I just don't get it. Is it just that the Xbox sucks and there's no other games for it? Is it just that there are no good FPSs for consoles?

All i've seem and what i played of the first one on PC just makes me see a run of the mill FPS with nothing really going for it, specially gfx wise.


Gives us a kiss precious.

But Halo came out at a critical time for the Xbox (launch title) and most gamers don't know a decent FPS from a hole in the ground. Thus, everyone loves Halo and Doom 3. Go figure. IMO Halo wasn't any better than Red Faction (I'd say I liked Red Faction a bit more, actually).

Then again, if joe sixpack liked the games I like, then we'd be seeing a shit load more vertical shooters in the US and we'd be playing Need for Speed Porsche Unleased 3 instead of Need For Speed Underground 2.

Also, Gearbox did a pretty shitty job of porting Halo over to the PC and I really hope that someone competent (ie. in house production team at MS or even Bungie themselves) ports Halo 2. I have no doubts that Halo 2 is far superior to the first game.

> I just don't get it. Is it just that the Xbox sucks and there's no other games
> for it? Is it just that there are no good FPSs for consoles?
>
> All i've seem and what i played of the first one on PC just makes me see a run
> of the mill FPS with nothing really going for it, specially gfx wise.
>
>
> Gives us a kiss precious.
>



Moon the world

Not that I would mind a NFS:PU3, but...

...if it were up to me. It would have just been Need For Speed: Motor City as it was originally intended, and it'd support up to 32 players on specially designed tracks and 12 players on the normal tracks.

It would have a complete campaign mode, a car customization feature balanced in a manner similar to Dark Forces 2 - Jedi Knight, and would use an engine that'd put Forza Motorsport to shame.

Yes...yes...if it were up to me, we'd have some good shit :(

Halo 1 and 2 are subpar FPS games in the grand scheme, nasty little ripoffs of what was done earlier and better in Tribes.

The reason why it did so fucking good was harkening back to the last generation. What one game basically sold the N64 to millions and was the highest seller? NO...Not Mario, strike 2...Not Zelda.

Goldeneye64... Awesome game, ai wasn't a genius, had a few issues, but the MP game owned and the level design was good.

Fast Forward... Xbox...jack shit for games, Halo though...it was a MP's wetdream and had an average 1P game too kinda like Goldeneye (but a shittier 1p game in halo, a bit nicer obviously due to tech advancements in the MP area.)

That's all it is...scarcity and coolness of WOW there's that 1 gem on my console I must own it factor.

> I just don't get it. Is it just that the Xbox sucks and there's no other games
> for it?

That's most of it. Same reason Goldeneye was the ultimate on N64, it had no other good games. I mean when it comes down to it, you can't tell a gun on the ground from a proximity mine in that game on that 4 player blurry-as-hell screen. At least Halo is somewhat sharp and you can play full screen multiplayer.

People who own X-Boxes say there are plenty of good games, but they obviously don't own PS2s, which means you can select many more games and you can be much more discerning. You don't always have to take what they give you, like with the X-Box and GameCube. People argue the X-Box has more good games simply because it has more 3rd party support than the Cube, but they don't take into account all of the good Nintendo and 2nd party releases. Most of MS's first party releases suck ass and you never hear of them, but some are good like Halo and Crimson Skies. Those are not in-house talent but bought talent, though. Nintendo tends to work more with 3rd parties than just going around buying talent too. Like they helped with Metal Gear Solid on the Cube. They worked with SEGA to make F-Zero, they worked with Namco to make the new Star Fox, they're working with Capcom on the Zeldas. Anyway, all that to say, the X-Box doesn't have that many good games. No good tactics/RPGs, very few fighting games, practically no shmups, crappy platformers, less Japanese releases in general. It caters to american tastes, that's for sure, and that's fine. But you can only stand so much of the same crap over and over, you need variation. It also has more games that you don't care about. Kakuto Chojin, Bruce Lee Quest of the Dragon, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2: Shitty Version, Shrek, Counter-Strike (it sucks on X-Box), Unreal II, Unreal Championship (all plagued with slowdown), Sega GT, and its cross-platform library is mostly shitty too, BMX XXX, Alter Echo, Driv3r, The Italian Job, Crash Wrath of Cortex, Futurama, Backyard Wrestling, X-Men, I mean for every high profile game there's 5 shitty ones. Oh and it got the best version of Turok Evolution, wooooo hooooooooooooo.

> Is it just that there are no good FPSs for consoles?

Yeah there's that too. Most of them suck! But then again, that's the case for PC too. Only a few are really good and are really worth playing. For consoles and PCs I think, the Medal of Honour series is good, as well as Half Life. Consoles have TimeSplitters and Halo though which are pretty good.

