A few parts of the game disappointed me a bit. The whole Cortana cam (the flashbacks?) was tedious. Especially the part where she says ‘This is how the world ends’. It wasn’t.
But the rest of the game was mint. Ripping turrets off their mounts is so satisfying. The ‘powerup’ thing seemed a bit like they wanted it in the multiplayer and just put it in the single player. It was a little too arcade for me - the previous games had quite a nice arcade / realism balance but I felt Halo 3 was a little on the arcade side. I hardly used the powerups, even while playing through legendary.
Legendary was good, I don’t think I will do it again but it was fun. The game seemed to be about taking all the parts of the previous games that people liked and making them bigger and better.
The first level is amazing, so lush, they really did justice to the Xbox 360 and jungles in general.
I can’t help loving achievements on the 360 but it disappoints me that some of them are for multiplayer only.
Watched the E3 Presentation. Saw the guy get a tattoo of the release date. Dylan convinced me to go to the release night. Then he convinced me to buy it. I finished the game at 9 O’clock on the day it was released. Annoying ending.
They took Halo and made it look better. Dual wielding, different weapon balancing and physics. The AI was better, the story was more epic. It was Halo scaled up.
I’ve played Halo 2 the most out of the trilogy. Karl and I managed to get to plenty of areas we shouldn’t. I’ve been thinking about creating a ‘freerunners’ Halo 2 gallery filled with screen captures of Master Chief in places he really shouldn’t be. We’ve explored most areas of Halo 2.
You can finally man turrets, drive wraiths, hit things to move them and swap weapons with your teammates. The story has interesting twists and turns. I’m a big fan of space operas. Playing the Arbiter was an interesting decision which decreased the fun a bit for me but did spice it up.
Halo 2 legendary is hard. The first level is probably the hardest.
Great game, good memories.
When looking at a Windows computer in Leopard:
Leopard is great. The Finder is faster and there are many small improvements everywhere. And for the first time for OS X the Leopard install kept all my installed Unix tools. Great stuff.
Just for fun I’ve decided to note my experiences with some games.
I first heard about Halo in a MacAddict magazine. The gist was that this awesome game was coming out for Macintosh and PC sometime in the future. Then Microsoft bought Bungie and Halo became the Xbox flagship game.
When the game eventually came out it was my brother who was able to play it first. From what he described I imagined rolling hills, grey chunky buildings, vehicles and a sniper rifle which you could take off your squad mate. I held off playing for quite a while - I think it was a year after it was released. I played through the coop with Weasel. There were also many multiplayer battles with friends.
The game was what I imagined. The vehicles were great, it had a space opera story, and shooting stuff was fun. Some of the levels have been described as tedious, but I was so sold on the game that they seemed to make sense in that part of the game - a struggle to get the key.
The game is engineered to be fun. I’ve heard the term ‘3 key elements’ or something like that. Shooting, melee, and grenading. I think it’s great that there is a separate button for each. I’ll go into further detail when discussing the other Halo games.
The game itself is great. Mystery, action and a light sprinkling of humour.
My pet peeve: calling a project that compiles in Windows and x86 Linux ‘Cross Platform’.
Technically it’s correct, yes it does compile on more than one platform. But for my uses converting to OS X a linux project that uses X11 and links to pre-compiled x86 Linux libraries isn’t straightforward. These projects don’t deserve to be called cross platform.
My ideal cross platform project: a project that has no pre-compiled code, libraries or otherwise. A project that has minimal dependancies or at least cross platform dependancies. A project written in standard C++ or similar (no ASM!).