Grandia Xtreme is a brilliant game, not much time is wasted with useless story bits (seriously, the number of games where you spend more time staring at the screen than playing them is way too high these days), and Grandia is just fun, especially with the little tweaks to the battle system that make the game so goddamn addicting.

As for guilty secrets, I kinda dislike SNES RPGs. I only got interested in games later on, near the end of the PS1, and even though I tried to get into some SNES games they just felt awkward to play (I was bored to death with Secret of Mana, and I still can't understand why everyone gets so excited about the SNES FF games, must be some nostalgia thing).

As for guilty pleasures, Suikoden III is pretty high up my list of favourites, although the general consensus is that it is one of the lesser installments. Before V it even was my favourite Suikoden game (maybe because it was the first on I played), and it's one of the few games that I replay every now and then.

My guilty pleasure? I'll have to thank Clover for that, making what I consider to be the greatest PS2 game of all time. No, not Okami. I bought and sold that in the same week 'cause it was pretty boring. I'm talking about Godhand, motherfuckers.

I guess my other guilty pleasure is that I'll always prefer Lagoon to any of the Ys games.

I always said Halo is like the World of Warcraft of FPS. It's pretty mediocre, but it does things in a way that a lot of people can pick it up and learn the game very quickly. At least that's how it feels to me. Having both the Orange Box and Left 4 Dead now I feel next to no desire to play Halo 3 anymore myself.

I think Halo 3 is an excellently-designed game and that the cocksuckers who overcompensate by bitching about the thirteen-year-olds who enjoy it for entirely the wrong reasons are horribly misguided. Referring to it with terms like "mediocre" and "generic" is nebulous as hell, and comparing it to needlessly convoluted PC shooters is a major case of apples-and-oranges.

Also, there is no "World of Warcraft of FPS". That's no fucking comparison at all. They're completely fucking different in terms of target audience and design philosophy. Fuck your genre distinctions.

Yeah um I'm sure there's plenty of people with genuine reasons for disliking the games, but most people ragging on Halo come off sounding like they've never actually played it themselves.

"No, but I heard a friend of mine describe them to me", rite.

I'll put this simply: I think Halo is a game designed to appeal to idiots.

I don't like the setting. It has just enough 'story' to convince stupid people that it's really clever. The entire thing is a pastiche of dumbed-down placeholders from a variety of obvious sources - a space fleet, a ringworld, a holographic assistant, space marines, a masked space hero, etc. etc. I defy any educated science fiction fan previously unfamiliar with the game to play through the first part of the first game and not immediately complain that the guys at Bungie must have really liked Aliens... and Star Wars... and StarShip Troopers... and Larry Niven... and Metroid in very, very unsubtle ways.

This would be fine, in and of itself... after all, my favorite PC game of all time - Wing Commander - does exactly the same thing on exactly the same scale. In Halo, though, it became clear pretty quickly that the developers and the fan were taking it all incredibly seriously and believed it to be high art. Where Wing Commander went off to have some of the most enjoyably pulpy tie-in novels ever written, Halo went on to explain in an intricate fashion just how brilliant it was that the guy who wrote it saw a bunch of movies. I think it completely snapped for me when I saw elaborate official histories about how and why a girl Halo robot appeared in one of those girls-in-bikinis-beat-up-eachother fighting games (see, she's actually TK-422 and she's the friend of Halo Robot Alpha 5 who was mentioned in the pre-release fiction printed on the lanyards they gave out at E3...).

And speaking of terrible stories, remember the lauded 'ilovebees' ad campaign for Halo 2? Ugh, ugh, ugh - it was the most pretentious thing in the universe, with pointless nonsense websites being 'tracked down' to 'prepare' everyone for the epic story behind Halo 2. I wanted to strangle John Halo very, very hard every time I heard someone stupid enough to fall for that crap raging about how wonderful it was. It was a whole campaign designed to make stupid people feel smart about playing an arcade game.

(In that light, let me give a rare kudo to Halo 3 - the advertising was truly magnificent. I'm the kind of guy who loves tie-ins and merchandising, and Halo 3 did that beautifully. Halo 3 Slurpees, Halo 3 action figures, Halo 3 Cars, disgusting Halo 3 flavored Mountain Dew, etc. I know it annoys some folks, but I wish to heck it was a game I didn't grit my teeth thinking about. And an unkudo - that terrible 'museum' advertisement is a brilliant concept that is done so poorly that it makes me angry beyond my ordinary angry-that-Halo-halos anger.)

Now, these pretenses and other nonsense weren't necessarily enough to turn off old LeHah - maybe the game itself was as brilliant as everyone insisted. Maybe it really would change the way we would play first person shooters and the way stories would be told in video games and so forth and so on.

Nope!

Halo is an ordinary game, simplified so that everyone can play. That would actually be an honorable design concept, mind you, if I believed for a minute that they went in thinking 'everyone' would mean mom and dad and little sis and Dusty the cat rather than as many teenage boys looking to scream 'cocksucker' at each other over and over as possible. But... I'm not anti-cynical enough to convince myself of that.

