Halo Month, Part 6: Sweet Christmas

Posted on April 19, 2018 by baudattitude

It’s an odd thing to realize, but of the 10 Xbox One games I’ve finished since owning the console, 8 of them have been remastered versions of games that were originally released for the Xbox or Xbox 360 – with the exceptions being ReCore and now Halo 5: Guardians.  It’s almost shocking how much prettier a game is when it was built ground-up for a modern console, and I was regularly gobsmacked – there’s a word I don’t get a lot of use out of – by just how gorgeous Halo 5 was.

Anyway, since the last Halo Month post, I watched the “Halo: The Fall of Reach” animation, which wasn’t terrific, and played through Halo 5’s single-player campaign in normal difficulty.  It was pretty good in a lot of places and a little weird in others, so let’s talk about all of the positive things.

I think I’ll start with the guns, because it’s a game where most of your interaction with the world comes in the sense that you are trying to put holes in the parts of it that are trying to put holes in you.  Some of the Halo games do not have very good guns, and even the best Halos have had one or two downright stinkers.

Halo 5 does have One Bad Gun.  I think it’s called a Plasma Caster or something? It basically shoots bouncy plasma grenades, which sounds way cooler than it actually is.  I did not like it, and I only used one once or twice during the campaign.

Every OTHER gun I picked up was really good.  Even the needler!  I have hated the needler in almost every Halo game up to this point, but the version in Halo 5 is actually….dare I say? FUN to use.

The enemies are also much less irritating bullet sponges in this outing.  Hunters are still, well, they’re Hunters and they take a ridiculous amount of damage to bring down, but I couldn’t help but notice that virtually every instance where a Hunter pair showed up came with a convenient Fuel Rod launcher or detachable turret just lying around somewhere nearby.

Halo 5 also has a much more familiar control scheme – something that probably rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way when it hit, come to think of it.  For the first time in the series, you aim down sights with the left trigger and fire with the right, and every gun seems to have an ADS mode.

Speaking of sights, by the way, considering my rant from the other day, I was happy to notice that the default human pistol DOES have sights, which makes sense – all of the various rifles tie into the armor HUD to provide a sight, but a pistol is a weapon of last resort, so it’s designed to be used without access to armor.  It’s a tiny detail that I liked a lot.

The Covenant Carbine ALSO has a flip-up reflex-style sight, which again makes sense because it’s mostly used by Jackals, who don’t generally wear armor.

Finally, the campaign was really compelling to play through – it felt like the game was over in no time at all, and it was quite difficult to stop halfway through so I could actually get some sleep, the first night I played it.  There are a couple of little “walk around and talk to people” levels that provide breathers, but outside of those it’s just really fast-paced and always pushing you forward to get to the next big thing blowing up.

So, negatives now.

First, I didn’t really expect to be spending so little time in Master Chief’s helmet.  At least two thirds of the game have you playing as Spartan Luke Cage with Spartan Rick Castle along for comic relief.  It made the segments where you play as John and his merry band of child soldiers stand out, however – they did a good job of showing the differences between Fireteam Osiris and Blue Team, so there’s just a whole different feel when playing one or the other, even though the general goal is the same. (Shoot things.  Try to avoid getting shot.  Get to the next big explosion.)

Second, man, Halo games have never really had boss fights before this, and this has the same boss fight repeated like three or four times.  It doesn’t ever get good, either, each one is pretty much a case of switching weapons to the Big Gun you picked up a few minutes back and have been saving, then blowing the Warden into small glowing pieces, in one case before he even had a chance to finish his megalomaniac speech about uh killing all humans or something.

Third, when I said in an earlier post that Halo 4 sure felt incomprehensible without having read all of the books, that just goes double for Halo 5.  It turns out that even the two books from this last batch that I really thought might be skippable – “New Blood” and “Hunters in the Dark” – are actually kind of important to knowing just who the characters in Fireteam Osiris are and why Gunnery Sergeant Buck from Halo 3: ODST is a Spartan now.  Real talk, if you want to enjoy Halo 5, you need to read at least a dozen books in addition to playing all of the previous games.

Oh, and it all ends with one heck of a cliffhanger and suddenly it is vitally important that you know – again, from the books – that Elites have never really liked AIs and thus Elite ships don’t HAVE shipboard AIs.  I suspect this is going to be a huge plot point in Halo 6.

In theory, I COULD stop Halo Month right here.  I’m caught up on all of the mainline games and most of the spin-offs.  That’s, like, 10 games this month!

But… I did buy Halo Wars 2 during the big Microsoft Spring Sale.  I should try to take that off the backlog right away instead of letting it hang around.

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Halo Month, Part 5: Embracing Product Synergy

Posted on April 17, 2018 by baudattitude

The most recent batch of Halo media consisted of six books (“Mortal Dictata”, “Broken Circle”, “New Blood”, “Hunters in the Dark”, “Saint’s Testimony” and “Last Light”, one video series (“Halo: Nightfall”) and two PC ports of mobile games.  At this point, I just need to watch the Fall of Reach animated series and then I will be ready for Halo 5.