> All i've seem and what i played of the first one on PC just makes me see a run
> of the mill FPS with nothing really going for it, specially gfx wise.

Well not really. The game does bring some cool shit to the genre. I dunno if it's been done in other games as I don't play many FPSes, hate 'em!

Halo, though, has the rechargable shields which means you don't constantly have to go looking for health. Halo 2 is even better, as it does away with health altogether, you only have your shields and then you can take a couple of hits as long as it's not in your head until you die.

Halo was the first game to do co-op really well. Part of that was because you could go around in vehicles. The other part was Legendary difficulty, which relies on you being fucking good, because the AI is actually very good. If you're the type that plays Contra: Shattered Soldier until you get perfect, then you'll love this (providing you love the game). Halo also was one of the first, if not the first FPS, to do vehicles really well, and used it as part of the story.

Halo perfected what Quake 2+ wanted to do, which was the level "hub" design. In Halo, you could go from the end and backtrack to the beginning of the game practically, and all the weapons and clips are right where you left 'em. It adds to the realism and immersion. Other stuff is enemy dropships come by and drop enemies off, which gives you a lot of "oh shit we're gonna die" moments where the enemies overwhelm you but you get through.

Another cool thing about Halo is it's like the survival-horror of video games, especially part 2. Weapons and ammo are limited to what you can get off the enemies, but if you're really efficient it'll be more than enough. The harder the difficulty the worse it is because the enemies take more hits, and on Legendary you'll be calculating every shot and taking everything into account. The more an enemy fires the less ammo you receive from them as well. This also allows Halo to do away with "Find the secret hidden elevator" crap that seems out of place in a lot of FPSes. Like there's really a secret ammo stash in the middle of a canyon.

The other thing is the huge ass levels, like canyons. You can even fly around in them. Another cool part is Halo has a lot of variation. Like X-Wing. Sometimes you have to escort people, you've got wingmen, there are waves of enemies and sometimes you can stay around longer than expected to fry 'em (though you don't always have to). Sometimes your missions involve holding ground, sometimes you have to capture ground. Anyway it's kinda like X-Wing because of the variation. I find in other FPSes there really is a lot of "find the item put the item here," but like Half Life (though I find Halo more fun than Half Life), Halo manages to make stuff part of the story or at least make it interesting for you.

Also in multiplayer, the weapons are really balanced. You don't get pissed off at the snipers because there are trails that come from their bullets, and other guns have zoom (not just the sniper rifle), or you could have a vehicle which makes you really hard to hit, there's a lot of tactics involved. The best part is that this translates over to the single player game. You still can yank enemies off of vehicles, you still have to battle against snipers, other flying enemies, you have to infiltrate bases, there's a certain amount of stealth involved as well.

The enemies also have a lot of personality, there are different ways to sneak up on the different types. I think what helps is Halo does like brawlers (Final Fight, Double Dragon, Streets of Rage) and RPGs. It not only throws at you different types of enemies, but also different ranks and personalities. The yellow ones are stupidest and run off and tell their superiors. The red ones usually have rocket launchers and more heavy artillery and are smarter, etc. Higher difficulties introduce more colours also.

Like anything else, you can get bored of Halo. But it's really good. It's well thought out to make the game as un-boring and well balanced as possible. If you're an expert at the genre maybe you prefer something more technical, but I think Halo is really well rounded and well thought out.

Halo is quite possibly the most over-rated game in history. People act like it's the second coming when there's nothing particularly radical about it. There is better stuff on PC.

Am tired to hear that what is you point. mine its very clear sun. shit uuuuuuuuppppppppp - Dany

> I have no doubts that Halo 2 is far superior to
> the first game.

Yeah, well, it's superior, but not far superior. It's a sequel. Graphics wise it's the same as Halo. Halo though didn't use the machine as "efficiently" as Halo 2 does. Halo had nice detail textures, nice everything, there was no Dreamcast-10-feet-in-front-of-you-blur. Lots of mip map levels and the LOD blended in really well, you never really saw it switching. Everything was bumpmapped as in part 2, high res models, all this. Halo 1 looked more polished than Halo 2.

Halo 2 has more blur in its textures, in fact even close up to the screen it could look as bad as Zelda 64 sometimes depending on what you're looking at. Sometimes it's an error in the rendering engine! Same with LOD, sometimes you're looking at ugly-ass models, and there's a lot of pop-in. They also have noticable fade-in in this game, you walk 10 feet away from a wall and a light fixture will fade out into oblivion. All the screenshots you see are doctored, everything's at the highest detail all the time. In the real game shit starts to look like ass as you walk away from it. Up close shit looks a lot better than in the first game, though. I guess it's a trade off, but I would not say Halo 2 looks better than Halo. In fact I think that the distractions take away from the game. I prefer it if I'm not paying too much attention because of gunfire, but when you sit back and look at it, it's a bit of a disappointment because of how they built it up in the screenshots.

