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FrenzyTheKillbot posted:Yeah I'm pretty sure the Arbiter is the exact same as the Chief except with camo instead of a flashlight. And he was the Fleet Commander of all the Covenant forces at Halo. Even with a lead-from-the-front mentality, I don't think the Fleet Commanders get out on the battlefield very much. I will note, Thel'Vadamee (The Arbiter's name, if we had been going for the Terminals we would have heard it already) is noted to frequently take the field personally, despite being the Fleet Commander. He COULD be the one wrestling with Johnson in the Legendary End-scene, but that scene's not exactly canon anyway.
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May 15, 2021 21:44
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The Door Frame posted:I found Aliens to be derivative on first viewing because I'd spent my entire life consuming media that cribbed every single iota of Aliens, down to individual lines of dialogue This is basically the problem I had with the original Halloween. Sure, it innovated all these slasher movie tropes. But watching it for the first time after decades of movies using, abusing, and mocking those tropes, it just felt like a stale assemblage of tropes.
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May 15, 2021 22:00
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BlazetheInferno posted:I will note, Thel'Vadamee (The Arbiter's name, if we had been going for the Terminals we would have heard it already) is noted to frequently take the field personally, despite being the Fleet Commander. That was my thought, and I also thought that one of the books supported that. Also, IIRC the legendary scene is the one where Johnson grabs the elite by the rear end. But the Elite there is wearing gold armor, same as Arbiter at the beginning of 2. Again, not supported by lore in any way, but it would be kind of neat if the Arbiter was not only at Halo when it blew up, but if he barely survived, only to be held in treason and sentenced to death by suicide mission once he returned.
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May 16, 2021 00:07
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Megillah Gorilla posted:To add to the little off topic discussion - definitely watch Aliens. Regarding the Keyes flamethrower thing. Could it be a refernce to the deleted egg scene from the first Alien movie? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuTk4Qc7JGI
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May 17, 2021 11:07
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Could be, but there's one just like that in Aliens when Ripley has an audience with the queen.
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May 17, 2021 14:35
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Here we have the problem with expanded universes (and Halo was probably the first game to have a serious expanded universe). Piles upon piles of retcons all claiming a random elite you fought in a lift on some level or other had a Huge Epic Backstory, when in reality the level designer just tossed him in to make a quick combat encounter. This series has had some truly cringeworthy stuff bolted onto it over time. Will we be looking at the Terminals and their bonus cutscenes? I'm not sure which editions of the game they were added to. Are they even in the latest round of re-releases?
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May 17, 2021 15:29
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Anniversary terminals are in the MCC, yes. Frenzy didn't do the CE ones, so I'm assuming 2's are off the board too.
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May 17, 2021 15:43
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The terminals in aren't quite as spoilery as the terminals in 1, but they're still something you should not watch at this point.
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May 17, 2021 19:04
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I'm behind on videos, but has the music track that plays during Arbiter's commissioning (for lack of a better term) been talked about? It contains a hidden message.
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May 17, 2021 21:48
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Loxbourne posted:Will we be looking at the Terminals and their bonus cutscenes? I'm not sure which editions of the game they were added to. Are they even in the latest round of re-releases? I'll have to take a look at the terminals again eventually and figure out if I'm going to show them at all. The problem with the Anniversary terminals in 1 and 2 is that they were added so much later and explicitly meant for fans who had consumed all the media up to that point. A bunch of them are extra information for things that don't happen until Halo 4 for example. Maybe I'll do a bonus video for Halo 3 (the first one to include terminals) and include a handful that I think are the most interesting/useful and let people find the others on youtube if they want to.
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May 17, 2021 22:37
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 05 - Oracle The situation with the heretics gets messy, and the Arbiter takes drastic steps to clean it up.
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May 21, 2021 20:34
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The Heretics and Sentinels working together makes a bunch of sense to me. Lore wise, the Heretics don't learn the truth until after Halo is already destroyed, so whether they actually want to fire the ring isn't really a factor. The goal here is to fight the Flood, and anyone who is making the Flood problem worse (i.e. the Covenant) and they've both got that in common. Also 343 just loving loves to talk about Halo to anyone who'll listen and the Heretics are all about that. My hot take for why there are Flood labs on the gas mine rather than being
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May 21, 2021 22:13
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Man, do I remember how annoying the elevator section was on higher difficulties. It just feels like padding to stretch the level out, and not even the good kind of padding because as you guys said, you're essentially waiting until the game tells you that you can proceed. What's worse is that design philosophy is rampant throughout Halo 2, although I think the Arbiter gets the brunt of the "stay in this zone until the game lets you move on" sections. Which, when you're trying to sell a new playable character, is maybe not the best idea to make said character appeal to players.