Even though “New Blood” and “Saint’s Testimony” were pretty short, that’s still a lot of reading and it does kind of blur together.  Fortunately, either I’m getting more used to reading Halo books or the writing is getting better, because there weren’t any real duds in this most recent batch.  I don’t know how many of them are exactly essential to understanding future games, but you could honestly get by with reading Mortal Dictata and Last Light.  Hunters in the Dark was pretty good – I was surprised to see Peter David’s name on the cover of a videogame tie-in novel – so that one is probably worth reading as well.

Only read Broken Circle if you really want some more Deep Lore revolving around the Covenant’s early days, and New Blood is the novelization that Halo 3:ODST really didn’t need.

If I was surprised to see Peter David credited on a Halo novel, imagine my utter astonishment in seeing a producer credit for Ridley Scott on Halo: Nightfall, and then seeing Mike Colter – Luke Cage from the Netflix Marvel series – as the lead actor.  Apparently Microsoft decided to spend a dollar or two on this, and it turned out really quite well.

I have to say, though, that the various gun designs in the Halo universe look pretty silly when made into props that actors have to actually point at things and make pew pew noises.  They have no sights, for one.  I think the in-universe explanation is that they don’t need sights because they’re tied into armor HUDs etc, but they still just look like big plastic toys.

As a side benefit of watching Nightfall through the “Halo Channel” Windows 10 app, I got some unlocked cosmetic bits for multiplayer in the Master Chief Collection and in Halo 5.  I’m unlikely to ever use any of them because I rarely DO multiplayer, but I’m always impressed with the way Microsoft links one thing to another.

Anyway.  Moving on to Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike, two ports of games that were originally released for Windows Phone, where I originally bought them – and where I quickly came to the conclusion that the controls were just not really well suited for my huge thumbs on a relatively small screen.  Thankfully, the PC versions let me use a gamepad.

Both of them are top-down twin-stick shooters with campaigns consisting of a few dozen over-in-five-minutes missions, which doesn’t sound particularly impressive when I put it like that, but I was impressed with how much they felt like proper Halo games.  I’ll chalk most of that up to the soundtrack and effects – they just SOUND right.

There’s not really any point to playing these for the story – they’re presented explicitly as combat training simulations, so I doubt they’re considered canon in any sense – but I had a lot of fun with both of them. They’re worth playing on their own merits, with the caveat that both of them have some dodgy mobile monetization built-in, in the form of being able to buy power-ups with in-game currency earned through completing missions… OR by just making a small monetary transaction.  It’s not mandatory to complete the games, mind you, but gosh it’s helpful if you want to go for gold stars on every level.

I didn’t bother with gold stars on Spartan Assault – the silver and bronze stars I was getting were just fine – but Spartan Strike won’t unlock its final batch of missions unless you get golds on all missions in the first four batches, and I would have been very vexed with Microsoft about this sort of thing in a non-free-to-play game, if it weren’t for some more of that lovely corporate synergy that I mentioned earlier.

Basically, when I logged in to my Xbox Live account in Strike, it looked at my achievements in the Xbox One Halo games and cheerfully handed me a massive stack of currency for each of the campaigns I’d completed in the Master Chief Collection.  That was enough to buy the score booster power-up for every mission, which lead to a streak of gold medals with very little effort.

Look on my cheevos, ye mighty, and despair.

Anyway!  On to The Fall of Reach series and then Halo 5: Guardians.  There are a few books between Halo 5 and Halo Wars 2, and unfortunately our local library has none of them available.  I am not sure I’m quite ready to start BUYING Halo novels.  I think that might be a rabbit hole there’s no clawing my way back out of.

 

 

 

 

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Halo Month, Part 4: Finally, some payoff.

Posted on April 14, 2018 by baudattitude

Halo Month continues.  I wrapped up Halo Reach, read the “Forerunner Trilogy” (Cryptum, Primordium, and Silentium), read the first two books of the Kilo Five Trilogy (“Glasslands” and “The Thursday War”), watched “Halo: Forward Unto Dawn”, played Halo 4’s single-player campaign and watched the story cutscenes from Spartan Ops.

The real motivation behind this entire madness came from having played Halo 4 on the 360 a few years ago and having been completely lost during the whole thing.  It felt like there was an awful lot not being explained, and I am easily annoyed when I feel like things aren’t being explained.

Apparently, my reaction to being annoyed is to spend two weeks reading media tie-in novels and playing videogames.  I guess there are worse ways to vent frustration.

Anyway, short version: Halo 4 made a whole lot more sense this time, and I really liked it.  So, if for some reason you have come to this page wondering what you should do before playing Halo 4, let me recommend that you simply read The Fall of Reach, First Strike, Ghosts of Onyx, Glasslands, The Thursday War, Cryptum, Primordium, and Silentium, and play Halo 1, 2, and 3.  That will give you all the background you need to properly appreciate the Deep Lore of the game.

Needless to say, this is kind of nuts.  Yes, it’s reasonable to expect SOME degree of player familiarity when you’re shipping something with a “4” on the end, but at some point you may just need to admit to yourself that your universe is getting just a little full of itself.

Anyway.  Some thoughts on the most recently-consumed load of Halo media.

