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First Impressions of Halo 3 83

Posted by Zonk from the hail-to-the-chief dept.
1up and EGM have had some time in the last month with the next iteration of Microsoft's Halo series. Several folks at the site have put up their impressions of the current build of the game, including some multiplayer feelings from EGM editor-in-chief Dan Hsu, a bunch of nice crunchy details from Mark Macdonald, a nostalgia-laiden look at the game from Luke Smith, and a potpourri of details from Crispin Boyer. From Luke's writeup: "Maybe it was the first shooter I played that had some substance? Maybe it was that my best friend bought me a copy of the game for my birthday and I didn't even have the console yet. Maybe it was all of the traveling to play in Halo tournaments on weekends in college, but somewhere between Halo: Combat Evolved's release and now, Halo became my Mario. It is the game that made me care about video games like I did when I was 10."
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First Impressions of Halo 3 More

First Impressions of Halo 3

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  • Sounds like the entirety of the Halo series to me. Not that interesting. I'd rather go for something with some substance, like Half-Life 2.

    • Nothing to see? How about a hot, hot pussy? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Channard ( 693317 ) on Monday November 06, 2006 @06:26PM (#16743129) Journal
      At least that'll be the case if you buy the super-dooper collector's edition of Halo 3. Granted, the internet isn't a 100% reliable source of information but apparetly the replica helmet you get with this edition will be cat-sized. So presumably we can look forward to Halo 3 hitting the news with reports of cat owners having to take their sweltering animals to the vets after cramming the helmets onto their moggy heads and being unable to get them off again.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AP2k ( 991160 )
      Trolling? I can think of at least a dozen games with more substance than Halo.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ProppaT ( 557551 )
      How'd this get marked troll? This is dead on my opinion. Half Life 2 was pure brilliance. Beautiful, great story and depth. Halo is severely overrated. It's this generations Goldeneye, which was also overrated. Call me sometime next year when there's a good shooter on the Wii, the only viable console to play a shooter on.
      • Goldeneye wasn't that overrated, and you could do some much more fun things in multiplayer with it. Hell, the levels were more original and varied than Halo's, and they were patterned after a frigging movie. Then you had Halo. I used the pistol whip, the sniper gun, and the pistol itself. That was it for multi. The other guns were just crap. Meanwhile most of hte guns except for the AK clone weree fun to dick around with. Not to mention explosive mine goodness.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Halo and Half Life are both good games you goddamn zealots. Stop acting like it's an either/or and embrace the synergy that is both/and!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by @madeus ( 24818 )
        Call me sometime next year when there's a good shooter on the Wii, the only viable console to play a shooter on.

        Millions of of people that do play first person shooters may disagree with you. It's all about the control mechanism and game mechanics, as long as you build them with the target platform in mind, it's perfectly viable.

        Compare, GRAW on the 360 vrs GRAW for Windows. Despite the PC version having more interactive environments and allowing for more fine grained controller of your squad members it's n
    • Sounds like the entirety of the Halo series to me. Not that interesting. I'd rather go for something with some substance, like Half-Life 2.
      Yes, by all means, let's get the obligatory "This game pwnz that game!" stuff out of the way. Move along indeed.
  • Links for the Luke Smith and Crispin Boyer articles appear to be identical.

  • WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Turn-X Alphonse ( 789240 ) on Monday November 06, 2006 @06:03PM (#16742639) Journal
    "Maybe it was the first shooter I played that had some substance"

    Some how the above quote makes me think he's a fanboy and not someone we should be listening to. FPS games have substance before halo and if anything lost a lot of it's substance in the Halo generation.

    • Re:WTF? (Score:4, Funny)

      by ePhil_One ( 634771 ) on Monday November 06, 2006 @06:08PM (#16742757) Journal
      FPS games have substance before halo

      Exactly. I think the first one was called "Marathon". Shame those guys aren't making games anymore.