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May 21, 2021 22:19
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We do get an explanation for why the Flood are on the station, but it might have been in secondary material or a novel. The Flood research sections were kept in the pod on the end of that chain, so they could be easily jettisoned if they broke out of containment. Personally I just love Bungie's cynical foresight in weapon design. As soon as a Covenant character becomes playable, the Covenant are given an assault rifle with aim-down-sights, just like the human one. They know the reasons for their popularity and played to them.
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May 21, 2021 22:45
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Hold up, can the Infection Forms raise dead humans and elites in this game? I thought they could only raise fallen Flood Combat Forms in 2, and didn't gain the ability to use other corpses until 3. As for why the Sentinels are here helping the Heretics, in short, the Heretic Leader is in contact with Guilty Spark; he's been curiously asking GS about Halo's true purpose. And Guilty Spark is all too happy to oblige in providing this information. Guilty Spark doesn't really know their stance on firing Halo; that or he assumes they would if it was still intact. And while he's happily engaging with the Heretics, the Sentinels will fight alongside them. The reason the Sentinels in general have been hostile to the Covenant is that they're intruders. They breached Halo's defenses and dug too greedily and too deep looking for "holy artifacts" upon the "Holy Ring", and released the Flood. Guilty Spark repeatedly refers to them as Interlopers and Meddlers. The Prophets want to "Light the Holy Rings", but for the wrong reason. They just see it as the secret to a Religious Ascendance, when in truth it's just galactic extermination.
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May 21, 2021 23:19
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Hitting you this soon with a Flood level was such a surprise back in 2004, but good lord did the Flood take a step back in this game, despite the improvements to their AI and range of abilities. The Library might have been a garbage level, but every combat scenario like the elevator and the locked room are just so much worse. At the very least in CE you were allowed for the most part to keep advancing through the level, there was a sense you had to keep moving to prevent being overwhelmed and to keep ahead of the swarm. That flavour is lost on these wave defence sequences, and it's such a shame. At the very least we'll get to see the true grotesque horror of an advanced Flood infestation soon enough, which almost makes up for their garbage encounter design in this entry. BlazetheInferno posted:Hold up, can the Infection Forms raise dead humans and elites in this game? I thought they could only raise fallen Flood Combat Forms in 2, and didn't gain the ability to use other corpses until 3. Not sure about Human corpses, but they can take over fresh Elite corpses this time around, which makes your AI partners become a bit of a liability on these levels, not an uncommon occurrence in these three way scuffles. Also, not sure if it's spoilery at this point with regards to Spark, but to add a bit of clarification to what he's doing on the station, post Halo 1 he's basically floating around doing cleanup on the Flood outbreak while seething over Chief destroying Halo, and comes to the Threshold facility to gather up a Sentinel escort from its security detail (the facility had a Flood research lab on it's lower levels, the idea being if it ever was breached they could drop the whole thing into the gas giant and let the crushing pressure deal with it). Spark hits it off with the eventual Heretics because they're the only Covenant he's met that don't fawn over him... as hard and tries to recruit them to join his clean up detail, whether they know he'll eventually want them to activate an array is left ambiguous. Which is where the Covenant strike force blunders in and everything goes to poo poo.
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May 22, 2021 03:04
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Loxbourne posted:We do get an explanation for why the Flood are on the station, but it might have been in secondary material or a novel. The Flood research sections were kept in the pod on the end of that chain, so they could be easily jettisoned if they broke out of containment. It's one of Spark's lines in the boss fight, along with the mine being several centuries older than Halo, and retrofit for this purpose.
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May 22, 2021 03:42
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With respect to how long you could fall before being crushed, Joe Kittinger who jumped out of a balloon at 102,000 feet, fell for around 4 and a half minutes. He went from about 0.02 atmospheres to 1 atmosphere. So, assuming you didn't fall into a pocket of toxic gas and just asphyxiate, you could fall for a very long time before dying.
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May 22, 2021 05:26
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLP9L-qJqcI This doesn't have much in the way of times. It says at 2:43 that by the time you get to a pressure of 1000 atm you have been falling for 12 hours. You would also be long dead.
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May 22, 2021 09:25
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Oh, and according to Official Sources, the gas mine was made to process hydrogen, helium, and methane.