Apart from Halo Wars, which was a completely side thing, Halo: Reach was the least-necessary game in the series so far.  It’s basically the Star Wars: Rogue One of the series.  It also has a really uncomfortable control scheme if you’ve gotten used to the standard controls from the previous games, and it took me the first few levels before I stopped meleeing when I wanted to reload.  I didn’t hate it, I didn’t love it, it’s just kind of there.  I get the feeling it was released more as a multiplayer game than on the strength of its campaign, so I probably shouldn’t judge it.

The Forerunner trilogy is a bit slow to get moving and loves to throw science-fictiony-sounding words at the reader, expecting that you will eventually get them from context.  This vocabulary and the characters from the books do eventually show up in Halo 4, so these are kind of must-reads.  I really didn’t care for the middle book, but it starts and ends well.

Glasslands and The Thursday War, by contrast, were more up my alley – probably just because I’ve read enough novels starring these characters that I’m starting to get to know them.  They cover the ever-interesting question of what happens AFTER two sides aren’t technically shooting at each other anymore, with a focus on the Elites on the covenant side who have just realized that, thanks to thousands of years of being the military force for the covenant and having all their needs met, they don’t really know how to feed themselves or build stuff.  It’s a good premise.

Forward Unto Dawn is pretty solidly in the skippable column.  It’s a web series that serves as a back story to one of the UNSC characters who shows up in Halo 4, and there are two bits of dialogue in Halo 4 that don’t make much sense if you haven’t seen it. It also has some pretty good visuals and it’s only 90 minutes long so you might as well check it out before playing Halo 4.  You don’t absolutely need to, though.

After all of that, Halo 4 was a really enjoyable game.  I mean, I spent a lot of time repeating the checkpoint -> die -> try again -> and again -> make it to the next checkpoint -> die cycle, and I won’t deny that there were a couple of OH, COME ON NOW deaths.  It wasn’t nearly as bad as when I played it on the 360, where I eventually knocked the difficulty down to Easy because I kept running out of bullets before the game ran out of guys to throw at me.  I didn’t have that same problem this time, so I may have gotten SOMETHING out of playing nothing but Halo games for the last two weeks.

The new enemies are a nice change after so many games of Grunt Grunt Grunt Grunt Grunt Elite Brute Grunt Grunt Grunt GODDAMNED HUNTERS, and setting the whole thing on a Forerunner planet meant all kinds of new science-fictiony guns with Tronesque glowing lights all over them.  Two thumbs up, would shoot giant glowing rat… dog… salamander THINGS in the heads again.

After THAT, I thought about playing through the Spartan Ops campaign – 50 missions, all tuned around four-player co-op and all dry as toast – and elected to simply watch the story videos instead.  The Master Chief Collection, thoughtfully enough, makes all of the videos available with no pesky unlocking required, so that was a big win.  I don’t know how much of an impact they’ll have on the upcoming games, mind you, so I can’t judge whether they’re essential or skippable.

Next up! Halo: Spartan Assault, a mobile game that eventually got a PC release.  I originally bought it on my Windows Phone but couldn’t get on with the controls.  Fortunately, owning it on Windows Phone meant that I got a license for the PC version when it came out, so I don’t need to buy it again.  Let’s see how this goes, then.

 

 

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Soon.

Posted on April 11, 2018 by baudattitude

So, seven days from now it looks like I will be able to play Panzer Dragoon Orta, upscaled, on my purchased-for-a-song Xbox One S.  Moreover, if they follow their normal pattern, everyone NOT lucky enough to still have a disc kicking around will be able to buy it from the Xbox Marketplace, probably for $9.99 or equivalent in local currency.

Heh. Upscaled.  It’s a game about a dragon.  Never has “upscaled” been more appropriate.

I have to say, I was not impressed with circa-2013 Microsoft.  They really seemed to have gone wildly off-track chasing the Kinect and media audience.  This new Microsoft?  I think I’m really starting to become a fan.

Now, back to Halo: Reach.  I really wasn’t clicking with this game to start, but I discovered the most important thing ever and now I’m doing OK.

(You can play pretty princess dress up with your Spartan)

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Installing Halo Wars 2 Complete from the Windows Store.

Posted on April 10, 2018 by baudattitude

So, I almost managed to make it through Microsoft’s Spring Sale without buying a single new game, and I was feeling pretty good about that.

Then, at like 1 AM (with two hours left in the sale!), my resolve broke and I bought Halo Wars 2 Complete. It was priced at $47.99 through the Windows Store and $29.99 on the Xbox Marketplace for some reason, so I bought it on the Xbox – assuming that, as a Play Anywhere title, it would show up on the Windows side of things for me to download.

It did not. Its Windows Store page cheerfully told me that this was a Play Anywhere title, yes, but that it was not available on my device. Since I didn’t want to play an RTS with a controller, this was a matter of some concern.

After some scouring of the web, I came to a couple of conclusions: First, that I wasn’t the only person to have this issue – and, second, that nobody seemed to have come up with a good answer.