      • I assume that you liked the Star Wars prequels just as much as the originals?
        (of course, this is coming from a person who liked the sequels to the Matrix--I'm just showing an example that will convince the majority of /.ers that past performance != present performance. Oh, and Han never really shot first even when he shot first. Mal Reynolds really shot first.)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by J. T. MacLeod ( 111094 )
      How many FPS games with substance have most gamers, or even reviewers, played? Doom? Quake? Both revolutionary, but mostly devoid of substance.

      Oh, there was--wait, no.

      Bottom line is that there just haven't been many. It's entirely possible that Halo was the first substance-filled FPS he played.
      • Half-Life? Seemed to me that Half-Life(and its sequel but that came after the original Halo) has more substance than Halo.
        • The first one had me from the beginning, but I got totally lost in the story in HL2. I never did fully understand what was going on or what I had missed since HL1. Recently, I went back and found a site [members.shaw.ca] that described the timeline of events and pulled all the pieces together. I'm gonna go back and replay both HL1 and HL2 now that I understand what's going on; I want to re-experience it. For me, HL2 didn't fill in the blanks in the storyline. I do like it, though, now that I understand.

          I do like Halo
        • Marathon pre-dates Half-Life and has just as much substance and depth. Compared to what else was out in that time frame (Doom) it was pretty damn revolutionary.

          Does Halo have the same depth as Marathon? No. But it has a cohesive story that isn't horribly cliche, and there is enough background developed to keep everything anchored. Plus, Bungie is really good at subtly, and they cram a lot of plot hints and details that many players completely overlook. (The same could be said for Half Life)
      • How many FPS games with substance have most gamers, or even reviewers, played? Doom? Quake? Both revolutionary, but mostly devoid of substance.

        Half-Life, System Shock, Deus Ex and Thief come to mind.

        The problem with Halo is that the level design is ridiculously repetitive, and that really kills the game. After playing the aforementioned games, Halo seemed really lame.
    • Interestingly I can remember thinking the exact opposite when I first sat down and played Halo - "where's the depth to this?" The actual combat seemed relatively repetitive and the at-times impressive graphics didn't seem to have much effect on the gameplay.

      This guy needs to get a Ninty and play some Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, then perhaps an old PC and really get into some serious Half Life, Unreal Tournament, BF1942 and Quake II action if he wants to legitmately use the word 'substance.'

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Broken scope ( 973885 )
        You know, I liked Golden eye and PD as much as the next guy. For gods sake though, why can't we move on. Golden Eye was good, but it is not the ultimate FPS, I enjoyed jet force gemini way more than Golden eye, for both single and MP, limited as it was.

        Halo was fun, it was fluid and it was a good time at a party. The story was good for an FPS and it has a fairly well thought out plot. It Did have substance, so does HL, SS, SS2,Deus Ex, so do enumerable games in the genre. Why the hell do we have to act l
        • Thank you, I agree 100%.

          Move on...and don't be a music snob.

        • Why the hell do we have to act like a bunch of music snobs who sit around discussing what music/band/sound/bs is better instead of just going out and enjoying every bit of it that we like, why do we have to shove our opinions about what game is the "ultimate" experience.

          Um.... because the guy in TFA was the one who said that Halo was the first FPS he's played with 'substance', and this is a place to discuss the content and merits of the article? And because personally, I strongly dislike the whole 'console
          • Very few games can ever hope to reach the same level as Deus Ex.

            Eventually the console and "PC" will be dead, we will have moved onto another computing paradigm. I am an avid PC gamer, I enjoy mapping in Source and I used to like mapping in goldsrc. I hate CS with a burning passion. After 2 good years of playing it I got sick of it, it lost all its fun. Still fun for a quick lan match, but i think people should just move on.

            I used to run a q3 or q2 dedicated server at my HS. We didn't do work in the l
            • ...but i think people should just move on.

              If you were talking about NetHack, you'd probably get lynched around here.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Reapy ( 688651 )
            Halo = Golden Eye for a younger generation.

