The heretic leader, Prophet of Regret, and Tartarus don't count as boss fights? 🙂 Don't get me wrong, they suck too.

Ah. Good point. I clean forgot about those. Then again, that would also explain why I rank H2 as the next worst game in the series, above H5:G. The "boss battles" idea is just… dumb.

In H5:G, the big problem with the boss battles is that the boss is just a colossal pain in the ass, constantly. In H2 you can figure out good strategies to deal with Tartarus and especially Regret, but in the final battle against the Warden Eternal… man, he just SCREWS with you, because there are three of them coming at you simultaneously, all with stupidly overpowered attacks, and your teammates are basically totally useless because the squad command system in H5:G doesn't actually give you the ability to tell them exactly what to do.

As I pointed out in my review of the game, they had so much potential with that squad command idea. They literally had the guy who designed the squad command interface for STAR WARS: Republic Commando on the design team, and the reason why SWRC is so great is precisely because you can assign members of your squad to performing sniping, anti-armour, or grenade activities. If they had simply taken that same idea and incorporated it into H5:G, the game would have been truly great.

But they didn't. And in so doing, they wasted a tremendous opportunity to make the HALOverse fresh and new.

Idiots.

Given how many other sci-fi franchises have been hit with the Woke Bat lately, not to mention how the director of Gears 5 went out of his way to trumpet how woke and progressive he was (I know, different franchise, but Mr. Softy must have signed off on that), I don't have much hope for Infinite.

Me too. I'm worried about the woke bullshit in this new game. We'll see how it turns out. Franke O'Connor knows what he's doing, but Bonnie Ross was the one calling the shots at Mr. Softy when H5:G came out, and look what happened there.

I haven't played Reach since it came out (it's on deck after 2 and before 5), but "Long Night of Solace" is enough to vault it to the top of my favorite list all by itself, since you get to play X-Wing for half the level. I also love the way the mood goes from "we are totally boned," to "it's not looking good, but we may actually pull this off!" to "nope, we are definitely, 100% screwed, and we're all gonna die." Even though you know what's going to happen just from the title, Bungie succeeds in not making you feel like you wasted your time.

Thanks for the tip on 5. I've also read that playing that one on Legendary makes 2 look like a cakewalk, which freaks me out a little. I'll probably still play it out of curiosity since I already have it. The not-playing-as-Chief thing doesn't bother me since I actually LIKE the Arbiter and what Bungie was trying to do with him. Halo 2, even with all of its flaws, has one of my favorite cutscenes of all time right at the beginning. If Bungie had the stones to actually let us fight humans with him, and hadn't stuffed all of his levels with Flood (which are also unfairly hated IMHO – every other shooter with zombies gets praised to the moon, but Bungie's universe-destroying intelligent ones led by Audrey II suck?), he might have more esteem among the fandom.

The heretic leader, Prophet of Regret, and Tartarus don't count as boss fights? 🙂 Don't get me wrong, they suck too.

Given how many other sci-fi franchises have been hit with the Woke Bat lately, not to mention how the director of Gears 5 went out of his way to trumpet how woke and progressive he was (I know, different franchise, but Mr. Softy must have signed off on that), I don't have much hope for Infinite.

There is a lot more than just the graphics. The guns are broken too. There is a serious issue with the spread and bullet magnetism of the pistol, and shots not registering in matchmaking. The issue goes beyond lag. There has been matches where I can clearly see the flash of a bullet hitting the head and nothing happens. I've noticed the shotgun is screwy too sometimes. Sometimes it takes three shots to take down an opponent at close range. There's also a known glitch with the plasma rifle as well. The sandbox is fundamentally broken in the MCC version of CE.

On my first play through of campaign I stumbled across at least a dozen issues that should have been caught by 343 on a casual play through. To be fair I haven't ran through Combat Evolved in over a decade so I explored a little bit. Still though, most of them were on paths the player is forced to take. The game is broken, but its still Halo when it functions properly. I hope it gets fixed. I recently stumbled across halo1hub.com/ too. Apparently, they've figured out how to play the OG Xbox version through the internet. I remember doing this with XBConnect back in the day. Don't worry the legend still lives on.

