Halo 4 box art

[DrLove42]

See its funny you mention Gears and Halo in the same sentence as they are two of the best games ever.

But not from a gameplay point of view (although I am a fan of both). The over arching story, the universe they've created, the ridiculous detail and the books are simply incredible. I'm reading "The Slab" which is the last Gears book at the moment

If you want ridiculous shooters...I assume you played Bulletstorm last year?

[DarkLink]

Really, both Halo and GoW are very popular for a reason. Halo brought real online multiplayer to the console market. GoW was the first game to have a good cover system, even if there are a few flaws in GoW when you have to man a turret or drive a vehicle.

Halo pretty much killed the FPS, then stupid Gears of War came along and made it so third person shooters sucked the farts out of a dead duck's rectum as well.

Quite the hipster, aren't you? I bet you still think GoldenEye is a great game.

I grew up with Doom 2. I don't want two weapon options. I want thirty, each with two alternate fire modes. I don't want to have a super-mega-ultra gun with one bullet so I can never use it. I don't want "realistic" shooters. I want totally ridiculous shooters.

So you're mistaking your personal preferences for quantitative measurement of quality?

You know what the most fun I've ever had in a video game, ever, was? Four player co-op playthrough on Legendary in Halo. Five player Horde mode in GoW2. You don't like that, you can keep on playing Doom all you want.

[Morgan Darkstar]

@eldargal - Hah! Masterchef. It's actually a TV show in England.

I have a sneaky suspicion she is aware of that fact

[url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfeyUGZt8nk[/url]

[MaltonNecromancer]

Quite the hipster, aren't you? I bet you still think GoldenEye is a great game.

can't stand it. I hate James Bond with all my little black heart. I tried it, got bored, went back to Fallout 3. Plus, I can't stand any Nintendo games... with the glorious exception of 2D Castlevanias.

You don't like that, you can keep on playing Doom all you want.

BUT I CAN'T! That's the problem! Every damn shooter is now a clone of Halo and it's "two guns means more tactical" nonsense, or GoW with its one-button-for-everything hideous controls/two full clips to drop a single enemy Mook.

The best shooters in my opinion:

Rainbow 6: Vegas 1 and 2 (but on "Realistic" difficulty) - best tactical shooters bar none. A cover mecahnic that works perfectly, guns that are effective, high enemy AI, lots of thinking needed to survive. Brilliant, brilliant games.

Splinter Cell: Conviction - meshes stealth and shooting perfectly. Lots of gadgets that are not game-winning in and of themselves, but fun and useful. Not one unnecessary gameplay feature.

Quake 2, 3 and 4 - perfectly balanced guns, imaginative enemies, relatively good-for-the-time AI (especially in 3), and stunning visuals. We can only render boxes? Fine: the enemies are all industrial cyborgs! The Strogg are still one of my favourite FPS enemies.

Doom 2 and 3 - like Quake but with more horror. Doom3 is less of a fun shooting game, but a really atmospheric experience.

Dead Space 2 - the precision shooting mechanic is superb, as well as the fact that the basic pistol/plasma cutter is the best gun in the game once you're good with it. Plus, the enemy AI is great in places.

Half-Life 2 - I'd have Half-Life on the list, but the Xen level is a turd that cannot be ignored. Half-Life 2 has the glory that is Ravenholm, a game sequence that is astonishing. There's also the antlion siege in Episode 2 which is the most awesome singe player experience I've ever had in a game ever. The music (Kelly bailey's "Vortal Combat") is the greatest song in any game ever.

Portal 1 and 2 - Both great games. Portal 1 funny. Portal 2 funny and horrifying, with a story that wouldn't work in any medium but gaming. The whole tragedy of GLADoS is just heratbreaking and sickening. Made more so when you find that Cave Johnson's actor (J.K. Simmons) wouldn't record some of the lines because they were too disturbing - and this is the man who played Vern Schillinger.

Hitman: all games after Contracts - perfect in every way. More guns than any other game, and the joy comes in completing every level without using one of them.

Mass Effect 2: loved the story of 1. game play was meh. Mass Effect 2 was a really solid shooting engine that happened to have a really interesting story attached to it.

Painkiller: because it's basically concentrated fun.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 - If they made a 40K version of this, it would be The Greatest Game Ever. And you know I'm right.

