The Glade 4.0

This game is so much better than part 3 it's retarded.

Yep. I've been describing it to people as "They took all the things that worked in the last 4 Halo games and made a game out of them. Then gave it a story."

They also added some things that weren't in any of the previous three Halo games...

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I'd really like to hear some detailed impressions of the campaign if somebody has time. I honestly don't care about the multiplayer and that's the whole reason I avoided ODST.

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The Dude abides.

Word.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I really enjoyed it. I thought it had the best crafted story of all of the existing Halo games. However, if you are not going to play multiplayer, ever, then I would rent it. The campaign is great, playing through a second time on legendary with friends is fun, but the legs are in the multiplayer. Fortunately, they put a lot more co-operative content in, expanded firefight quite a bit and forge 2.0 as well. (As well as adding a 150point achievement for completing legendary all by your lonesome, evil!)

Funny thing...multiplayer was the only good thing about ODST. Firefight was awesome.

As for the campaign on this one...nothing new, really. But I only watched my brother play the first three levels, which consisted of a normal investigate this place level, a sniper level and a drive around while your gunner blows **** up level. All three of which have been in all Halo games so far. It looks much nicer, though.

EDIT:
One thing I did notice was that the random marines that you meet throughout the games were much more effective in this game than they have been in the other Halo games.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

By the way, there are a couple of Halo: Reach Legendary editions at the Target beside our apartment for $150 if anyone wants but didn't preorder or whatnot.

May pick this one up.

Halo 3 killed my interest in the franchise.

If it can recapture what 1 and 2 did, however, I'd be interested.

$150? Even I'm not that big a consumer whore.

I mean, what do you get for $150? 4 copies of the game!?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I'm not exactly an expert on Halo (half-played 1/2, beat 3) but this is the best one I've played so far. Environments are varied, storytelling is top-notch (for an FPS) and the characters are all done pretty well.

Almost done with it, maybe 7/9.

It's hard to pick any one element that makes it better. Here's a list of some improvements:

-Varied weapons and vehicles. The introduction of some new weapons make it even more enjoyable.

-They went away from duel wielding weapons, which I think brings it back to being more like the original.

-Storyline: as stated by most everyone, is top notch. They also added characters to the story now, which was a huge missing element from previous games. From what I remember, Halo 1-3 is mostly just about Master Chief, with a few other characters introduced, but not a whole team like in this game.

-Improved AI. The AI in this game beats any other Halo game by far. This makes playing solo a lot more enjoyable, as well as co-op.

-Introduction of a store to buy armor and equipment upgrades. Additionally, there are other easter eggs and goodies to purchase with the points earned within all modes of the game. For example, for 2 million cR, you can have lightening glowing around your mask. It gives the game more legs.

-Mission design is also top notch. I believe these missions were designed better than any other game from the series.

-Music in the campaign continues its excellence.

I'm missing a lot. I've only played through about 6 of the missions so far. I can't even give a full opinion of the game until I complete it. Overall, I'm enjoying it more than any of the other Halo games, by far. I have no access to online play, so the fact that it's great offline means a lot to me.

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Multiplayer map types are leagues above any previous Halo. Tons of variance and maps even change depending on game type.

SWAT is awesome.

Reach's multiplayer maps that were designed in forge world have some very bad spawns. Though Bungie said they will be fixed in the first patch in early October.

Ex of mine I got the other day:
[youtube]VzjouGF3Aho[/youtube]

We finished this one tonight. While it was a fantastic game, it didn't really feel all that new aside from the looks. I mean, it followed the same basic level design as Halo 1, 2, 3 and ODST. Story was good, but not fantastic or anything. It introduced a huge plothole. There are really only three things that stick out in my mind that would have made the game better. First would be to move back to the Halo 2 and 3 shield system. Two would to be to have Master Chief as the playable character(though, you can play as him in Firefight, which is totally awesome). And third would have been to have made it Halo 4 instead of a prequel.

The very last level after the credits was super awesome, though. Overall, better than Halo 2(no assault rifle? And I'm not Master Chief the entire game? WTF?) and waaaay better than ODST(seriously...you aren't even a **** spartan), but I still enjoyed Halo 1 and 3 more.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I really don't get the whole attachment to Master Chief thing. I do not care the least bit if I play him or not. He's not exactly someone filled with personality and there's really not much writing to him in the games.

I enjoyed Reach a lot more than any of the others and the new additions are great. The campaign was far better than the previous games and MP is a blast. The space combat level was surprisingly good and flying the Falcons is awesome.