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May 22, 2021 16:42
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Deformed Church posted:My hot take for why there are Flood labs on the gas mine rather than being It's a bold theory, but there's a surprising amount of evidence to support it. AradoBalanga posted:Man, do I remember how annoying the elevator section was on higher difficulties. It just feels like padding to stretch the level out, and not even the good kind of padding because as you guys said, you're essentially waiting until the game tells you that you can proceed. What's worse is that design philosophy is rampant throughout Halo 2, although I think the Arbiter gets the brunt of the "stay in this zone until the game lets you move on" sections. Which, when you're trying to sell a new playable character, is maybe not the best idea to make said character appeal to players. Yeah it's especially bad because the Chief's levels start off so strong. They even out towards the end, but by the time you get there it's hard to fight that "I don't want to play as the Arbiter" feeling. BlazetheInferno posted:Hold up, can the Infection Forms raise dead humans and elites in this game? I thought they could only raise fallen Flood Combat Forms in 2, and didn't gain the ability to use other corpses until 3. They can, but as SteelMentor said they do have to be fresh corpses. Pre-placed corpses in the level are basically scenery, although apparently not pre-placed Flood corpses as we saw at the beginning. SteelMentor posted:Also, not sure if it's spoilery at this point with regards to Spark, but to add a bit of clarification to what he's doing on the station, post Halo 1 he's basically floating around doing cleanup on the Flood outbreak while seething over Chief destroying Halo, and comes to the Threshold facility to gather up a Sentinel escort from its security detail (the facility had a Flood research lab on it's lower levels, the idea being if it ever was breached they could drop the whole thing into the gas giant and let the crushing pressure deal with it). Spark hits it off with the eventual Heretics because they're the only Covenant he's met that don't fawn over him... as hard and tries to recruit them to join his clean up detail, whether they know he'll eventually want them to activate an array is left ambiguous. Which is where the Covenant strike force blunders in and everything goes to poo poo. I don't consider it a spoiler at this point, and yeah thanks everyone for pointing it out to me. This context is actually from one of the Halo 1 Anniversary terminals which I had totally forgotten about. I looked it up and Guilty Spark actually tells the (soon-to-be) heretics it's his job to wipe out any living thing if necessary to contain the Flood, and seems to take their "reverence" of him as a holy oracle as understanding and compliance. He does always seem to be genuinely surprised when he finds out that people are against the idea of galaxy wide extermination. Carbon dioxide posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLP9L-qJqcI This is cool. So the 5-10 minutes or so in this level is probably perfectly reasonable. Ablative posted:Oh, and according to Official Sources, the gas mine was made to process hydrogen, helium, and methane. This seems surprisingly mundane, but then again helium is super useful and becoming increasingly hard to come across.
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May 22, 2021 18:27
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I have to say, I bounced off the franchise more than once because the original Halo felt very repetitive and the little bit of Reach I played did not feel meaningfully different from the first Halo. Halo 2 is feeling a lot more varied and full of cool set pieces so far. (I mean, the bugs and stay in one spot shooting Flood bits aren't great, but...)
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May 22, 2021 20:29
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A level where I wonder if there is a hidden time limit (probably already tested by more than one person though). But yeah its really hard to imagine just how big Jupiter is and how long you would fall through them, assuming of course you're still living and could escape like that video said. I think those people that have skydived from the stratosphere were in freefall for something like 4 or 5 minutes.
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May 27, 2021 05:09
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If there is a time limit it is super generous. I somehow managed to get turned around in this level and managed to run the circuit twice before realizing I needed to turn left instead of right to go out the exit door. Still manged to beat the level and never got any fun "Hurry up Arbiter" voice over lines.
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May 27, 2021 15:00
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 XX - Screwing Around on Earth We're getting into the second act of the game and that's prime time for bonus videos. For this one I'm showing off some of the cool secrets and tricks that can be done on the Earth levels of Halo 2.
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May 28, 2021 22:03
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I was actually wondering if at the start of the Scarab fight, when you start shooting at guys on top of the thing, if you can go on one of those bridges and get on top of the Scarab yourself way earlier than "intended"?
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May 28, 2021 22:48
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Carbon dioxide posted:I was actually wondering if at the start of the Scarab fight, when you start shooting at guys on top of the thing, if you can go on one of those bridges and get on top of the Scarab yourself way earlier than "intended"? You absolutely can, and I assumed for years that was the intended way, just jump down and start blasting! I didn't hear that line about it being trapped until I played through in the MCC.
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May 28, 2021 22:52
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That's pretty cool, I've never seen the warthog sword fly. The method I originally learned was done on foot, as a result of a glitch where the reticle stays red for a couple of frames after you swap weapons and lets you lunge at whatever it thinks you're on target for. You aim your gun at an enemy, swap weapon, hit reload to cancel the swapping animation and then hit attack. It's a good example of 343 Industries being pretty cool, because despite being fixed in patches for the original xbox version, the vista release, and the first versions of MCC, they ended up adding it back to MCC in 2018 deliberately, in the campaign only, so people tricking and speedrunning could have their cool toy back while multiplayer could stay not-hosed. It's framerate related so I'd guess it's basically impossible at higher framerates but at 60FPS after 20 minutes or so of trying I can get it 10-20% of the time.
