like a commercial trying to get you to buy, the ViDocs made fans feel like stakeholders who really wanted Halo 3 to succeed.

If you were one of the unlucky few to get a scratched Halo 3 Limited Edition disc, they are finally being sent out to those missing the Halo 3 action.

I actually had to have my disc at Best Buy swapped with a regular Halo 3 edition disc after I opened eight different Limited Editions only to find them ALL scratched. The whole process took about 15 minutes. I am thinking about sending my disc back in because even the one I have is giving me a disc read error occasionally, and I am a purist who wants the Limited Edition box art in my Limited Edition case.

I know, I know. I am a horrible person. After spending several weeks following all the latest Halo 3 reviews and analyzing them to see what the fanboys, haters and regular Joes were saying about the game, I went and slacked off playing the last few days without giving you my review. If it makes any difference to you, I got three more achievements. No? Nothing? Alright, let’s move along.

I’ll preface my review by saying that I did not start out as a Halo fanboy. I was slow to adopt the Xbox as a valid console being a Nintendo fanboy Gamecube-addict myself. I had friends who moved over to it immediately and claimed it was the best console out there on the market, but I thought it was only catering to the hardcore shooter fans. I played Halo a handful of times and got owned by my friends–pistol masters.

When Halo 3 emerged, I lived in a fraternity house, so there you go. I played a great deal of multiplayer and even ducked into the campaign–gasp–to follow the storyline of the game and become wrapped up in the plight of Master Chief and Cortana. I discoverd a little site called TheHalography.com which I have featured on here several times and fell in love with the Halo universe. Sadly, I don’t think UNSCleric has updated the site since Halo 3 emerged. I never owned a copy of the game myself until I went all next-gen Microsoft and got an Xbox 360 with the release of Gears of War (Note: after my Wii–I still love you Nintendo).

You can call me a fanboy, but keep in mind that I also have a background in other consoles, shooters and gaming experiences not to be a complete mindless zombie.

Now for the review…OMG HALO r0X! L33T! No, I didn’t do that.

The Campaign

When I first popped the game disc into my 360, I went straight into the campaign mode. I loaded up on Heroic–none of that pansy Normal or Easy I had heard was intentionally made easier for the mainstream gamers to get hooked on the story. I could have gone Legendary, but come on, that’s hard.

Yes, the graphics are not the end all of 360s capabilities, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Yes, the campaign seems a little short. Yes, I thought it resembled a lot of what had already been done in Halo and Halo 2. BUT I expected and enjoyed this design choice.

The levels may not be the best looking, but they are deep enough and rich enough to make you stop and look more than once. Besides, if you are glancing around at all the backgrounds, you need to turn up the difficulty and get into the fight! The game definitely offered a great deal of WOW moments as many reviewers have said as well. I thought that these moments were amazing–so amazing that they became water cooler talk at the office for two weeks. The freedom to fight large pitched battles and take on multiple Scarabs with any choice of weapons and tactics is empowering, and one of the highlights of the Halo experience. The new features such as equipment and multiple grenades give you some new tactics, but not enough to throw you off the golden formula that Bungie established in the first installment–grenades, melee and weapons. You definitely need to make heavy use of grenades and melee once you get to Legendary where ammo is more scarce.

Achievements also are well-designed in Halo 3. They are difficult but not impossible or requiring hours of work. The multiplayer ones may take some time and only come once in a blue moon, but the campaign achievements are very reachable and add the replayability.

The only major complaint I have against the campaign is one that Destructoid also shared. After seeing all the Halo 3 commercials and promotions with that great diorama, I expected to see that battle or at least a cutscene. I know that the ad designers had not seen the game when they made those, but I thought that the scene with Master Chief camptured holding a sticky grenade would at least have to be in the plot. Instead, I kept looking for that dare to be great moment where Master Chief would enter into the hearts of the masses. Besides the very end, I didn’t see that.

I felt that the ending was a proper one for this series, but I would have liked some explanation as to the logistics of why this or that ended up here or there. I would be more exact there, but I don’t want to ruin it for people checking out this review prior to finishing–for crying out loud though, man, if you haven’t finished it yet, get on it.