How's the multiplayer as compared to Modern Warfare 2?

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

Hrm, two different beasts is what I'm finding.

Halo Reach multiplayer is not perfect, but I think it's a better rounded experience then MW2.

Bungie has said there are some things they are looking at tweaking in the early October patch. As I mentioned above, the spawns in the forge world maps ARE shoddy at best, but again, they were made exclusively in forge world to show people what it's capable of.

Some people have issues with the abilities being built into classes. Some say armor lock is retarded, some say a full team of drop shield users is OP, some maps the Jetpacks are over powered. I think they all have their uses. Sprint seems to have the most versatility to be handy in the most situations.

The DMR & Needler rifle seems to be solid replacements to the BR. Each taking 4 shots to the body and then 1 to the head for a clean kill.

Melee is still two hits from all but the side, and if you hold in melee from behind you'll perform an admittedly awkward looking assassination which takes longer to perform, but it's more like a giant teabag display, so it's kind of fun.

Some of the power weapon placements on some maps seem a little imbalanced, favoring one spawn over the other. Which can lead to several maps with teams able to get the power weapons and then camp up high with minimal entrances to watch for an easy win.

The sword & gravity hammer are back of course. If you hate Commando in MW2, then you'll get pretty pissed with the sword. However, you CAN block the sword IF you can time a melee of your own properly. I however have only done it once and that was a pure fluke of panicking. I was then killed in his follow up swing.

Crouching and camping with a sword atop of a gravity lift/elevator seems to be a very popular tactic, much to my annoyance. Admittedly this is my first Halo game I've taken seriously, but I had always heard Halo players brag to CoD players that Halo doesn't have campers. Well, Reach certainly does. But in theory that could just be the CoD community checking out what all the hype is about for Reach.

What else... uhhh. There's a heat seeking sticky grenade launcher that can be horribly annoying but I think it only has one extra clip of ammo.

Health packs... I like them personally. It seems to get rid of the "well if I just duck over here for 20 seconds I'm 100% good as new." The health packs are placed pretty reasonably and on a 15 second respawn at each location, so I like that aspect of the game.

The playlists are a bit lacking at this point, but again it's something Bungie said was coming quickly in a change. There's no dedicated playlist for team swat, as well as none of the MLG variants which I understand to have been very popular in Halo 3.

Hrm, that's about it. Though remember, take all of this with a shaker of salt, I'm new to the Halo franchise and I'm pretty damn bad at Halo Reach. Roughly a .85 K/D but a positive W/L I think.

Armor Lock is only retarded in that anyone who actually uses it is basically a free Assassination kill for anyone with half a brain.

BANHAMMMMMMERRRRRRR


Shortly after Halo: Reach was released, users found a way to earn cheap, easy in-game credits via an exploit. Some people, though, had to take it too far.

Now, the exploit itself, if you've got the patience for it, that's fine. But 15,000 players have been found to have gone overboard on the exploit via "network manipulation and other easily detectable workarounds that fall well outside of standard gameplay", and every single one of them has tonight had their credit levels reset to a big fat zero, along with receiving a one-day ban on amassing any more.

What's impressive/sad about that number is that it's only from a preliminary pass; Bungie says that "as our automated Banhammer mechanisms grow accurate enough to satisfy our high bar for burden of proof", we can expect that tally to rise.

Which is too bad, the single player game was good. It had one of the better stories of all the games.

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Raell Kromwell

The boy and I finished the story on Co-op last night. It was fun. Not understanding what was going on I got careless. The boy lasted a good 20 minutes.

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Raell Kromwell

For me, it's not so much the Chief himself as it is his interactions with the other characters (most notably Cortana) that made his character appealing. Had the Chief been solo the whole game, then yes, he would have been completely forgettable.

Also, the Master Chief has been way more hardcore than any of the characters ever shown in this series. And he does it with less gadgets. It really made me go "WTF?" When the Reach Spartans had all of these **** awesome toys and Master Chief had...a flashlight. Same thing with the ODST guys. They had that super awesome night vision. Where the **** was Master Chief's night vision? Also, why are all of the guns in Reach better than the guns used later(chronologically)? Seriously, those needle rifles were **** bad ***. It doesn't make a god damn bit of sense.

Fighting Elites was still super awesome, though. I always found them much tougher opponents than the Brutes.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Yahtzee review!
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2136-Halo-Reach