Halo 4

Jam it back in, in the dark.

11th of June?

I don't get it.

Most amazing jew boots

My copy arrived today, gonna play it once the missus goes to bed. Be online in three hours or so.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

So I played this for a good six hours last night and quite a lot again today. I'm not sure whether this should be known as Call of Halo or Halo of Duty, either way, the developers clearly played a lot of CoD.

My initial thoughts are as follows:

Getting shot no longer knocks you out of zoom. Not sure why they did this, a great feature of Halo was always that you could disrupt a sniper by spraying bullets at them, also now you can't tell if you're getting shot while you're scoped.

There are no basic weapons lying around on the map any more. You choose your loadout then are stuck with that until you kill someone with something different. Power weapons are on the map but not so many, but they are marked on your HUD so you'll never find yourself scratching your head wondering where the hell they got that Spartan Laser from.

Unless they got it from an ordanance drop. In Slayer, earning points gets you ordanance drops, a choice of three which can be weapons or powerups. I've not decided if the choice is random or whether the losing team gets better drops but you can kill people with the canisters dropping out of the sky.

Playlist-wise, there's four a side slayer, eight a side slayer, domination (Base capturing), capture the flag, king of the hill, oddball, flood (zombies), slayer pro and probably something else I forgot. There's no generic objective, no big team objective, no grifball, no multi-team (boo) and within the playlists there's no variation, so slayer is always slayer, there's no sniper matches, no rocket matches and so on.

Net-code is pretty crap, it's a bit like Halo 2 all over again with waiting ages for games to start and players dropping out all over the shop.

You have to unlock most things. Including for some retarded reason, the emblems. Had the same emblem for the last however many years and want to use it in Halo 4, better get levelling up then as you can't even add a second layer until you hit level 21. Until you have four loadout slots, the game does offer you additional choices but I'm surprised and saddened that they didn't take a leaf out of Space Marine's book and add in a feature whereby when someone kills you you can copy their loadout for your next life.

That said, you level up pretty quickly to start with. After a night and day of playing I'm at level 16 and it's no secret how crap I am at Halo.

It's fun for the time being but I fear that medium to long term it'll get boring with so limited a playlist set, for me at least as I don't really enjoy slayer games that much. Also the whole thing is hilariously set-up for raking in extra money down the line. Spartan-ops is fun enough although a poor substitute for Firefight. They've already decided the dates for map packs and I guess the episodes will continue at a steady rate.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I played through the whole campaign with Phong on Normal mode. It was hilariously easy but a quick way to blaze through and see what the story is. The Geth things make decent enough bad guys I guess but there aren't enough types of them to be really exciting and there was no moment in this campaign as intense as many bits of CE or as epic as a lot of ODST and Reach.

As a first effort by the new studio, it's not a bad game but one hopes they can improve a lot for Halo 5. In their efforts to make it more like CoD, they've dropped everything that was silly and fun about Halo in Reach. There's no comedy playlists like Multi-team or Griffball, there's no public multi-player campaign and why they dropped Firefight is anyone's guess, the Spartan Ops levels are no substitute at all. It's like they missed the point that although some people are all serious business about Halo, a lot of people like it because it's possible to be really silly when you play it. It's great that there's a whole playlist just for King of the Hill but why not include a general objective game playlist?

I was speaking idiomatically.

I'll bet you whatever it costs that if they do add Firefight it'll be as pay-for DLC.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

There are very few Xbox games where randoms talk over an open mic in general any more in my experience. You very rarely hear anyone talking during the match and most people are in private chat parties anyway. The only games these days you really get open mic chat in my experience is anything co-op rather than adversarial and even then, I had one guy once sending me abuse because I didn't join his party during a game of EDF so he couldn't hear me. Motherfucker could have just left his one man party and listened to me talking but noooo, better to get yourself killed then blame the other guy for not joining your party.

I don't think I've ever finished a Halo game on Legendary. I'm not that good at the game and I don't have the patience for Legendary, I just don't find it fun playing like that. Give me easier to kill badguys and a horde of team kills any day of the week...

FELIPE NO

Yeah, I've had that issue a few times. That and the game telling me I've lost my connection to Xbox Live, even though I patently haven't and can see my friends online and so forth. Only way I've found to fix that is to reset my Xbox.

I went on to the new Halo website earlier and it's pretty crappy. The stat tracking is about four days out of date for some things but bang up to date for others and there's little or no actual useful information on there as in you click on gametypes and it gives you a brief description but no details or it'll show you a picture of different armour types but no info on how to unlock them. I can understand a desire to distance themselves from Bungie.net but did that really have to involve getting rid of most of the useful stuff?

Halo 4 reminds me of Halo 2 for a lot of reasons. I'm getting more plasma grenade kills than anything else, the assault rifle is next to useless, the story has a lot of plot holes and ends a bit suddenly and you wait ages to get into a game then it randomly boots you or others out and you play 5 versus 2 for a few minutes.

It looks like they might be about to add some less serious business stuff in though at last. There's an announcement on the website of a Griffball league, which in itself is taking something silly and fun and trying to make it serious business but at least they're getting there. I get the impression that 343 Studios is staffed by a bunch of people who take their gaming very seriously and don't like people who muck about and try to just have fun rather than winning. They also think every game should be slayer. Why else would I finish a King of the Hill match having scored all but 15 seconds of our team's winning score and only come third to two guys who were playing it like Slayer, racked up lots of kills but never went anywhere near the hill?

How ya doing, buddy?