Looking up just “Halo Wars 2” on the Windows Store resulted in finding a listing for both “Halo Wars 2: Standard Edition” and something just called “Halo Wars 2”. “Halo Wars 2: Standard Edition” had a Buy link, and the second one didn’t show up in My Library – but the Install button was active so I went ahead and installed it.

As an aside, the Windows Store seems to have gotten a little friendlier about where it puts things. I recall there was quite a commotion when some of the earlier Play Anywhere titles would only install to the system drive and would cheerfully suck up your entire boot SSD in so doing. When I went to install Halo Wars 2, it warned me that it was a 46GB download and prompted me to choose between any of my drives.

Anyway, after downloading Halo Wars 2, I still couldn’t install the Season Pass or any of the DLC that came bundled with the Complete Edition, and I was starting to think some rather unkind thoughts about Microsoft. I launched the game, and it even had an advertisement on the main screen for the “Awakening the Nightmare” DLC campaign, implying that I didn’t own it – and when I clicked on the ad, it told me that I DID own it. I just still wasn’t getting any option to install it.

I spent more time than I want to think about beating my head against this.

You know, to prevent dragging this out any further, the kicker is that it seems that the Windows Store simply went ahead and installed all of the DLC without telling me it was going to do it. When I actually went to the campaign mission selection screen, both DLC campaigns were available and all of the multiplayer characters show up when starting a skirmish. It could just have done a much better job about telling me that it had done that.

And maybe “It won’t run on this one” could have a link to the version that does run. That would be cool.

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Halo Month, Part 3

Posted on April 9, 2018 by baudattitude

I’m painfully old-school sometimes, so normally I write blog posts in a plain text editor and copy/paste them into the WordPress editor. Today I’m testing Word/Wordpress integration so I apologize in advance if things are messed up.

I’m in the final stretch of Halo’s Bungie years. I played through Halo 3: ODST, read “Halo: Evolutions” and watched “Halo: Legends” and just started Halo: Reach.

I’m not sure why I feel the need to put quotation marks around book and movie titles but not around game titles. It’s bugging me that not everything has quotes around it, but it looks awful if it’s all one way or the other. I should probably edit this out, or get back to talking about Halo.

So. Halo 3: ODST, the Halo Game Where You Don’t Play As A Spartan. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this game is really where the book lore starts heavily seeping into the games without very much explanation. The ODSTs are in Halo Wars, but not really talked about much, and stuff like biofoam and the Engineer race were straight-up printed-page-only material until they appeared on-screen here. It does cheat a little with the lore. ODSTs should not have shield technology, and they don’t TECHNICALLY have shields in this… but you do have a “Stamina” bar that works exactly like a shield.

I had a fair bit of trouble with ODST on my first playthrough, back in 2010 or so. I felt really squishy, as it were, and I remember dying an awful lot. That wasn’t the case this time around – apart from one late-game segment where you’re trapped in a very small space with a Brute Chieftain with a gravity hammer, I really didn’t go horizontal too often. I think it’s a game that rewards patient approaches to encounters, and I’ve gotten a lot more patient with games.

It doesn’t hurt that the enemies seem much faster to fall over in this game than in previous games. One of the things that frustrated me with Halo 2, in particular, is that your opponents are very spongy and just seem to suck up a ton of punishment before dying. The Covenant forces in ODST weren’t nearly as painful to deal with – with the exception of Hunters, of course, which are just my least favorite enemies in any of the Halo games so far. There’s never a sense of accomplishment after I’m done with a Hunter fight, just a weariness and a hope that I don’t see them again for a while.

Along with the enjoyable gunplay, ODST has a very different atmosphere from your typical Halo excursion. Rather than playing one character for the entire game, or swapping between two as in Halo 2, the game has you jumping into the perspective of five different characters, with levels designed to encourage very different play styles. There’s a sniper level, a “drive around in tanks” level, a particularly notable level where you are fighting a slow retreat to keep data out of the hands of the Covenant and escape, a flight level, and so on. Some of these are daytime, some set at night, all of them are very distinct things.

I’m a big fan, I think is the short version, and I should probably just stop here so I can get on to briefly ranting about the other Halo media I went through in the last couple of days, none of which I liked all that much.

Halo: Evolutions and Halo: Legends are both collections of short stories set in the Halo universe. Evolutions is marked by something of an overuse of the Heroes Heroically Sacrificing Themselves For The Mission trope, and I just got a little tired of all of the Heroic Sacrifice. I did enjoy “The Impossible Life and the Possible Death of Preston J. Cole” and “The Return”, but I’m not sure it was worth reading a 400 page book for two enjoyable short stores.

Likewise, Legends really suffers from Downer Ending Syndrome. It tries to lighten things up with a downright wacky story detailing the exploits of “SPARTAN-1337”, so at least ONE of the people writing the shorts didn’t get the memo that everyone should die tragically, but… well, I had a hard time sticking with it, until about 15 minutes before the end.

15 minutes before the end is where you see “The Package: Directed by Shinji Aramaki” and that’s where any fan of a certain age will sit up and pay attention. I won’t spoil anything, but if you like Macross-style ridiculous missile barrages, you will be well-served by The Package.