I was never one of those 'FPS games are destroying gaming!' cubes. I think they're fine, they're fun and there's a lot to be built on with them. Some special games, like the first Ghost Recon, take the basic concept in a new direction in exactly the way art builds upon itself. Others, even more rarely (like the original Half Life) are literally earth-shattering - they're games that change how things like narrative itself works. Still others are just DooM with a new hat, and they're usually just as fun as their august predecessor. Halo is that type of game wearing the rotting corpse of the previous two.

The big developments in Halo just aren't. Wow, you hold two guns at once - somebody call Lara Croft! Wow, you can drive a car - somebody call Cybermage! Wow, you can play it in split screen - somebody call every Nintendo 64 game ever made. Halo is a bunch of good ideas that already existed in a pleasant balanced package (literally a pleasant package - the art design works in exactly he same way as the other 'dumbed down' aspects of the game... maps and baddies and characters who are literally as inoffensive and designed not to have a particular style to them as possible.)

It really seems for all the world to me to be a game made to sucker idiots - the story, the gameplay, the art, the ease of the thing... so, I feel bad about it. Several of my friends - people I respect more than anyone on this Earth - love Halo 3. They were playing when I started writing this. I see that and it hits my gut - how do people I really love like something so stupid? Maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe I'm unable to have fun for some reason, maybe I want attention... but I just can't feel it. The franchise bothers me on a very personal level that I find myself completely unable to write off. I do feel somewhat bad being an asshole about Halo, in light of people having fun with it and people I believe in loving it, but it is how I feel regardless of anything else.

(Is Halo just plain fun? Maybe - but certainly not for me. I drove three meters in the stupid Halo car and got stuck in a hole... Cybermage's stupid box tank worked better and that game had strippers! I played multiplayer games that were exactly the same as CounterStrike fort-levels with a Star Wars Bounty Hunter skin. It just didn't do anything for me and occasionally veered into incredibly tedious territory.)

So yes - if you like Halo, you are a horrible person.

Halo 3 is a simple video game with minimal cruft, nicely nuanced weapons, well-designed maps (ignore the campaign), a shallow learning curve, bright colours, a distinctive visual aesthetic, and a lack of pointlessly arcane bells and whistles. It's a good fucking example for console FPS games.

(edit: Oh, and as for any criticisms of it being "generic" - what in blue fuck is that supposed to mean? Is the fact that it consists of a solid genre-adherent core devoid of wanky crap like RPG elements or "killstreak rewards" a bad thing? Fuck your feature creep.)

It's the fucking occam's razor of FPS design. Besides, since when do people who criticise a video game for setting and storyline - completely fucking static elements irrelevant to the medium you're trying to criticise - have any credibility at all?

I played Halo 3 to death when it came out. I got all the achievements aside from Metagame and a few of the ranked free for all ones. But I mainly played it because of my friends.

I however regret it far less then I regret all the times I tried to stomach WoW or FFXI but then that might be because Halo isn't a massive time and money sink like those sorry excuse for MMOs were.

Halo did one thing particularly well in my book. They set up match making perfectly. You could easily form a party with your friends and be matched up against random opponents. This is an idea I wish more companies could wrap their head around and is the main reason I never tried to play Lord of the Rings Conquest outside of Campaign mode. Tons of shooters and non shooters have in my mind been better games then Halo, but would have been near perfect if they could have had a similar match making system.

Ever since people took gaming far too seriously.

You're one of those people who say "Why do you have to be so critical about everything?" aren't you? One of those people (emphasis mine, slur insinuated) who takes immediate insult the moment someone bothers using their brain outside of a classroom or their Stephen King Book Club.

Thats fine. Live your life how you see fit, I suppose. But heres the long and short of it: You asked, I answered, you took offense and then couldn't bother to retort, so you replied in generic prosody fashion and emphasized general feeling instead of empirical material I already wrote.

Or since you're of shorter attention span: You just failed at everything.

Hey now. ilovebees is the only part of Halo I gave any shit about, but that's because ARGs are awesome, and have been ever since the flawed inception of the genre that was Majestic. ARGs as advertising are really nice ways of doing things, as I see it.

To reply to this one element would start topic drift. I'm interested to see how someone can... agree... with this idea, so if you wanna start that conversation someone else, I'll gladly follow.

Any game that starts to intrude on real life to the scale that the one I was in the middle of (Dread House or Urban Hunt (they're called both in various places)) gets points with me. While I personally didn't get any calls, when you get phone calls both from characters in the game (sometimes just to CHAT, sometimes to both fuck with you and prod you in the right direction) and calls that are strange recordings that make pictures in spectrum analyzers; emails back and forth with people, websites with hidden messages buried in image files (among other file types) (it's called stegging) oh and fucking creepy shit in password protected zip files?


Fuck yes. Granted, urban hunt wasn't an advertising campaign.

Not in the least. I criticise the fuck out of everything I like, and my criticisms are relevant. I'm one of those people who say "Why do you have to be so critical about shit that doesn't even matter?"