Earth Defence Force: for the same reason as Painkiller.

There's a few others, but those are the big ones.

The over arching story, the universe they've created, the ridiculous detail and the books are simply incredible.

Not for me. I have a tendency to skip cutscenes. If I want to watch a film, I'll watch a film. One of my big problems with GoW (aside from the one-button nonsense) was how utterly unsympathetic the "heroes" were. Marcus Fenix in particular is a big unlikable turd of a human being to me; I spent the whole game hoping they'd pull a COD4 and kill him, but no. I had to put up with his foul personality all the way through the game.

The books might be good, but the game universe just doesn;t interest me at all.

If you want ridiculous shooters...I assume you played Bulletstorm last year?

Hated it. Ugly aesthetics, long, unskippable cutscenes, repellant main character whose defining trait of being an unlikable turd didn't endear him to me. Only able to carry a few guns, most of which weren't that interesting, "kill with skill" interesting concept, but used only to "unlock" ammunition, a companion (like that idiot Dom) who follows you around to do nothing more than block your path and insult you, a "sassy" (read: stupid, ugly, ignorant, unlikable female character), chldish swearing (the main villain's dialogue was the pits), the list goes on....

"Bulletstorm" was kind of a case study of Why I Hate Halo and Gears Of War.

Because of

[url]http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FollowTheLeader[/url]

what could have been a fun, silly, shooter, was instead po-faced, with a "gritty" (read: stupid, ugly, ignorant, unlikable) "hero". It had a single fun idea (the "kill with skill" system), but that was it.

I really, really hated that game.

You know what the most fun I've ever had in a video game, ever, was? Four player co-op playthrough on Legendary in Halo. Five player Horde mode in GoW2.

I remember when gaming was four mates sat on a sofa, eating, drinking and laughing together at split screen action. Sat alone talking to disconnected voices? Not for me. I get why people like it. It just annoys me. I've tried the online games, and for me it holds as much appeal as... well, I can't even be bothered to finish that simile, because online gaming doesn't deserve it.

[DarkLink]

I don't have online, so co-op is in person.


Splinter Cell Conviction is awesome. If you like that, look up Ghost Recon Future Soldier. They basically slightly toned down the stealth and bumped up the shooter part of Splinter Cell Conviction. Watching the trailers for GRFS, it looks like everything that I always wanted in a tactical shooter.

Not for me. I have a tendency to skip cutscenes.

You're missing out on a lot of what made Halo awesome. GoW, not so much, I was never that impressed with the story there. None of the overly gritty grouchiness from GoW applies to Halo, either.

Because of

[url]http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...ollowTheLeader[/url]

See, here's the thing, and it's pointed out in the link you posted.

Stuff advances. It moves forward. Halo, half life, etc, each was the next evolution in first person shooters. If you want to play doom, then, literally, go play doom. But not everyone wants to make or play a carbon copy of doom for the rest of their lives. Some of us like to move on.

That's not to say that Call of Duty Modern Warfare 5 Black Ops 3 isn't getting a little old, nor that your alone in not caring for GoW's uber-manly brown and greyness. But GoW's cover system was awesome, and absolutely a gameplay advance. CoD and Halo's modular class system add a lot of fun to the system, and Horde/Survival/Firefight is the best thing to happen to multiplayer since, well, multiplayer.

So you might not like Halo, but when almost everyone is trying to copy its success don't make the mistake of thinking it's a bad game.

Edit:
That article also points out that Halo was the first big game to successfully take a large number of awesome features and stick them all together effectively. You could throw grenades at the press of a button, smack people with whatever you happened to be holding, drive around in vehicles as you pleased, etc.

[MaltonNecromancer]

That article also points out that Halo was the first big game to successfully take a large number of awesome features and stick them all together effectively. You could throw grenades at the press of a button, smack people with whatever you happened to be holding, drive around in vehicles as you pleased, etc.

Oh, undeniably. The grenade-button was genius, as was the melee.

But the game was really ugly; the Covenant look ridiculous, the plasma guns look like vibrators, and the first and second game consist of huuuuuuuuge car parks. Yeah, the first missions of each were great, but after that? Big concrete buildings with glowing iPod screens. Ugly and boring to look at. Made worse by the fact that many, many of those rooms were copypasted. Bad, lazy game design.