So… well, I had a hard time with most of Halo: Legends, but mostly because I had a hard time getting in to the mood for Everyone Dies And It’s All Pointless. For the most part, the games are just so much more hopeful than the extended-universe stuff.

This was, of course, just the perfect mood to go into Halo: Reach with, since that game IS a game about everyone dying at the end. It also marks the return of some really ridiculous bullet-sponge enemies – Elites, in particular, seem to be color-coded depending on how much damage they can soak up, and if you don’t happen to have a plasma weapon the silver elites are just a drag to fight. Really kind of tempted to skip this one, but… well, I’m only a couple of levels in. Maybe it will pick up.

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The Beige Box saga continues: Getting a Sound Blaster Audigy to work in DOS.

Posted on April 7, 2018 by baudattitude

I mentioned early in March that I was working on throwing together a retro gaming PC using parts I’d gotten from an eWaste bin, from thrift stores, and from digging through boxes in my closet.  I even recorded a video where I talked about the hardware a bit, and was going to do a sequel video… and then I realized that, while any given text post on this blog gets about a hundred views in the first day or two, the video took over two weeks before it even hit double-digit views.

It was educational to MAKE, anyway.  I have some good ideas of how to make future videos better, but they involve spending more money and I’m not entirely sure I want to do that.

But, anyway, that post was focused on just finding all of the hardware needed to make a working computer and didn’t cover the software side of things.

For the given era of PC games I’m interested in, I decided on Windows 98SE as the ideal operating system.  I know that there are games that will not work on 98 that did work on 95, but they are vanishingly few in number and 95 was just a little more twitchy then I really wanted to deal with.  Also, you can boot into DOS mode… once you track down DOS drivers for your CD-ROM, mouse and sound card, that is.  Let’s talk about that.

The sound card I am using is a Sound Blaster Audigy, which sometimes gets described as the “1394 model” because it included a Firewire port.  It is the last sound card from Creative with official DOS support, though its DOS support is done through SB16 emulation.  So, it won’t sound exactly like an OPL-based card, but it’s probably good enough.

Getting it to work in DOS was tricky, though, because the installation CD I had didn’t include the DOS drivers and then I couldn’t get them installed once I found them.  It turns out that they require a Windows 95 VXD-style driver, while the Audigy installer selects the WDM drivers by default.  To get the card working in DOS, I needed to remove all of the drivers that had been installed, reboot so Windows would see the card and prompt me for a location for drivers, manually select the Windows 95 drivers from the install CD and THEN install the DOS support after I had those working.

That gave me audio support in DOS mode, but I still didn’t have a mouse because I was using a USB mouse.  Worked fine in Windows, but not when the computer was rebooted into DOS.  So, I found a PS/2 style mouse, plugged it in, and immediately lost all sound.

It turned out that my motherboard had assigned IRQ 12 to the Audigy, which created a conflict with PS/2 mice which use that IRQ by default.

So, I said some unkind things and went into the BIOS and disabled both COM ports, freeing up IRQs 3 and 4, and then the motherboard was able to shift things around so I could have both sound AND a mouse at the same time.  I was way too happy about getting this to work.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that, gosh, computers sure have come a long way in the last 20 years.

Next up, I’ll probably talk about video cards.  I had some fun there, though not nearly so much as with sound.  In the meantime, here are a couple of very useful links if you are interested in abusing yourself with a similar project:

www.vogons.org – Officially, “VOGONS” stands for Very Old Games on New Systems, but there are a lot of resources on there for people trying to make old systems work – especially their vogonsdrivers.com site, which is a trove of old drivers.

How To Install USB Mass Storage Device on Windows 98 from raymond.cc – while Windows 98 supported USB devices, it didn’t have a general-purpose mass storage driver.  I didn’t have a working floppy drive (much less any blank floppy discs!) to start, so getting stuff on to the beige box was a pain and I was going through a bunch of blank CD-ROMs.  This article saved me a lot of hassle.

 

 

 

 

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Halo Month, Part 2

Posted on April 7, 2018 by baudattitude

Halo Month continues, with wrapping up Halo 2 and reading the “Halo Graphic Novel” and “Halo: Ghosts of Onyx” before playing Halo 3, then continuing to the books “Halo: Contact Harvest” and “Halo: The Cole Protocol” and Halo Wars.

The sad thing is, I think I may have read more books this month than I usually read in any given SIX months and they’ve all been these borderline-young-adult military adventure fiction things.  I have shame.

Halo 2 was… well it started well but honestly it had me kind of rethinking this whole plan after I got past the first few levels. It’s a game where you spend most of your time shooting at things that are trying to kill you, but so many of the guns are just terrible and it really felt like they deliberately dropped ones that people liked in the first game. The first Halo is… well, it’s clunky but it’s from 2001. That earns it a lot of forgiveness-by-context. I felt less inclined to forgive a game from three years later.

The Halo Graphic Novel is, I think, the first Halo media tie-in that seemed entirely skippable, and in fact I think I’m going to skip all of the comics going forward. If anyone reading this has any particular opinions on ones I SHOULD read, I’m open to advice.

