Halo 3: Finished
November 19, 2007

As I stood teetering at the entrance to the flood infected High Charity (I think) my 360 pinged at me and a little blurb appeared at the bottom of the screen; "Ryoseth has invited you to play". So began my task of finally completing Halo 3. We ransacked the flood infected ship, rescued our captive AI and went on to save the world from the forty thousandth halo ring in existence. Hooray!

I have to say that it was quite an enjoyable ride. The storyline in Halo 3 was quite impressive, with a number of unexpected twists and turns which kept everything fresh and interesting. The levels themselves were quite diverse and lent themselves well to the gameplay and definitely the interesting encounters. By far the most interesting of which was fighting two Scarabs simultaneously. It'll definitely be interesting to revisit that one with Ryoseth at some point.

I've also been dipping my feet into the multiplayer waters lately too, even having Mike and James over this weekend for some funs. I've been deriving some serious enjoyment from this portion of the game. Xbox Live's "matchmaking" system is really pretty nice for keeping players on even and balanced playing fields. No more "Phantomdata has died" before I even spawn. :)

With all the multiplayer that I have yet to uncover, there's still a lot more interest to glean from this little disc of joy. Even though I've eaten most of the meat from the single player campaign, I still forsee Halo 3 gracing the 360's tray quite often - thanks both to the multiplayer that I've yet to uncover and the desire to replay particular parts.

In all, Halo 3 was a spectacular ride with wonderful storytelling and great gameplay. The replay-ability and multiplayer only sweeten the deal, making it an almost automatic purchase - and definitely worth the $60 it costs.

Halo 3: Seriously Enjoying It
October 23, 2007

As some of you may know, I recently broke down and bought an Xbox 360. It's been the bane of Emily's existence since I got it, but it is oh so much fun nonetheless. In her infinite kindness and selfless sacrifice during my annual revolution around the sun, she bought for me teh delicious Halos Tres. In all seriousness, it's turning out to be a total blast being and has made me quite happy with the shiny new Xbox.

As a relatively old and grizzled gameplaying veteran, I find myself frequently at my own personal odds about this. The Halo series is so ubiquitous and popular that there is absolutely no shortage of 12 year olds ready to go on about how it "has lots of graphics". While I certainly won't argue with the "lots of graphics" that Halo 3 has - I think that there's a critical factor that trumps it all. The game is just plain fun.

There's no super realistic physics, checkpoints are frequent and the drive to keep going is strong with every new encounter actually being different than the last. You start the game running through the jungle, defend a base and then go tearing down a highway to prevent activation of the Ion Cannon from Command and Conquer (No, you're not really trying to stop the Ion Cannon). It's all fresh, entertaining and simple fun.

Mix in a great storyline with this installment possibly having the most engrossing of the series, and you've certainly got something worth the $60 you'll have to drop for it. Even withstanding the current glut of wonderful games (BioShock, Portal, Phantom Hourglass - I'm lookin' at you ) Halo 3 should definitely be in your play queue. Now, if you'll excuse me I have to go get pwned by some 12 year old from Georgia who hasn't learnt him the alphabets yet.

Halo Revisited and How I'm Starting to like Console FPSs
September 21, 2007

To placate Chris and his insatiable Halo love, I have began replaying Halo with my newly acquired 360 controller. On top of playing BioShock through with my new 360 controller I've also been giving Lost Planet and Overlord a try with my new-fangled device... and I have to say that I'm loving it. I think that it boils down to having the ability to control my walking speed with an analog system in addition to having more intuitive "movement" controls. Aiming still gets a bit hairy, but I've only been playing with the controller for a month or so now. Yes Andy, I can do more than spin around in a circle now.

Now, on to the topic that has probably caused Ryoseth to start poking pins into a voodoo-me - Halo. At this point I'm a little bit further in the game then when I had originally played it, and I have to say that the 360 controller makes a huge amount of difference. Without it the game feels sluggish and slow, but when using the controller everything feels fluid and the gameplay is actually fairly fun. One might even say... it's action packed.