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May 28, 2021 23:24
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I had no idea about the hidden soccer ball. That is an interesting and weird secret to hide away in Metropolis. The hidden sniper rifle spot kind of makes me wonder if, in an earlier draft, you'd be encouraged to traverse the rooftops in order to proceed in Outskirts. Because that spot looks like it was set up as a sniper's nest where you'd either stumble across a dead marine sharpshooter + their spotter, or be the spot where you'd have a shooting gallery while you deal with waves of enemies in one of Halo 2's "stay put until the game lets you move on" zones.
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May 29, 2021 00:33
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I used to spend a ridiculous amount of time loving around with sword flying and playing with the soccer ball and scarab gun (and of course using the scarab gun ON the ball) with friends, but I had completely forgotten about all of it until now. Talk about a nostalgia kick.
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May 29, 2021 01:43
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I don't remember if it was in 2 or 3 but there was a sword flying trick you could only do in MP. Youtube only mentions 2 so that must be it. You needed the enemy to have a rocket launcher and you had the sword. You had to stand pretty close to each other and facing the same way. The sword person had to be aiming at practically the barrel of the rocket launcher. Then rocket guy fires, and the sword guy would attack at the same time, and they would lunge, but it would track the rocket, so it would send you flying across the map until you hit a wall or the edge of the map. I think the logic was something along the lines of the rocket was a physical object and was considered part of the enemy, so you could lunge at it.
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May 29, 2021 02:41
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At this point its playing the safe odds that if you can do something in a Bungie Halo game it was in some part intentional. I know plenty of games have hidden stuff out of bounds for a long time but Bungie seem to go out of their way to make sure you can go there (instead of falling through textures) and find something for your trouble a lot of the time.
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May 30, 2021 05:33
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Kibayasu posted:At this point its playing the safe odds that if you can do something in a Bungie Halo game it was in some part intentional. I know plenty of games have hidden stuff out of bounds for a long time but Bungie seem to go out of their way to make sure you can go there (instead of falling through textures) and find something for your trouble a lot of the time. A pity their time management allowed all these Easter eggs, but was not good enough to prevent the massive story and level cuts that made Halo 2 so rightly infamous. Although it is funny seeing all the Microsoft "lifestyle" marketing shorn of all context.
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May 30, 2021 16:14
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Deformed Church posted:That's pretty cool, I've never seen the warthog sword fly. Yeah, for some reason I thought that had a different name than "sword flying", but I guess not. Maybe I should have included an example of it, but I was never any good at that one. CzarChasm posted:I don't remember if it was in 2 or 3 but there was a sword flying trick you could only do in MP. Youtube only mentions 2 so that must be it. You needed the enemy to have a rocket launcher and you had the sword. You had to stand pretty close to each other and facing the same way. The sword person had to be aiming at practically the barrel of the rocket launcher. Then rocket guy fires, and the sword guy would attack at the same time, and they would lunge, but it would track the rocket, so it would send you flying across the map until you hit a wall or the edge of the map. I think the logic was something along the lines of the rocket was a physical object and was considered part of the enemy, so you could lunge at it. I know you can shoot a rocket out of mid-air, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was technically considered a targetable enemy.
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May 30, 2021 18:19
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 06 - Delta Halo The Master Chief continues his hunt for the Prophet of Regret in new, but familiar, territory.
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Jun 4, 2021 18:49
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Add me to the list of people who never stopped to listen to Regret's sermons. It is interesting that those sermons actually function as (almost certainly heavily biased) backstory to the Covenant, but you can easily miss them because it takes a while before Cortana's translation kicks in and lets the player hear the dialogue.
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Jun 4, 2021 22:05
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I never listened to the sermons because I swear, I would sit there for like five minutes and he never said anything. I don't know if there's like, a trigger to it or something, but I could never get them to play.
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Jun 4, 2021 22:40
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My assumption is that the ruins aren't forerunner ruins, since they're very obviously different to the forerunner architecture we see close by. Some other civilisation who were there at some point built around the existing forerunner stuff. Doesn't really explain the bridge, maybe the designer was just feeling a bit arsey while doing that piece.
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Jun 4, 2021 23:07
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I get that the game is called Halo, but I can't help but feel disappointed that the game is now back to the setting of the first game.
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Jun 4, 2021 23:09
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Cythereal posted:I get that the game is called Halo, but I can't help but feel disappointed that the game is now back to the setting of the first game. They do a decent amount to make it different this time around.
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Jun 4, 2021 23:10
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