Plus ONLY TWO GUNS! What's that about, seriously? It's not tactical; it's just dull.

You're missing out on a lot of what made Halo awesome.

I play games for interactivity. If I want to watch a film, I'll watch a damn film. If the game designer can't find a way to get that story element integrated into an interactive gameplay element, it has no business being in the game, and that game designer has failed as a game designer. Cut scenes are the herpes of gaming. Quick-time events are the syphilis.

Also, stories about heroic supersoldiers interest me about as much as stories about sparkly vampires; just a personal thing. I've never had any great desire to be a soldier (which is why most of my favourite shooters don't involve serving in the armed forces. I'm still surprised I liked Rainbow 6 as much as I did). I also don't like unrconstructed stories about heroes, unless the game gives me the choice to be a hero/anthero/antivillain/villain. Which is one of the key reasons I despise Master Chief and rate Commander Shepard. At least in Mass Effect, I have some control over the badly scripted garbage I have to listen to.

But GoW's cover system was awesome, and absolutely a gameplay advance

It was a good idea, badly implemented. Rainbow 6: Vegas has the best cover system of any game I've ever played; it is absolute perfection. I love cover-based shooting, but it's often appallingly implemented, and GoW is the reason why.

when almost everyone is trying to copy its success don't make the mistake of thinking it's a bad game.

Why not?

If it didn't work for me, it's a bad game FOR ME. I couldn't care less how many people enjoyed it! "Twilight has a massive fan following; I doubt you'd use that as an argument for it's quality. So does "Titanic". So do a lot of bloody awful things.

Popularity does not equal quality. Popularity equals popularity. There is no such thing as an "objective" opinion of a game. All opinions of games are, by their nature, subjective.

If people are copying it's success, well, that means it appeals to the lowest common denominator. Which if fair enough, but not the sign of quality. If I was interested in what the mainstream liked, I'd be into X-Factor, not 40K.

But not everyone wants to make or play a carbon copy of doom for the rest of their lives.

Not everyone wants t platy a carbon copy of Halo or COD. But that's all the industry's been churning out for years now.

[DarkLink]

Twilight never had anything innovative, quite to the contrary. Titanic, while just a sappy love tragedy, was I assume pretty visually impressive for the time. Same thing with Avatar. Avatar is actually a pretty mediocre movie, but it's so visually stunning that it is worthy of note. It's basically like watching Planet: Pandora, with an awesome evil Marine Colonel killing stuff for no good reason.

Halo invented and brought together a lot of things and pulled FPS up to the next level. Some of the stuff had been done before, some hadn't, but no one had done it all at the same time, successfully. GoW did that to a lesser degree as well, with a smooth cover system, chainsaw bayonets and some fun little features like the reload mini-game. Both were important steps in the evolution of first and third person shooters. Even the Halo sequels (but not the GoW sequels) added new features and polished the gameplay. You might not like it for specific reasons, but there are plenty of things not everyone likes yet were important milestones with significant undeniably positive qualities.

On the other hand, the twelfth Call of Duty game is basically the exact same thing as the last three or four. At one point, that series was innovative in some way and earned its popularity, but now while it's still fun it's overrated. The finale of each game, where you get arbitrarily disarmed and severely wounded while the badguy single handedly beats down your partner as if you hadn't just killed like five thousand terrorists in the last 24 hours is annoying.



I guess if you arbitrarily hate soldiers as characters, then good for you. But again, don't mistake personal preference as a measure of quality. I find the story (cutscenes included) of the Halo series to be one of the better video game stories out there.

[Tzeentch's Dark Agent]

And so it turns into an FPS war thread... Le sigh.

[Psychosplodge]

Not everyone wants t platy a carbon copy of Halo or COD. But that's all the industry's been churning out for years now.

They're just trying to outdo each each other in how brown they can make their game environments...

And so it turns into an FPS war thread... Le sigh.

But of course...

[Tzeentch's Dark Agent]

They're just trying to outdo each each other in how brown they can make their game environments...

What?! Halo is colourful!
The main enemy wears blue, pink, purple, orange, white, red, etc etc
I used to think that Halo was too cartoony compared to Battlefield or Call of Duty.
You can't say that it is full o' sepia.