With today's brash of thoughtful shooters and no-holds barred controller-throwing fests it's nice to revisit a world where you can charge into a fight without thought or real planning. Everything plays out perfectly and each "section" of the map ends up being an interesting and dynamic battle that's sure to entertain. My favorite parts are charging into a room to find some inattentive guards who suddenly have a sticky-grenade pinned to their backs. Brilliant, I say, that's flavor and excitement.

I'm hesitant to talk about Halo's storyline at this point. I'm only as far as the Silent Cartographer, so I really don't have much to say there... but the storyline thus far isn't that interesting. Basically, ship blows up, you blow shit up, you rescue some doodz, you try to find picture to lead you to more shit to blow up. That's what I've gotten so far. Perhaps there is more to come, and I will keep going since the action is quite a bit more entertaining.

I'll say that the 360 controller definitely brings the PC port up above the suck-fest that it was with the mouse and keyboard. Thus far there's a pretty mediocre storyline, but the actual gameplay is pretty awesome w/ the 360 controller. Contrast that with BioShock's awesome story and mediocre gameplay... hmm... maybe some day we'll get a combination of the two. So, to recap... I'm finding the gameplay to be a lot of fun and the storyline sort of "meh". Chris tells me that this picks up soon, which I'm excited for - but the gameplay w/ the 360 controller is enough to carry the game for me.

Anyway, at this point I'm almost capping my "emergency savings" point and am starting to save for more... interesting purchases. With my newfound love of the 360 controller itself, I'm beginning to get more and more interested in some of the other games that the 360 has to offer. Gears of War definitely ranks up there as well as Crackdown. Trusty Bell has me intrigued from an RPG standpoint and I am a sucker for Geometry Wars. Heck, even Ikaruga and Rez are coming for XBLA soon.

Oh, and multiplayer gaming is something that I haven't tasted outside of a LAN party in... well, we'll just say that it's been too long. Xbox Live definitely presents me with some interest and I'm sure that Chris and Tony would love to bring me to an educational distillery of the Halo variety. Something tells me that Emily would be a hard-sell though...

Halo 2 PC, Ok, It Doesn't Look That Bad
June 14, 2007

Ok, some of you may have noticed my rant a few days ago about the ugliness that is Halo 2. I realized that it was a bit too ranty for my tastes, and decided to delete it before anyone commented on it (I'll never delete a post after a comment has been made). Anyway, I made some correlations between Halo 2 and Quake 2... after a recent discovery, I have to take these back.

After being over at Andy's yesterday, helping him with some Vista printing issues, he showed me a quite nice looking run through of Halo 2 on his PC. I noticed something, it didn't look like ass. So, when I got home I sat down intending to do something about it! Ok, well - I did some packing and cleaning first - to be truthful.

I fired up the game and jumped right into battle thinking that I had maybe been looking at it wrong. No, it still looked like ass. I went into the Video settings and upped the anti-aliasing to 4x thinking that maybe it made a giant difference. Nope, still no difference. Well, now what? Andy's looked so good... so I decided to go ahead and register for a Live account and see if there were some updates. Man, that was a good half hour of my life I'd like back. Their server even responded with a TOTALLY blank page after successfully registering. Still no avail...

Then, before loading the game I decided to double check my anti-aliasing settings. Loe! There was a new setting available "Level of Detail". I pushed that puppy up to high and was greeted by a decent looking game when I loaded up my last checkpoint.

The LOD setting was deemed, too difficult to code to be dynamically set in game. Fair enough, a few other console ports are that way - your Indians aren't star programmers. I get it. However, what Microsoft decided to do instead was to simply drop the option from the in-game menu. The usual state of affairs is to dim or otherwise note that it is not able to be set during gameplay. Oh well.

So, Halo 2 actually looks halfway decent. It's got a kick-ass plot-line and the controls feel a lot better than Halo's did. They're not quite PC shooter quality, but they're standable now. I consider my money well spent.

Also, this FireFox add-on kicks major ass and this robot song will be stuck in your head until next Tuesday.