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What's up with Reach and the absurdly distracting frame-dropping in cutscenes? Poor old 360 hardware.

Reach is a competent game. It doesn't look like dogshit the way every other Halo game does, it's redesigned all the guns to look more GRIM, and it's properly built for coops.

Halo standards are still here; nades have tiny radius but huge damage, all vehicles have tyres made of oil slicks, and melee is more effective than half a dozen shotgun shells. It is, however, a much more mature and less twitchy game like the others, and once you get past the outrageously pretentious introduction it actually tries to tell a story that non Halo slaves might give a shit about (unlike Halo3 which has no exposition and essentially no plot it didn't inherit from Halo 2). You still can't iron up for no reason, but they have otherwise changed the controls to emphasise the changes. Sherry and I will be cooping it up tonight, so if anyone wants to jump in let me know.

See? A whole post about Reach without laughing about how <nameless man> had better armour and HUD interaction than Master Chief.

So it might actually be worth picking up? I was toying with getting it simply because there's nothing else until Fallout New Vegas drops next month.

The teammate AI is the worst I have ever seen; they will seriously sit in a warthog a few hills away and do nothing. Terrible stuff. And the wonky balance is extremely evident; on heroic you'll die to 5-6 machinegun bullets, but you'll need to hose elites with 30-40 to bring down their shields.

Stark wrote:The teammate AI is the worst I have ever seen; they will seriously sit in a warthog a few hills away and do nothing. Terrible stuff. And the wonky balance is extremely evident; on heroic you'll die to 5-6 machinegun bullets, but you'll need to hose elites with 30-40 to bring down their shields.

Eh, I don't really care that much about heroic. Just whether or not it's improved from Halo 3 and they got rid of the stupid "lol zerg Flood rush" levels that plagued the other games.

It definately goes on the list of games that'd be improved by being third-person.

Not gameplay-related, but I just got back from working my store's Reach midnight release with 30+ people in the store at once, all there exclusively for Reach... and we were open the whole time before that!

Just whether or not it's improved from Halo 3 and they got rid of the stupid "lol zerg Flood rush" levels that plagued the other games.

It's "improved" from Halo 3, but it's still very Halo. This takes place before the flood were discovered, so there are no flood levels.

Stark wrote:It definately goes on the list of games that'd be improved by being third-person.

Explain.

It goes third person all the time (vehicles, armour abilities, constant cutscenes, heavy weapons) and the armour customisation is basically irrelevant without third person. It'd be easy; put a 'third person' option in the options. It'd make the combat (especially the larger stuff) look heaps better.

I'm not jarred by switching for certain things. Was perfectly serviceable in R6V and I think it works fine here. If they just let you roll with third person all the time, they would have to do some camera and animation work to prevent it looking awkward and unnatural when your character is moving around (i.e. how shitty it looks when you use console commands to force the game into third person for FPS games on PC).

I wouldn't really care if they went pure third person either though.

Third person camera has worked fine for years now anyway.

adam_grif wrote:I'm not jarred by switching for certain things. Was perfectly serviceable in R6V and I think it works fine here. If they just let you roll with third person all the time, they would have to do some camera and animation work to prevent it looking awkward and unnatural when your character is moving around (i.e. how shitty it looks when you use console commands to force the game into third person for FPS games on PC).

I wouldn't really care if they went pure third person either though.

Nobody said it was 'jarring'. It's just lame because it obviously works and it'd be trivial. R6V uses it for cover, because first-person attach-cover systems are bullshit. And hey, lock third person camera at waist high like every decent third person game = no dodgey footsteps.

I'm really struck by how Bungie's level designer is so utterly boring; everywhere in Reach looks the same as everywhere in Halo3, which looked the same albiet worse in Halo 1 & 2. The battle for reach is a tension-free bizarrely humdrum battle through the same sandy canyons and rolling grass hills as every other Halo game.

Every game should have the option to switch on the fly between first and third, it really should.

aieeegrunt wrote:Every game should have the option to switch on the fly between first and third, it really should.

Just not the awkward toggle depress that Oblivion had, it's a little confusing if you accidentally switch perspectives during a battle.

I had it on preorder and it will allegedly arrive tonight but i probably won't have time to play it until Saturday.

Probably gonna order it tomorrow at around midnight, and hopefully get it in time for the weekend. Anyone else going for the Legendary edition?

I'm being constantly struck by how Bungie is massively pretentious (slow motion + chorus = epic remember) and yet unable to sell emotional involvement in their stories. Nothing that happens in Reach is powerful or even makes sense. Is it really this hard to link a series of visuals together into a meaningful narrative? How can the imminent destruction of the world be such a bland sideline?