The Multiplayer

The multiplayer I like on Halo 3 more than any first-person shooter multiplayer in some time. I am not sure what makes me enjoy it so much, but for some reason, the timing and intuitive fighting style just seems to catch on and get instantly gratifying.

Saved films and Forge are incredible. Multiplayer freaks will be toying with them and releasing mods to maps for years. I don’t think anything as monumental to multiplayer has been seen since CounterStrike first triumphed with user-created gameplay. Maps have already been shared–Rocket Race and Pirates–that are catching on all around Xbox Live. I have made two or three videos of my best games thus far, and while I hate that there is no rewind, making mix tapes of my own destructive wake might never get old.

The new maps level the playing field a bit by taking away portals and exploitations that some earlier maps had for the advanced players. I really like the large levels with tons of new vehicles–my favorites are the Hornet (human helicopter) and the Brute Chopper (Brute badass motorcycle). Not a lot more is new besides equipment. The vehicles and weapons change, but they don’t give any great new flexibility to the game. It’s Halo 2 with beefed up physics and graphics.

A cool feature that gets overlooked is the armor personalization. By earning achievements in the campaign and collecting skulls, players can unlock different looks or armor–even a Ninja Gaiden throwback helmet–to make their character personalized and give opponents something else to fear besides that gamertag above the soldier running at them.

Conclusion

When taken together, Halo is a very complete game. Changes are well-planned and integrated into the existing formula well. It’s good that Bungie didn’t make any drastic changes; they didn’t need to do anything to what gamers already loved and admired. To keep their hardcore “Halo Nation” fans, they only needed to conclude the story without bursting any bubbles and correct the wrongs of Halo 2 multiplayer with some new weapon and equipment tweaks. To attract the mainstream, they made the lesser modes of the game easy to pick up and promoted the story. For all the hits that Halo takes for having a predictable or unoriginal plot, I still think that the storyline is part of what makes me love the series. Emotion and purpose are built into this final installment in every cutscene. Master Chief doesn’t just take orders but has a bit more personality and individual motive in this one. I was afraid after seeing the ads that he would just be worshiped on the battlefield as the Messiah, but luckily, he is still just the most badass soldier any of the NPCs have ever seen trying to find his way in a crazy alien-infested world. I’d like to know if Bungie knows where his character is going, but maybe at the end of this review I can share a couple of theories.

Halo 3 is an incredible advance in first-person shooters. It doesn’t completely revolutionize gameplay or invent a whole new kind of first-person shooter, but it IS Halo. It uses the same controls, formula and addictive multiplayer that established the Xbox and Bungie on the map. For your money, you probably won’t get a better pure first-person shooter on a console until 2008. Disclaimer: I have never played Half-Life, but I can stil safely say that this looks to be the first-person shooter to beat.

I don’t think the game is perfect. If I had to give it a number, I would say a 9/10. No game deserves a perfect score (in the perfect sense) unless it truly WOWs everyone that plays it and commands attention in the gaming universe. Some outlets use perfect scores simply as recommendations of games they pick as the best this year and worth buying, so they may give it a perfect score because it IS worth buying. In order to get a perfect score from me though, I would have to ask that the campaign hold up to what the commercials built–what I imagined either fairly or unfairly–a battle in which wave upon wave of Brute troops sweep onto a multiplayer-sized arena rather than encounter after encounter built into the linear path. I would have wanted to see the multiplayer really get crazy and differentiate itself with custom fighting upgrades like in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I would have wanted to see some incredibly groundbreaking gameplay feature that I just couldn’t get over for weeks. Hey, a 9 isn’t bad nonetheless.

For a shooter or an action game for that matter, Halo 3 gives you more variety of combat: tank, close quarters and long-range and keeps it interesting, so it is most definitely a must-play, but I think there is still room for improvement. Maybe that’s why they left it a little “ambiguous” in the end.

SPOILER BELOW

As for my predictions, I have two theories on where Master Chief ends up at the end of Legendary ending. No, neither of them is Master Chief vs. the Death Star.