            Consol fps games are a different experience due to being a LAN in the box for 4+ players, as was said above. Internet gaming is cool, but I didn't know the goodness of LAN play until I went to college and blew someone's head off in unreal, only to hear "FUCK" shouted down the hall. What great feedback that was.

            I hated bond at first, controls sucked, graphics sucked, the little tiny box in the corner of my scren sucked. But I kept at it, and by the end of the year 0
            • And then there are those of us who *were* into pc gaming when FPS were just beginning to walk and witnessed Id's rise to glory in the age of Wolf 3d, and have still come to see the light that is Halo. Went through Doom, Quake, DN3d, Golden Eye etc.. etc.. then became totally bored with more of the same over the years. Halo re-awakened my love for the game, with it's overall appeal, the combination of story, music (yes to me that is a very important part.. and the music in Halo is second to NONE) and the she
    • It may not be a popular opinion, but Halo was pretty crappy as far as single player games go ... Where Halo was a very good game (and worthy of its hype) was in a 16 player lan game. Certainly PC gamers had large lan-parties for years before Halo was released, but a lan party that size was quite difficult to set up and there were (always) tons of technical problems. To get a Halo lan game to work you just needed 4 people with a reasonable sized TV (hopefully over 27 inches), and 4 consoles (either owned or

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Haeleth ( 414428 )
        Where Halo was a very good game (and worthy of its hype) was in a 16 player lan game. Certainly PC gamers had large lan-parties for years before Halo was released, but a lan party that size was quite difficult to set up and there were (always) tons of technical problems. To get a Halo lan game to work you just needed 4 people with a reasonable sized TV (hopefully over 27 inches), and 4 consoles (either owned or rented) a router and some cables.
        Um, it sounds like you're describing how to make a four-player
        • It is just as easy as setting up as was described, 4 tv's, 4 xboxes, some cat5, and the amount of controlers equal to the amount of available warm bodies up to a total of 16. More warm bodies optional to be hot-swapped as required.

          This is surely easier than finding space in your abode to stick 16 pc's.
    • Or maybe when he said "...it was the first shooter I played that had some substance" he meant that it was the first shooter he had played that had some substance.

      I don't see anywhere where he indicates that it was the first shooter EVER with some substance.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by AP2k ( 991160 )
        Can we post every other person's first impressions to playing Doom, Quake, Halo, et al then?
    • I listen to the 1up netcast every week.
      Luke is a hard hitting whiner, I actually like it - he bitches on microtransactions and generally tries to get to the bottom of things.

      That being said, one thing I can't agree with is his love for Halo, he's most definately a Halo fanboy.
      As far as I'm concerned the game was ok, but is likely one of the most over-rated games of all time.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by PaganRitual ( 551879 )
      It probably just means that he only plays FPS on console.

      But yeah, he is probably just a total fanboy. They seem to go hand in hand. If Halo is the first FPS/Deathmatch game you've ever played, you seem to come away thinking it's the best thing since sliced bread and you refuse to listen to any opposing opinion. Even when it's been done better many times prior and many times since, and even on it's own merits the game is very poor, especially single player. And it's not that hard to get MP right, and co-

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Inoshiro ( 71693 )
        "It probably just means that he only plays FPS on console. "

        See also: all those people who thought Golden Eye was a good game!

        It's the Septmeber that never ended for video games. Thanks, Microsoft and Sony.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by AcidLacedPenguiN ( 835552 )
        while you're probably right, I must say that as a person who has played nearly every first person shooter since ken's labyrinth (not including the crappy PSX/PS2/xbox bond games) I did enjoy goldeneye, halo, and halo 2. I think the real fanboyism in this discussion is the "PC is better than console mentality". Is it really that hard for people to accept that some people like games that they didn't like or vice versa?
      • My FPS playing goes back to Wolf3d, and has made Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Half Life, Thief, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, CounterStrike, Descent, Aliens vs. Predator, and who-knows-what other stops, at various version numbers, along the way. If you toss in console FPS, you can start counting Turok, Goldeneye, that Aliens game for the Jaguar, Perfect Dark, TimeSplitters, Metroid: Prime, and maybe a couple more I'm forgetting. Hopefully, this qualifies me to comment on FPS games.