I agree with most of what you said. I do think the Library level bears mentioning, though...

I dislike Sonic: The Hedgehog. I play it and the thought going through my head is "Why can't this be even 1/10th as good as Mario?". Of the many awesome Genesis games out there, Sonic definately is not one of them.

On the opposite end, I like the Atelier Iris and Ar Tonelico series. They're crappy games really, but for whatever reason I like them. There's some more Atelier Iris stuff on the way and I'm fully intending to get it. I do hope that Nippon Ichi doesn't fuck up the translation so it causes a game crash again though. Players of the first Atelier Iris and Ar Tonelico 2 know what I'm talking about.

As for me, I even liked two Wolfgroup games not even mentioned on metacritic, IGN or gamespot - Dark apes: Fate of devolution and Dracula: Days of gore. Maybe it`s a result of my weak playing passion (therefore I don`t play much and many games) but they were completely absorbing and "hardcore" (the second word doesn`t mean that they were hard but no saving except of between levels can be challenging itself). But after all I didn`t want to replay any of them - they`re one time use for me).
Also, Rober Anderson`s Legacy of Cthulhu wasn`t even nearly absorbing or just good for me but playing wasn`t disgusting anyways. Thanks to all-open levels!

Devo hit the nail on the head I think. Halo 1's campaign mode is fucking astoundingly good. I played that through both alone and with a mate so many times I could probably tell you exactly where every tank spawns. With Halo 2, the campaign was pretty much a steamy turd but the multiplayer was awesome. The maps were for the most part really well designed and the weapons were well balanced. Also, there was a preponderance for objective games online which for someone like me who's not that got at straight up killing made it a shit ton more interesting. Some of the various tactics I saw for assault games were almost genius and a well planned attack was worth far more than simple killing ability. Also, there was Midships, the greatest map in the history of Halo maps. I once played a 16 man, King of the Hill match in midships, pistols only, no shields with a three minute win time requirement that I swear lasted over three hours. I think the kill leader had just above 3,000 kills and it was not boring for a single second, especially as I was mates with everyone in the room so we were chatting as much as playing. Good times.

Halo 3 has a pretty solid campaign that suffers from a lack of imagination and gets repetitive. Even though they added the Scarab setpieces, they are a bit slow paced and once you've seen one, pretty dull. The areas are all too open after the base level near the beginning and the whole thing is just too similar to the previous two games without really improving on them. The multiplayer suffers from poor map design. Most are far too big and favour snipers and long range battle rifle battles, plus the weapon balance isn't brilliant. The two latest maps are a welcome addition though as they're both pretty claustrophobic and these days you find more people actually trying to meet the objectives in objective games.

At the end of the day though, despite me basically being shit at the game, I always have a laugh playing Halo online. Mainly because I play with friends and you can never take the game too seriously. It's fast paced and slightly silly and it's accessibility is what makes it fun. I love playing Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon online and whilst those are fun with mates too, there's a lot more lying in a bush with a sniper rifle involved in those and you don't get the face to face immediacy you get with Halo. In fact, you very rarely ever see who's killed you, especially not if they're good at the games.

I think the bottom line is LeHah, you need to lighten up a bit to enjoy Halo. It's flawed and it's silly but it's just fun.

Be happy. It's being remade as "Heretic" and it's in the map pack that'll ship with ODST.

Halo 3 suffers from a lack of polish compared to more recent titles and a fairly dire campaign (issues ODST looks like it'll fix), and the balance is a little off on some of the more exotic weapons, but I'm still resolute that it's good on its own merit. I think most people's issues with it centre around the fact that they don't want to be seen enjoying something whose audience consists mainly of thirteen-year-olds for fears that their masculinity be compromised.

Is it? Wicked, I loved that map and am really enjoying the last couple released as they're much smaller. I like Halo 3 well enough, just not as much as Halo 2. Hopefully ODST will get the series back on track and not just be Halo with no shields.

Yeah, it'll be Metroid Prime with no lock-on. OOOH!

Yup. Halo ODST DS right here folks.

http://gfx.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2004...met_image4.jpg

When they first announced it as Halo Recon, I was quite excited about a Halo/Tom Clancy crossover. I guess Ubisoft weren't up for it or something.

One hopes that since you're now just a normal dude rather than a Spartan, the bad guys won't all be the same old Brutes and Elites. Either that or there'll be a load more sniper ammo lying around.

Has that Franky idiot not been doing a diary about this one or is it just that nobody cares this time out?

I think Mr. Frank O'Connor left Bungie to go work on "other Halo related stuff" (whatever the fuck that means) early in 2008.

Frankie has a hand in that anime thing. I think he's the leader of 343 Industries.

I probably probably deserve a Falcon Punch to the groin for this one, but I can't help it.

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/2097/xgra.jpg

It feels like the first two games, which I'm absolutely loving. It lacks depth and the career mode is a bit on the short side, but the gameplay itself is an absolute blast. I've tried, but I just can't hate it.