Ghosts of Onyx continues the wacky adventures of Doctor Halsey and the Other Spartans Who Aren’t John. I am continually amused by the fact that all of these genetically-enhanced super soldiers have boring names. It also makes it easier to keep track of them, which is always my problem with fantasy and science fiction names. As an example, I can’t remember a single elf from Lord of the Rings except for Legolas, but I can remember “Linda the Spartan” JUST FINE. Anyway. It was a good read, as media tie-ins go, and I’m starting to feel a lot more connection to the overall story. So that’s a recommend from me.

Halo 3 was genuinely enjoyable, which was a really good thing after slogging through the first two games. I will admit a touch of impatience with “Cortana”, but… setting that level aside I thought it was well-paced and brought back all of the better guns from Combat Evolved and generally wrapped up the trilogy in a neat bow – the final scene is just full circle to the introduction of the Master Chief, and I think I’d have been perfectly content if they’d stopped making games at that point.

Plus, TANK BEATS EVERYTHING and the other random marine chatter will never stop making me giggle.  I think Bungie realized that they were in danger of being a little too stodgy and decided to lighten the mood a bit.

Contact Harvest and The Cole Protocol were prequels, so by-and-large less important. They have a lot of scenes written from the perspective of the Covenant races, so they’re probably mostly books to read if you’re curious how the …you know, what I said about Elvish names? It goes double for the alien-language names they gave to the Elites and Grunts and such. I will, therefore, ignore the alien names and say that if you’re curious how Grunt and Elite and Brute societies work, these are a good couple of books to read. If you don’t particularly care about back story or alien anthropology, they’re skippable.

Telling stories from the point of view of one of the Grunts seems to be a particular theme in the Halo novels, and they come off as quite the sympathetic underdogs. That won’t stop me from sneaking up on sleeping grunts in future Halos and putting a sticky grenade on them so I can watch the fun, mind you.

Halo Wars was the first new-to-me game, since I hadn’t played it on its original release.  Fortunately, while it’s not included in the Master Chief collection, there is a remastered release and I didn’t have to track down the Xbox 360 version.  I wasn’t really looking forward to it because I have never been much of an RTS player and I was expecting to have to constantly repeat levels and wasn’t looking forward to that kind of time investment.  I decided to set it to “Easy” and just grit my teeth and power through, maybe abusing the heck out of quick-save along the way.

It turns out, “Easy” really IS “Easy” and I needn’t have worried. I did feel a little rushed by the two levels with time limits, but the others were just a lovely peaceful experience of building up my home base – or bases – into impregnable fortresses and maxing out tech trees and finally rolling out with a ridiculous amount of infantry and armor and just steamrollering everything else on the map. It was a very enjoyable seven hours from opening to end credits and well worth the ten bucks it cost me.

I don’t actually know whether it DOES let you save mid-level, come to think of it.  I never felt the need to stop and save the game.

As a side benefit, it’s a Play Anywhere game so I was able to play it with a keyboard and mouse. I understand the controls are decent even with a joypad, but why handicap myself?

It IS 100% a side story and could easily be skipped, but you would be missing out on an enjoyable game and some cutscenes with a delightfully snarky AI.  Strong recommend.

Next up is, uh… Halo: ODST, followed by one book, then the animated “Halo: Legends” anthology and Halo: Reach. Then I have FOUR books to read and a movie to watch before I can start Halo 4.

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Halo Month, Part 1

Posted on April 3, 2018 by baudattitude

So, Halo Month is off to quite the start. I’ve read the first three books (“Halo: The Fall of Reach”, “Halo: The Flood”, and “Halo: First Strike”), played through the MCC version of Halo: Combat Evolved, and started Halo 2.

As mentioned before, a big part of why I’m doing this is because I’ve never really paid attention to the Halo universe outside of the games, and that made following Halo 4’s plot very confusing – a lot of it revolves around Doctor Halsey, who I don’t think ever shows up in a Halo game before that point but who is hugely important to the book plots from the very first book forward.

I can’t really talk too much about the quality of the books. They suffer a bit from the need to lovingly describe the various weapons and gear used by the Spartans, and it comes off a bit… men’s adventure? Like, there’s a drugstore action novel feel to them, with all of the talk of calibers and high explosives – and to make things worse, some of the technical talk is just painful. There’s at least one moment where a character is described as using a “114mm sniper rifle”, for example, which I am going to pretend is just a really interesting typo.

Let’s just file them under not-great-literature and move on.

Two of them are basically lore dumps to get you into the first game and then to explain how one of the characters in that first game survived until the second. The middle book, “Halo: The Flood” is little more than a novelization of the game storyline, which was quite a disappointment. I had expected it to go into, well, the backstory of the Flood. Silly me.

Of all of them, I think “Halo: The Fall of Reach” is the most critical to read and I kind of wish I’d read it before playing the game for the first time – some details from the page don’t perfectly match up with the on-screen events, but it really sets the stage and the stakes for the campaign.

I’d played Halo: Combat Evolved through twice before, both the original Xbox version and the Xbox 360 Anniversary edition, which was a good thing. It meant that I was ready for the godawful slog that is “Assault on the Control Room” and knew in advance that “Twin Betrayals” was just going to be “Assault on the Control Room” in reverse. What I didn’t remember was just how easy it is to get absolutely murdered by random chains of grenade explosions, or how painful breaking into the landing bay in “Truth and Reconciliation” was going to be. I was only playing on Normal difficulty, expecting a cakewalk, and I had to reset my expectations several times over the course of the campaign.