I do believe you just gave me like half the material I need for next Monday's post…

I played HALO: Reach on Legendary, ONCE. My LORD but it was a colossal pain in the ass. The balance issues in Reach are pretty ridiculous to begin with, and Legendary just makes them about twenty times worse.

I get why that is. The point of H:R was to give the player a feeling of fighting a losing battle against an overwhelmingly superior enemy – but the end result had to give each of us a feeling that we had contributed in some way to a true victory. And Bungie, to their great credit, pretty much succeeded in crafting the story, gameplay, and dynamics to hit such an ambitious target.

Having suffered through HALO 2 Jackals with beam rifles and drones with plasma pistols repeatedly, I'm pretty sure I'll keep playing it on Heroic. The stupidity factor gets cranked up by at least an order of magnitude on anything else.

As for HALO 5: Guardians… I never, ever thought that I would type these words in my life, ever, but… don't bother.

It's heresy for me to write that. But the fact is that H5:G is easily the weakest game in the entire franchise – it's FAR worse than H2, and that's saying something.

The parts of the game where you get to play as the Master Chief are AMAZEBALLS, and the assault on Sunaion when you're playing as Locke is excellent. But the rest of the game is… meh.

And the fact that you have to take on the same boss FOUR TIMES – in the final boss battle, you have to fight against three Warden Eternals at the same time – just shows you how artistically bankrupt the production team was. I mean, this is a game franchise that NEVER had boss battles, ever – it simply threw enemies at you in escalating orders of difficulty. And then all of a sudden, just to dick with longtime fans of a franchise that scales in difficulty as you progress through the games, the production team threw BOSS BATTLES at us.

They forgot, or never understood in the first place, that HALO is not the Metal Gear franchise. And it really shows in H5:G.

I gave that game a stellar review when I first played it. The five years (!!!!!) since that time have shown me that I did so largely out of fanboyism, not objective analysis. I've since greatly scaled back my views of the game and now think of it as "the shitty one".

I really hope that HALO Infinite restores the glory of the franchise. It went from being one of the most innovative, challenging, and inspirational franchises out there, to an also-ran that copies the style and controls of other, far less interesting, franchises – with worse results.

No, it came through just fine ))

The reason you didn't see it instantly is because I have the spam filters on this blog cranked up to Rectus Maximus. It's necessary simply because of the amount of crap that would result without it. Every comment is individually moderated by me personally, and that can result in a delay of several hours between a comment being posted by you, and it actually being published by me.

Are you having a lovely quasi-pseudo-kinda-apocalypse? Here it's nothing but flowers.

Advising your clients to put everything into canned food and shotguns yet?

Or are you hoping that people will worship you and bring you TP for your bunghole?

But we all know who to blame, don't we …

日本人 health and safety bitches, don't be giving me any shit about my 山菜 during a global health crisis!

I am a professional self-medicator, don't be messing with my shit. 🙂

In short, Gearbox porked something in the original PC port graphics, and that PC port is the basis for the 360 Anniversary remaster, which is in turn the basis for the MCC. I dunno if they fixed this in the PC version, but I always wondered why original graphics mode looked so much crappier than I remembered on the 360 and XBONE. Turns out that my nostalgia was right for once.

Also, I swear I'm not trying to start an internet d!ck-measuring contest here, but if you're not playing on Legendary, you aren't playing it right. The absolute best thing about Halo, other than every playthrough being different, is knowing that you EARNED your victories because the enemies are just as smart as you are. No other shooter, save perhaps FEAR, Half-Life, or Gears of War, even comes close to providing that feeling. Legendary, by being that much harder, makes you feel like an even BIGGER badass when you come out the other side of 8+ red Elites and their supporting Grunts and Jackals in one piece. I was a Heroic player myself until I attempted to take down H3 for the 100 XBOX Live points back in my cheevo hunter days, and I haven't looked back since.

I'm currently running through 2 again on Legendary against my better judgement. I haven't played 5 (yet), but 2 is the only one where I'd recommend playing through Legendary once and then never again. All of 2's already annoying BS gets cranked up to 11, which makes big chunks of it (like literally any part with those instant-kill Jackal snipers) the opposite of fun.