HALO Anniversary is ass

[Stark]

I'm holding Zak responsible; he was a big Halo fan in the day so we rented a few copies from EB to coops it up. Coop makes anything good, right?

It does, unless the game is ugly as shit, has laughably poor frame-rate and apepars to be the PC port of Halo with a texture replacement.

A part of the 'update' is apparently lighting related (bloom or HDR or something) and so the too-busy textures used on a lot of map geometry look AWFUL because all the dithering is in harsh constrast. Some things (like Captain Keyes, the marines, and the underground facilities) now look completely different and awful. Zak noted in partiuclar that the first underground bridge section in new graphics is brightly lit with lights everywhere and thus the emergence back to the surface lacks the dark -> light kick that you get in 'old' mode. The night assault on the T&R is similarly quite bright in 'new' mode, but looks like it used to in 'old' mode.

We tried 'new' mode, but switched back semi-constantly and ended up playing in 'old' mode because the frame rate appeared slightly faster... but the gun 'walk' animation was still obviously ghosting.

So yeah... they took a 10 year old game and made it run worse than Gears 3 while still being ugly and actually detracted from some of the level design. The halo itself? The outer surface is now greebled to shit and super-busy, with fucking BATTLEMENTS the size of whole countries. What is 'scale'?

That said, it showed me that Halo gameplay really was better in the first one.

[Chardok]

Reading this makes me sad. And glad that I didn't buy it. I suffer from retroactive awesome nostalgia disease. In my head, I cannot picture the terrible awfulness of the first Halo, save for that scene where the Marines are lining up...ugh...

Anyway - I heard that Anniversay was literally, LITERALLY halo reskinned, no aiming down the ironsights, no hijacking, etc., and I kind of blanked everything else out. I'm sad to hear the reskin has actually damaged the game to the point where it's better to play in old school mode. I guess they...they must not have optimized the shit engine at all. Bad day.

[Stark]

They gave the sergeant guy really bad acne for some reason.

Zak and I blew each other up half a dozen times by reflexively going to iron up and throwing a grenade instead. I really don't understand why they didn't just use the Reach engine, y'know?

[One Two]

They gave the sergeant guy really bad acne for some reason.

Zak and I blew each other up half a dozen times by reflexively going to iron up and throwing a grenade instead. I really don't understand why they didn't just use the Reach engine, y'know?

343 claimed they used a modified version of the Reach engine.

[Dave]

Zak and I blew each other up half a dozen times by reflexively going to iron up and throwing a grenade instead. I really don't understand why they didn't just use the Reach engine, y'know?

Diddle with the controller profiles then? Heck, I thought nowadays you could actually manually customize each option, rather than selecting from a dozen presets.

I had the same problem going for L4D to Halo 3. Melee is not the same thing as a grenade.

[Chardok]

They gave the sergeant guy really bad acne for some reason.

Zak and I blew each other up half a dozen times by reflexively going to iron up and throwing a grenade instead. I really don't understand why they didn't just use the Reach engine, y'know?

343 claimed they used a modified version of the Reach engine.

I thought 343 farmed this shit out to a third party and just kind of let them do their thing while just sort of half-ass supervising the process?

[Moby Halcyon]

They handed the remakes of the multi maps to a third party, but handled the campaign themselves. My brother and I are cooping it up right now, and while we're not as caring about the graphics as Stark, we're pretty disappointed there wasn't as option to switch vs play as well graphical engines. But, yeah, old fans 'complaining about keeping the old feel'. There's plenty of little changes from the sequels we missed, but my brother summed it up with 'dude, I just want to pick up an energy sword.'

[DPDarkPrimus]

They gave the sergeant guy really bad acne for some reason.

Zak and I blew each other up half a dozen times by reflexively going to iron up and throwing a grenade instead. I really don't understand why they didn't just use the Reach engine, y'know?

343 claimed they used a modified version of the Reach engine.

I thought 343 farmed this shit out to a third party and just kind of let them do their thing while just sort of half-ass supervising the process?

And then didn't give them proper credit at the start up of the game.

[Stark]

The game is so ugly (and the framerate so bad) that at times Zak and I thought 'whoa, this is pretty ugly, we'll turn to the upgraded graphics'... only to find we already were on the upgraded graphics.

Someone really needs to find out how they managed to make a game that looks so crap run so poorly on the only hardware it will ever run on. I mean I know the answer is 'because they didn't give a shit and just farmed the franchise' but it's almost a technical achievement to have ~15fps on a 10 year old game. If only all those Microsoft guys came round to optimise? If only they'd just used the already-optimised Reach engine?

I don't miss any of the dumb weapons they added later; it turns out that they just broke the stupid golden triangle. Swords and BRs are fine, but they kill the Halo flow and make it either a crap beat-em-up or a crap Modern Warfare. I enjoyed the actual fighting part of H:A a lot more than the fighting in Halo3 (although Halo3 had a waaaaay better framerate and Sergeant Tough Man didn't have acne).

[aieeegrunt]

The only thing you can legitimately complain about is getting Reach's multiplayer in place of the original, which is like getting a cup of tepid milk instead of cognac.

It a texture/graphical update of a ten year old game that had hilarious frame rate shenanigans to begin with. It was stated over and over and over that they were keeping the old engine and just updating the graphics, probably to prevent CE fanatics like myself from burning the studio down because you just know they would have fucked with it and ruined it like they did the sequels. What exactly did you think was going to happen? Stark buys a 10 year old Camaro with a new paint job and bitches that it doesn't handle like a brand new M class BMW. Film at eleven where an old man yells at a cloud. Bonus points for complaining, again, that Halo doesn't do iron sights. Yes, we know.