A lot of Halo’s campaign, after your first play-through, is just working your way to the Flood outbreak since that’s where the game really kicks into gear. It’s probably an unpopular opinion, but my favorite level is “The Library”, just because I really love the sense of being constantly almost-but-not-quite overwhelmed by hordes of enemies. It doesn’t have the same adrenaline rush as the final mad dash in the Warthog, but it keeps up the tension level for a really long time. It may be a bit linear, compared to other levels where Bungie was happy to let you get lost and wander around for a while, but linear works for me.

I suspect I have just insulted a lot of fan-favorite levels, and I’d be interested to hear other peoples’ thoughts on the campaign.  Be gentle. 🙂

The Master Chief Collection versions of both Halo and Halo 2 let you swap back and forth between the old graphics and new graphics with the press of a button, and I found myself switching quite a bit. Unexpectedly, I found myself preferring the old lighting in most of the levels – the ring is supposed to be ancient and long-dead, and the Forerunner ruins in the original game LOOK it. The fresh coat of paint added for the remaster kind of destroys the sense that you’re wandering through the remnants, like they spent a long time on retexturing everything and then realized that they needed to turn on all of the lights or you wouldn’t be able to properly appreciate the work they put into designing wall panels.

Old Vs. New

Also, the newly-added ground flora does a fine job of covering up ammo and weapon pickups, and one of the primary reasons I kept switching to the old graphics was so I could find stuff after fights.

That kvetching aside, the new models for characters and vehicles are far better and usually won out over preferring the older lighting. If they ever RE-remaster the original game, I hope they find a bit of a middle ground.

As I mentioned, I’m only a little ways into Halo 2 – specifically, at the point where the Master Chief actually winds up on the second Halo installation. So far, I’m liking the changes to the visuals much more than in the first game, and there is a real evolution in pacing – the opening level is a bit of a drag, especially since I managed to get lost several times, but everything since then has been firing on all cylinders.

Next up, I should finish Halo 2, then read one or two more books and dive into Halo 3. I also have Halo Wars waiting for me, and that’s going to be the first completely new-to-me game. I don’t have a lot of RTS experience so I’m a little anxious about that one, but we’ll see how it goes.

Posted in videogames, xbox, Xbox One | 2 Comments

Five other things I played in March

Posted on April 1, 2018 by baudattitude

I haven’t been going as whole-hog on my backlog this year, because honestly I feel like last year ended with me in control again after quite a while of feeling buried under the shame of a mountain of games I’d bought but never actually played.  I’m still, oh, 70 or 80 games behind but at least it’s not three digits anymore.

It’s a good feeling, and it means that I can do things like trying a different Dark Souls III spec without self-inflicted guilt.

I may be putting a little too much emphasis on this, but I don’t think I’m the only one to have backlog stress.  If you’re struggling with your own “to-play” list, or want to brag about how your first quarter of 2018 has gone, feel free to share your pain or triumph in the comments.  This is a judgement-free zone.

Anyway, even with being a little more mellow and with being distracted by replaying a game, I did manage to knock 5 games out.

A few years ago, I talked a friend into buying Borderlands 2 so we could co-op through it.  At the time, I didn’t realize that the campaign was quite so ridiculously long – I think we made it about 25 hours in before it kind of fizzled out.

Anyway, I decided that I would make another go at it and started from scratch. It turned out to be worth going back to – while the game’s inventory system is just awful, it has some really enjoyable gunplay, the script got some genuine laughs out of me, and I even managed to enjoy the “sorting through a pile of vaguely-similar weapons every 15 minutes” aspect, which usually bugs me in loot games.  Also, the cel-shaded look has aged really well.

I’m not being entirely truthful when I say that I bought a WiiU for Splatoon.  I decided to buy one when Nintendo announced that they’d be localizing Fatal Frame 5.

On the other hand, I knew I needed to have Splatoon in my life from the first time I saw the first video of it – maybe an E3 video? maybe a direct? I can’t recall, but I do remember really confusing the guy at Best Buy who I preordered the Splatoon console bundle from.  It was a mix of “wait, someone wants to buy a WiiU?” and “wait, we are actually taking preorders for WiiUs?”

I put a good number of hours into the multiplayer, but it also deserves special mention for having a really fun single-player campaign, capped with one of gaming’s best final bosses.

The sequel… well, I haven’t played any of the multiplayer yet, but I expect it’s just as good as the original game, just without needing to hold a massive tablet controller all of the time.  I did play through the single-player, and it was… well, it was OK.  It would have been worlds better if almost every level hadn’t had a “Sheldon Request” making you play with specific weapons, mind you.  It did not stand up to the standards of the first game.

That said, I am really looking forward to the DLC expansion announced recently.  The Octolings have really neat designs and it seems sad that they’re limited to being the bad guys in a part of the game most people will only play once, if that.