The levels are also cut up more due to an increase in detail and scripting. The loading is shorter but more frequent, and you actually leave areas and can't backtrack as much as in the first game, that really sucks. Parts of the game are shorter than you expect sometimes, it's kinda disappointing.

Now the gameplay itself is a LOT better. The levels are more varied, they're better balanced and well paced, and have cooler shit for you to do. The enemies are more varied in actions and a lot smarter, Legendary difficulty is just a lot more fun because of this. The weapons are almost perfectly balanced, much more so than in the first game at any rate. The multiplayer maps are more detailed and varied, although they aren't vastly superior to the first game. They fixed bugs that plagued the first game and allowed shit like walking without making a sound, and dumbass shit like that.

Still, if you had your fill of Halo 1 and only dusted it off out of excitement for Halo 2, and you wouldn't have played it otherwise, then you won't find too much replay in this game. You'll beat it and then maybe play a little multiplayer but the excitement will wear off a lot more quickly than it did with the first game. The flaws also make the game seem rushed. Halo seemed rushed too because of the level design. I guess it's a curse. At least this time overall it's a more enjoyable and immersive experience.

Console gamers prefer different games than PC gamers and I guess this is part of it. Halo is really well done for a console FPS. Maybe if they did a better job on PC ports they'd be more well liked. Usually the interface of a PC port is a big part of why they blow. Lots of tiny text, not well geared towards a joystick and console graphics capabilities, they're better geared towards PC hardware and requiring lots of RAM, it's just doomed to fail. Halo on PC is well done though, but when it came out it was dated. If it was out earlier it would have probably lived up to the hype at the time.

> Halo 1 and 2 are subpar FPS games in the grand scheme, nasty little ripoffs of
> what was done earlier and better in Tribes.
>

Sure they ripped of a lot of games, but they did it well. Like Halcyon said, the vehicle mechanics were really well done. I found it exilerating hopping in a vehicle, while one hops in the passenger seat, and another grabs the gun in the back (woah, that sounded homo-erotic :-/) Sure, nothing revolutionary, but the elements were compiled together in a decent manner, and not a clusterfuck of "cool stuff."

IIRC the FPS genre was very dry at the time this game came out. '98/99 had a shitload of good games, eg: Half-life, Blood 2, Sin, just to name a few. Then started rolling out the "online" games, with little or no single player elements, such as Quake 3, and Unreal Tournement. Jedi Outcast didn't come out until 2002, and that was garbage, not to mention a shitload of WW2 theme'd games.

Halo seemed to bring back that single player element that was missing from games around that time. Are PC FPS creators thinking along those lines as well? Well, it looks like id tried it with doom 3. Sadly, it failed. They really missed the boat on that one. There multiplayer is fucking garbage, and the single player was boring and repetitive. Same damn scenery throughout the game, and the story was damn weak too. Far Cry brought back that Single player expierence that people have been craving for, too.

Half-life 2 comes out in less than a week. Graphics are looking poor in places, but i think the physics engine will be the highlight of the game.

> I just don't get it. Is it just that the Xbox sucks and there's no other games
> for it? Is it just that there are no good FPSs for consoles?
>
> All i've seem and what i played of the first one on PC just makes me see a run
> of the mill FPS with nothing really going for it, specially gfx wise.
>
>
> Gives us a kiss precious.
>

Not as retarded as the first one getting perfect 10s though.

Am tired to hear that what is you point. mine its very clear sun. shit uuuuuuuuppppppppp - Dany

Average graphics (fucked up at times), similar gameplay, short Campaign mode...

And they rated it a fucking 9.8.

Explain to me how a game so decidedly AVERAGE scores a near perfect rating. This is why I never believe ANY reviews. It's tough to find a trustworthy source.

I didn't expect much from it, so I was pleasantly surprised

M$ paid for the review in some manner I'd imagine... that's what companies do when something somewhat blows to cover their tracks. Hype, go covert, then bulk sale up front since returns aren't allowed...make cash and run.

My advice. Gamefaqs and Gamerankings.com's 'USER' reviews. That and take a look at the full range of reviews on a game, if you know one is suspect like Halo2, find the 3 worst and see what they rip on, then take an average between the hyped highend ones.

That's worked enough for me in the past, but best is the user reviews because those poor bastards bought it and learned the hard way (financially and time) one way or the other.