Seriously Stark, you don't like Halo, which is fine. Why would you do this to yourself? I don't like Call of Duty, so I took the novel approach of not playing it. Bulletstorm and Duke Nukem bored me, so I never finished them and traded them in for Gears.

[DPDarkPrimus]

The only thing you can legitimately complain about is getting Reach's multiplayer in place of the original, which is like getting a cup of tepid milk instead of cognac.

Because a multiplayer experience literally put together in a few weeks by people who were learning 3DMax as they were making the levels, with no balancing of vehicles and weapons from single-player always looks better through decade-old nostalgia glasses.

But Reach's multiplayer is going down the shitter, I'll give you that - 343 Industries started shitting on the constant re-balancing and tweaks Bungie was doing since launch immediately after being given the reins.

[Stark]

It a texture/graphical update of a ten year old game that had hilarious frame rate shenanigans to begin with.

PS it's running on hardware years in the future of Halo. If you're saying 'they suck at updating a game without fucking it up', thanks for agreeing.

It was stated over and over and over that they were keeping the old engine and just updating the graphics, probably to prevent CE fanatics like myself from burning the studio down because you just know they would have fucked with it and ruined it like they did the sequels.

Good job they totally fucked elements of the art design anyway, then, I guess? Changing engines and getting actual real fps wouldn't have made their horrible lighting any better or worse; it'd just ghost less and drop less frames.

What exactly did you think was going to happen?

A 10 year old game to not drop frames while looking horrible? Y'know, quality etc.

Stark buys a 10 year old Camaro with a new paint job and bitches that it doesn't handle like a brand new M class BMW. Film at eleven where an old man yells at a cloud.

Awwww, diddums. Your comparison is stupid anyway; it's like claiming to 'restore' a 10 year old Camaro, only making it look and run like a Getz. Good job, idiot. The game has neither the performance you'd expect from simply porting Halo to far better hardware nor the visual quality you'd expect from something described as a 'remake'. I mean holy shit, Perfect Dark is literally nothing but a texture swap and it runs better ANYWAY!

Bonus points for complaining, again, that Halo doesn't do iron sights. Yes, we know.

I mentioned we pressed the wrong button. It's clunky to go back to right-click aiming. I'm sorry this upsets you, but hacking a PC port back onto a different console (if that's what they did) was a really, really bad idea - as demonstrated by the awful result.

Seriously Stark, you don't like Halo, which is fine. Why would you do this to yourself? I don't like Call of Duty, so I took the novel approach of not playing it. Bulletstorm and Duke Nukem bored me, so I never finished them and traded them in for Gears.

Because I'm an adult and I'm not afraid of the evil CODs? Because I expected 'Halo, only modern' and not 'Halo, only fuck-ugly and hopelessly inefficient'?

The laugh about your sadcase knee-jerking is that if you could read, you'd see that I actually enjoyed the game. It reminded me that later on Bungie's insistence on the triangle balance never worked so well again as they added more to it. It reminded me that Unreal was a cool game. OH NOEZ TEH HAT0RS.

[CaptHawkeye]

Announcing Halo 4 was strike 1, making H:A garbage is Strike 2. What's Strike 3 going to be for 343 Studios?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Announcing Halo 4 was strike 1, making H:A garbage is Strike 2. What's Strike 3 going to be for 343 Studios?

Obviously a prequel game where the much younger Master Chief (alone, despite there being 30-odd other Spartan's) infilitrating a vast Covenant shipyard and sabotaging it single-handed, thus crippling the Covenant's initial offensive and buying the UNSC enough time to rally it's forces and avoid getting curbstomped.

Shudder.

[Ford Prefect]

Announcing Halo 4 was strike 1, making H:A garbage is Strike 2. What's Strike 3 going to be for 343 Studios?

Strike 3 will be them misusing all the cool bullshit in Cryptum.

[Darksider]

Wait. Cryptium actually had good parts?

I'd pretty much given up on the Halo EU, so I didn't read it, but it might just be worth a shot.

[Sarevok]

The only thing you can legitimately complain about is getting Reach's multiplayer in place of the original, which is like getting a cup of tepid milk instead of cognac.

It a texture/graphical update of a ten year old game that had hilarious frame rate shenanigans to begin with. It was stated over and over and over that they were keeping the old engine and just updating the graphics, probably to prevent CE fanatics like myself from burning the studio down because you just know they would have fucked with it and ruined it like they did the sequels. What exactly did you think was going to happen? Stark buys a 10 year old Camaro with a new paint job and bitches that it doesn't handle like a brand new M class BMW. Film at eleven where an old man yells at a cloud. Bonus points for complaining, again, that Halo doesn't do iron sights. Yes, we know.

Seriously Stark, you don't like Halo, which is fine. Why would you do this to yourself? I don't like Call of Duty, so I took the novel approach of not playing it. Bulletstorm and Duke Nukem bored me, so I never finished them and traded them in for Gears.

Agreed wholeheartedly. It's a remake for people who loved the original. If we want a new Halo game we will play Reach or wait and see how Halo 4 turns out. But if we want the Halo CE experience again on a modern system Halo:Anniversary gives us just that.

[Stark]

With a lower frame rate than in 2002, and with heavy lighting in dark areas? I'm glad being a fanboy makes poor performance and bad art acceptable. Switch between modes in the underground or night sections, it's hilarious.

It's actually a shame too, becuase Halo had tight gameplay. If only it ran at 60fps like an actual quality game instead of being a lazy hack job cashin to milk fans.