        I like Halo.

        I had more fun with H
        • "I apologize, though, if I'm breaking your compartmentalization/judgement scheme."

          That's cool though, you fit right here in the compartment with me :D. We can wait for Halo 3 together. Old skoolers moving into the future, waiting on our new game.

          Thanks for reminding me about Descent.. man, the times we used to stay at work till 10 at night playing that.. it's the game that showed me how much fun lan gaming is. I still have my 3d orb buried in a box somewhere, along with all my old thrustmaster joysticks and
    • I don't have mod points, so I'm just here to give an amen....
  • As in Ninja Laiden? Score one for the editors!
  • Because it seems few 360 games have split-screen options. Given how heavily Microsoft are pushing Live, it wouldn't surprise me if Halo 3 only offered co-op and MP via Live.

  • Why did Bungie have to copy the names of Nine Inch Nails records? Halo 3 is the Head Like a Hole maxi-single [wikipedia.org].

  • I have to agree. Halo does have more substance... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JL-b8 ( 862188 ) on Monday November 06, 2006 @06:39PM (#16743361)
    Than most console FPSs. For starters I was only into computer gaming until I got a playstation, then I had a fall out of gaming altogether. I bought PS2 at launch, bought GTA3 and all that, but it just never stuck with me. Then I got a taste of Halo at a friends and it was over from there. It turned into my new mario or zelda. Halo 3 is the one true game that I'm looking forward to and I think whatever bungie does following halo will be at the same caliber and possibly better.
    • Is it any wonder us "hardcore" long-time gamers just groan when people talk about Halo? The parent post is the perfect example..

      Fucking Halo...

      • I've been playing FPS's since Wolf3d. I hope that classifies me as a 'Hardcore' long-time player. In my expert, experienced opinion: Halo is the second console FPS to be worth playing. (The first being Goldeneye) Is it the greatest FPS ever? No. Is it a steaming pile of dogshit? No. It's a good game, and worth playing. I don't understand why people feel the need to be so extreme about these things. It's just a game, so get off your soapbox and chill.
        • Well first of all, I forgot my tag, ie. I meant it mostly tongue-in-cheek.

          But Halo was not the second worthwhile console FPS, IMO. Red Faction was reasonable, and Half-Life for the PS2 was a better game than Halo(not including MP). And there were some other really fun FPSes on the N64 too. Halo was certainly the best multiplyer console FPS of it's time. I played a decent amount of Halo. I was, in fact, a fan. I was eager to play Halo 2.

          But then Halo 2 sucked =P

          I was very disappointed by Halo 2. To m
  • That the game is not delayed impossibly long like 2, that tons of features I was looking forward to are not removed like 2, and that the game looks at least as good as 2 was supposed to look. Even as different as it was from the hype, Halo 2 still rocked, and I would bet that Halo 3 will as well.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tarison ( 600538 )
      I hate to break it to you, but the odds are you'll only get two of your wishes. Choose carefully.
  • I've been playing games since Atari, Coleco, and NES. My brother had a 3do, and I mostly skipped over later Nintendo and Sony PS for PC Games. Halo MADE me get an XBOX because it was one of the first console games that captured the freedom/substance of PC FPS. Halo 3 is probably the only game I'm looking forward to in this latest generation because of it's history. Other games/consoles are good, but Halo CE was very groundbreaking for the console gaming industry. While there are of course better games
  • Halo is the best he could come up with?

    No: Medal of Honor series (started the whole WW2 game being popular), FEAR, SOCOM, Ghost Recon series (cept for #2), Splinter Cell series, Max Payne(s), Half-life, countless others, etc???

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