On the other hand, at least they're trying? Being pretentious sounds like a huge improvement over Halo 3 being extremely flat yet supposedly the last chapter in an epic, mythic cycle about the future equivalent of King Arthur.

It has the same feeling of nothing happening and you not being involved. Outside your small firefights there's no sense of anything larger.

But Gears has no story.

I have to say this is the least interesting, most disappointing major release in some time. Not only does it have a fanservice wedding for the player and Cortana (complete with 'I do'), but it consistently fails to sell any drama about obviously dramatic situations (such as the deaths of Noble team, which are quite often hilarious in their awfulness). Bungie has to learn that when there's a planetary invasion going on that threatens the entire human race as the UNSC fights a rearguard action to save mankind, just playing a piano solo and putting up an interlaced filter doesn't create a mood.

Not that you'd know any of that is happening anyway; the space battle is a one-sided rape by space fighters, on the ground nobody uses heavy weapons for... some reason (the Autumn escapes because a nearby Covenant ship simply doesn't shoot it while it sits motionless on the ground, for instance) and you'll often see huge explosions etc from space, but nobody actually seems concerned by anything going on. There's a greater sense of desperation in Saints Row 2, and that's pretty sad. Bungie's last chance to prove Halo wasn't a giant fluke proves that Halo was a giant fluke. They're playing to the fans and leaving everyone to scratch their heads... again.

Stark wrote:Not only does it have a fanservice wedding for the player and Cortana (complete with 'I do')

What

It's not in a church or anything. However, the player is required to swear the holy oath and utter the magic words before he can take possession of tits mcgee Cortana and take her to the Autumn for her appointment in Halo 1.

Oh, and she 'chooses' you. Because that shit makes nerds hard.

Stark wrote:It's not in a church or anything. However, the player is required to swear the holy oath and utter the magic words before he can take possession of tits mcgee Cortana and take her to the Autumn for her appointment in Halo 1.

What. The. Fuck?

No such retarded thing ever happened in the book (as far as I remember anyway), not that I'm saying the book was good but it seems like it's way better then this thing's story.

The dialogue, for those who are interested:

*Halsey withdraws the AI container from a computer terminal. Halsey walks over to Noble Six, holding the case out to him/her.
Halsey: Take it Lieutenant,, she had made her choice.
*Noble Six looks to Carter for permission. Carter nods. Noble Six grabs the container, but Halsey doesn't let go.*
Halsey: Do you have it?
Noble Six (firmly): Yes.
Halsey (intent): Say the words, please.
Noble Six: I have it.
*Halsey lets go*
*End Cutscene, switch scenes to squad on surface, leaving*

And that's it. In Halsey's position, I'd be a bit formal about handing over an AI too. The cutscene's here, for those who need proof. It's not some magical wedding, if anything, the cutscene play sinto a different weakness of Reach, one STRAK mentioned already: being way too understated for a story about the last bastion of humanity getting slaughtered.

Coming right after 'she made her choice' (ps it's you) its just too lame. The worst part is that nobody who isn't a Halo fan will have any idea who she is or why anyone cares, they don't even mention her (or the forerunners, or anything) by name. Then again players don't even knwo that the Cov can't find earth, so....

In the hands of decent writers Cortana choosing a squad doomed to die saving the human race (probably the latest in a long line) would have resonated powerfully with MC's role in the earlier games and make him seem even more of a King Arthur, but it doesn't. They were too busy writing descriptions of all the guns that all involve meaningless acronyms they have to explain in footnotes.

It's nothing more than an exchange akin to "Do you have the con?" "I have the con." Complaining about Halsey being EU-fodder is no more akin to referring to the marketing campaign of all things (Remember Reach) painting the Chief as King Arthur. Making something out of an incredibly boring cutscene is plain daft.

I'm not 'making something'; it's just lame. On top of the complete failure of the game to create any drama during a world-ending invasion by unstoppable alien hordes as Noble team dies to save the human race, its just sympomatic of the fanservice attitude.

Even one level where you save some UNSC guys who are all typical 'whoo Spartans whoo' and then you guys just walk off and leave them to die because you have a mission, or any obvious interference sacrifice being made to preserve you in your run to the (mysteriously untouched) Autumn would have made the game about a hundred times better. All the tension and drama was ready-made for the game and they fucked it up to have fanservice obsessions with Cortana and name-drop things nerds love.