[Epyon MX]

Okay. I want to post this and this is a fine enough thread. It was written by a guy named Sno at another forum that I visit.

Really though, what Halo does, and you have to play it on the higher difficulties to get the effect, is that is has wonderfully dynamic combat with a real tactical edge.

If GoldenEye made FPS games work on the consoles, Halo made them work well.

The first Halo also introduced a number of subtle innovations that have become pretty much standard in shooters these days.

I mean, some the Halo "firsts" include regenerating health, hotkey grenades, smart allied-AI's, vehicular combat in an FPS context, strict limits on weapon carrying, etc.

Halo wasn't necessarily the first to do all of those things, but it was the first to really nail them.

Still, as much as i like the first Halo, i really hate the second game.

It was rushed and it shows, in that it was buggy and incomplete and lacking many of the things that made the first game great. (For one thing, instead of large open-ended combat spaces, the level design was extremely linear.)

Even so, you listen to Bungie talk about the second Halo and they go on and on about how they had to compromise to make their deadline, that they really ^@%$ up, those guys are amazingly hard on themselves.

Halo 3, they didn't compromise anything, they took their time, they really went above and beyond, and it's certainly the best game in the series.

I mean, more than that, it always kind of felt like the first game was a bit of a happy accident. (The first game had quite a development history behind it too, starting off as a strategy game, becoming a third-person shooter, and finally settling on first-person action.) They just stumbled into something that really worked very well, and when they went to make Halo 2, they still didn't really understand their own creation.

I think they sort of figured it out for Halo 3.

All that said, Halo 3 is still very much a Halo game, and if you were to go in expecting huge dramatic leaps forward, you'd be disappointed.