I’ve never had a ton of attachment to Mario, but I wound up playing a whopping three Mario platformers last year – and two of them were excellent games.  I probably wouldn’t have gone out and bought a fourth, but Nintendo added 3D World to their Player Selects line and $20 felt like a good price.

It turned out to be a lot of fun, and I’m glad I took the plunge.  I don’t do well with platform games – I tend to seize up when asked to do something like jump from one swinging platform to another – but the short levels and mid-level checkpoints meant that I was able to brute-force my way through every level in the first 8 worlds and send Bowser packing.

Being a pre-Odyssey game, it still has the annoying combo of limited lives AND stage time limits, which was particularly vexing in one of the Bowser stages where I was supposed to be knocking things back at him to damage him and he ran out the clock on me by not throwing enough things for me to knock back… but lives were easy enough to come by, and I still had 30 in the bank when all was said and done.

Special mention goes to the “Captain Toad” puzzle levels, which were absolutely charming, and I may just need to check out his solo game when it gets a Switch release later this year.  Or I could always hunt down the WiiU original.  That might be a lot cheaper.

While I used to be a big comics reader, I stuck mostly to the DC side of the comics shop.  As a result, my only exposure to Deadpool has been the recent movie, which was a surprisingly good non-Marvel-Studios Marvel movie.  Really, between Deadpool and Logan, Fox was really firing on all cylinders when it came to super-hero movies.

(Let’s just try not to think about X-Men: Apocalypse right now.  I apologize if by mentioning it I have reminded you that it was a thing that happened.)

Anyway, I had just enough exposure to Deadpool that I decided to buy the game when it was announced for delisting from Xbox Live, and I finally got around to booting it up this weekend.

It’s not a long game – it took me about 7 hours on the “Veteran” difficulty setting – and there’s very little about the gameplay to recommend it – really, it’s a by-the-numbers 3rd-person brawler and suffers from a severe lack of variety in level design.

HOWEVER.  It’s funny as hell, and that makes up for a lot.

Well, that deserves a qualifier, really, because the humor is definitely on the mean-spirited side of things and for maximum appreciation you really need to have been a 12-year-old boy at one time or another.  If your reaction to random fart jokes is to roll your eyes rather than giggle, you might not have the same positive reaction to this game.

You will also need a fairly high tolerance for male-gaze-heavy camera angles whenever there’s a woman on screen… though, even though Psylocke’s role in this game is mostly to stand around with her butt directly pointed at the camera, it’s still a better use of the character then the previously mentioned X-Men: Apocalypse.

Finally, while the combat is mashy as heck and really tedious for the first hunk of the game, it starts getting much better once you’ve unlocked a few weapons and upgrades, and the last level features a boss gauntlet that really justifies all of the time you spent getting to it – it just throws wave after wave of mooks and previous bosses at you, and is a wonderfully hectic affair.  I even picked up one of my favorite recent achievements from this level:

So this gets a thumbs-up from me.  If you’re on the fence… maybe go on Youtube, watch the first half hour or so, decide for yourself whether the gags are up your alley.

Finally, Never Alone, which has exactly zero fart jokes.  No jokes at all, really – it’s a fairly bleak affair, a puzzle platformer which has you taking control of a small girl and a fox in an effort to survive inclement weather and a particularly nasty villain.

Seriously, I really hated the guy, with a passion that I can rarely summon for videogame antagonists.  I was glad to see him brought to a fitting end.

It’s gotten a lot of praise for its setting and for its source material – it’s based on an Inuit folk tale and has a number of videos you can watch to find out more about the culture if you want to learn more.  It’s pretty much the game equivalent of Oscar bait, and has accordingly won a ton of awards.

I kind of suspect that most of the praise has come from people who didn’t actually persevere through the whole thing, however – it is a VERY short game, which you’ll likely knock out in 3 hours or less (I took 2 hours 41 minutes, and as mentioned earlier I am rubbish at platformers), and while it has a very good “first level completion” rate of 87%, a bare 15% of players actually stuck with it until the end.  That’s a steep drop-off.

You will die a lot in this game, many of the things that kill you are poorly-telegraphed until you die from them, and it can be quite an unenjoyable affair at times.

On the other hand, cute fox.  REALLY cute fox.  You may decide to play this game only for the cute fox, and I don’t think there’s a single thing wrong with that.

So, not cutting down the backlog with quite the same force as last year, but still generally having a good time at it.

For April, I have a self-imposed backlog challenge theme.  When I bought my Xbone, I also got the Master Chief Collection and Halo 5, so I’d like to rack up some more hours in a green helmet… but I’ve held back, because playing Halo 4 a few years back didn’t make a ton of sense and I really felt like there was a whole lot of backstory that I was missing out on.

So, this April is Halo month – not just the mainline games, mind you, but I’m going to read the books AND watch the movies AND play the spin-off games… and I’m going to do all of this mixed-media consumption in release order, which I hope is not too painful.  I have constructed a spreadsheet.

I may even buy some Doritos.  And Mountain Dew.  You know.  Game fuel.  Advance warning, I may be going Full Bro here.

 

Posted in PS4, Switch, WiiU, Xbox One | Leave a comment