Theory #1: The Covenant was right. Upon firing the Halo at the Ark, the ship was separated in the escape, and while the Arbiter and front of the ship returned to Earth, Master Chief and Cortana were transported to the Forerunners just as the Prophets predicted. The world below is the new home of the Forerunners, and Master Chief will find out who exactly the Forerunners are once and for all.

Theory #2: Master Chief gets transported back to the start of things–Reach, the planet where the Spartans were trained. On Reach is where the Covenant killed most of his Spartan kind, and maybe he will find some sort of solitude or resting place on its surface. I would assume that Reach was “glassed” after the attack, but perhaps there are still some remnants of life for him to find there.

Or maybe he is going to float around in space until a time when the people need him again…how Superman-esque.

Well, now, that is all I could have written about Halo 3. Now I’m heading back to bust some skulls in Lone Wolves…

Adam Sessler weighs in on the Halo 3 haters and why the series has been such a success

If you have any trouble viewing the above video, you can always find it here.

Destructoid posted a review that I have to post because I agree with it–in part. Part of what upset me in the Halo 3 campaign was that I expected those large, desperate battles with waves of Brutes. I didn’t get that.

I know the commercials were made by people who didn’t really play the game or know much about the Halo series, but don’t tempt me with this giant diorama of a battle that I never even get to see. It wasn’t even featured in a cutscene for crying out loud.

But all this would be trifling, not fit to notice, had the gameplay been anything like what we were promised. I shoved through the campaign mode because I was hoping the whole time to run into the epic, Braveheart-style battles depicted in the brilliant commercials. Massive city-streets troop surges, swarming human marines being thrown around by rampaging brutes, intense triumph and misery: this is the game I thought I had bought. It was not the game I played.

Overall, this Destructoid review from Eliza Gauger agrees with Something Awful: the campaign was just a little too bland to stand up to games like BioShock.

I’ve been a gamer all my life. You’d think, by now, I’d have learned to ignore hype, to receive games on their own terms with calm and dignity. But I am unable to accept that mediocrity is a desirable trait in any work of media. When did “stupid” become a valuable quality? Why is Halo 3 praised for its blandness, when Bioshock is only nervously lip serviced for its brilliance?

Please tell me, so I can stop weeping.

Halo 3 definitely only captures a select bunch of hte gaming audience. It’s a natural part of every genre that drives certain people to the side of “fanboy” and others to the picket lines of “hater.”

Something Awful definitely jumps wholeheartedly into the picket lines on this one. They didn’t enjoy the Halo 3 experience-comparing it to the new Madden.

The general consensus is that Halo 3’s single player feels more like an episodic installment than a full, robust campaign. There isn’t much to it and what’s there isn’t particularly exciting. Of course, the most common defense to those claims is that the multiplayer is so refined that it more than makes up for the sloppy solo campaign. Besides, multiplayer-only games that don’t even afford players the opportunity to shoot at the same stupid aliens in the same corridors with the same reflective shader for roughly six hours aren’t punished for it, so why is Halo 3?

Their biggest complaint it that they felt it did nothing new–nothing beyond what Halo 2 did which is pretty much true besides some multiplayer tweaks and equipment additions.

In the end, Halo 3’s biggest problem becomes apparent when you read a Halo 2 review right after playing Halo 3. Everything said about the first game pretty much rings true about the third, right down to the complaints. I was going to copy and paste a bunch of Halo 2 reviews together and call it my Halo 3 review had they not made me sign an academic honestly policy.

I neglected the AICN (great site if you don’t read it already) review of Halo 3 in the heat of trying to track them all through RSS feeds.

In Quint’s review, he takes a close look at the campaign in his preview of the game with Bungie. He went for getting the achievements right away and notes how much they add to the replayability of the game.

What you can do is replay any level and try to build up points. You get achievements if you reach a point minimum. You build points by killing bad guys (headshots count for more) and destroying vehicles. You get multipliers for beating it in a certain time, on a certain difficulty setting and having these skulls turned on. The more skulls you have turned on, the harder the difficulty level, the quicker you reach the level’s end, the higher the multipliers are.

The achievements and skulls really make the campaign great in Halo 3. Whereas you might have been satisfied zipping through Halo 2’s campaign once or twice, the edition of campaign level scoring adds an entire competitive element. The skulls also make the game harder and goofier (see Grunt Birthday Party skull for confetti).

The campaign has the same video and screenshot editing as multiplayer, so you can really take advantage of those epic moments in gameplay to share with your friends.

We tested this with our first level and it was mind-blowing. This level was almost 30 minutes long and it was only a 3.8 meg file. What’s sweet about it is you can switch views, watch yourself run through the map, pause and take a snapshot which you can save, move the camera around anywhere you want and even zip ahead into the map so you watch what the bad guys are doing for a few minutes before you show up and ruin their day. How sweet is that?

The review is great. Coming from a fanboy of the series, he takes a look at what makes Halo 3 a standout of the trilogy and the pinnacle of Bungie’s innovation in first-person shooters.

The G4 review provides a cool video highlighting the classiest parts of Halo 3 multiplayer culture, maps, video editing and Forge system to edit the map.

While most of the review focuses on actual explanation of these features, the review is very positive about each of these improvements. Sessler on the multiplayer and Webb on the campaign combine to explore the entire game–even pointing out intricacies that print/Web reviewers could not fully show without the benefit of full video and audio.

While I feel like a perfect score is a little high, I guess without being able to give decimals, they probably rounded up from the 4 range. If you haven’t bought the game yet because that car flipped on you in the frozen tundra, and you were just found yesterday, this review gives you everything you want to know before you buy your copy. Video below.

To keep you tempted for my review of Halo 3 finally coming later this week after hours of obsessively playing and painstakingly reading over what everyone else was saying since this was the highest profile game release to date and saw coverage everywhere–taking a breath–I give you two videos that are insane.

If you thought flipping Warthogs was the coolest trick of the gravity and grenades in the Halo series, check out this insane grenade stick that proves you just can’t get away.

The grenade in the elevator shaft/air vent trick is getting more and more popular on the bungie.net file shares and will probably become a strategic element in Halo 3 once more and more players begin to use the levitating grenade trick. It’s going to be a scary world with so many levels using man-cannons and elevators in Halo 3 multiplayer. *Shivers*

Look for my in-dept review later this week. I wanted to cover stat collection and sharing on Bungie’s database site as well as the campaign, co-op and multiplayer/unlockables, so excuse my tardiness. I will talk enough. I promise.

Destructoid puts the facts out there for Halo 3. Leaning on the multiplayer, they give the campaign a lackluster review because of it’s poor ending and lack of drama placed upon answering those crucial questions we have had from the very beginning. Although they give the campaign a lot more credit for improving unlike some reviews who were more harsh, what they do point out is held heavily against Halo. In the end, they give the conclusion to the trilogy a 8.5/10 with the multiplayer pulling the campaign up a bit. In Aaron Linde’s own words below.

Like I said earlier, Halo 3 is almost two games in one. The campaign can stand on its own two feet, but multiplayer is what’ll keep gamers coming back for years afterward. That being said, it seems difficult and even somewhat unfair to slap the game with a lower score for the faults of the campaign which, after digging into the game, feels very much secondary to the multiplayer component. But Halo 3 is a complete experience and ought to be measured as such.

It’s not perfect — far from it, actually — but Bungie’s accomplishments with multiplayer are so outstanding that it’s difficult to get uptight over it. Those losing sleep over the game’s impending release, you who are already dreaming up your excuse to get out of work so you can tear through the game — you won’t be disappointed. And for us bitter punks who were never much for the first two Halo titles, plan on being pleasantly surprised. Halo 3 is a solid effort, and one that’ll be dominating late nights for quite awhile.

As you can see, the review is pretty torn. Like many reviews, you can’t throw in the negative without going back to how overwhelmingly dominant the Bungie series is in this category. I mean, think about it, the closest comparison anyone is making is Halo 3 vs. Halo 2. I guess Halo 3 will now be the big goal to reach in the first-person shooter genre, and Destructoid agrees it will dominate with multiplayer for years.