TheOneAndOnlyT posted:

I didn't get into Halo until 3, but my friend group has a similar story with the series. Ever since we graduated from college in 2009, we had a weekly game night where we all got together and system-linked a few 360s together to play Halo. When Reach came out in 2010, we started playing that at our game nights and basically never stopped. We played other games too (including Halo 4 ), but they always eventually got discarded in favor of going back to Reach. Then when the pandemic started we started doing our game nights online, and Reach was the first game we played.

My wife, who had never held a controller before, now knows how to play FPS games because of Halo. My friends and I started up one of our usual Slayer games, handed her a controller and promised not to kill her, and then gave her a Gravity Hammer and told her to go nuts. It is the single greatest custom game we have ever created and it eventually developed an entire metagame around evading the hammer and leading the other players into her vision range so she would smack them instead of you. And now she happily plays games like Destiny because of how our custom game taught her to move and aim in an FPS in a low-stress (and hilarious) situation.

I can't put into words what makes Halo so perfectly suited to a small group of friends shouting in a living room, but by God there is no other game that comes close in that department. Maybe it's the huge variety of weapons, maybe it's all the different maps and vehicles, maybe it's the visual and sound design, or maybe it's just the sheer level of customization you can put into maps and gametypes. I don't know what it is, but Bungie's Halo games had it, and with LAN play going the way of the dinosaur in favor of online play, I don't know if another game will ever live up to Halo's magic.

Carbon dioxide posted:

In other words, Lagrange points are one of the few things that cannot be realistically modelled in KSP. You'll learn a lot about spaceflight playing KSP, but not about Lagrange points.

Samovar posted:

In truth, I never played this beyond the first game since it was Xbox exclusive afterwards. I just remember being blown away by the size of the maps and the A.I.

Edit: I'm sure they changed the last cutscene. Didn't MC reply to the marine who says if they're gonna make it originally?

anilEhilated posted:

I got a bit of an ambivalent relationship with this series. I played the PC port of Halo back in the 2000s and was extremely unimpressed, last year I got the MCC and playing through it it turned out Halo 2 and 3 are actually pretty good even now. 1 is still a stinker, though.

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

As a Nintendo homer, I too never played Halo

I knew about from cultural osmosis, but never figured why it blew up the way it did

White Coke posted:

What is it about Halo: Reach that doesn't fit with the others? Is this an issue of lore or gameplay?

EggsAisle posted:

Now that brings back memories. I worked at a Lego store for several years in the early 2010's, and one of the questions customers asked all the time was "Where are the Halo Legos?" The answer was that there was no such thing; there were Halo-themed construction toys, but they were manufactured by Mega Bloks, basically a knock-off brand. One time a lady was convinced I was lying to her or something, kept insisting she'd seen them online. She proceeds to take out her phone and triumphantly shoves it in my face a few seconds later, with an image on it. I gently point out the Mega Bloks logo on it, and she rolls her eyes, gives an offended huff, and leaves the store. A very mild frustrated customer story, especially considering it was retail, but very memorable for some reason.

Cythereal posted:

Bit of a shame, as far as I know Reach is the only game in the series that lets you play as a woman, from what I've heard through online osmosis.

Simply Simon posted:

Lots of words

PizzaProwler posted:

'Perfect Dark' had one in 2000.

El Spamo posted:

We noticed them arrows and I think we had some joke along the lines of "hey look, directions for idiots!" and "well, you are an idiot" so they were fun. Being able to actually get lost in a space that wasn't intentionally trying to misdirect you (maze levels in say doom/marathon) was new-ish. I have a hard time thinking of another shooter at or before that time that had big open spaces like Halo did that you could actually get turned around in.

El Spamo posted:

The modern remasters of course look really nice especially compared to the original, but the original graphics were no slouch and I relish the nostalgia of seeing them. Since they're there and available, spend a little more time with the old graphics and let us really see how well they did back then and how much things have changed for today.

Ablative posted:

I assumed Cortana meant "there's one pod left in this area" rather than "there's one pod left on the entire ship".

e: Also, last to leave doesn't always mean last to arrive.

White Coke posted:

How unevenly matched are the two sides? The Covenant seem to have superior technology and greater numbers.

White Coke posted:

Is Humanity better at technological advancement? Humans doing better at improving technology, or just more creative and unpredictable, than a more advanced enemy is a common trope.

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

What you said about the vehicles and level design makes some sense from a technical level and breaking new ground. The other smash hit FPS around time was Half-Life, which had an entirely different narrative and gameplay structure compared to every other FPS. And infinite modability

I'm not a big FPS guy, so a lot of stuff looks the same to me. The shooting aspects don't seem particulary different than other games. Tho the Needler is cool looking

White Coke posted:

If nothing else, a technologically inferior enemy has the advantage of being able to reverse engineer their enemies' superior technology to close the gap.

BlazetheInferno posted:

Also, as far as I know, this is the only time in Halo 1 where human NPCs wield Covenant weaponry.

theenglishman posted:

Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I was the under the impression that Sgt. Johnson was a unique marine character model that got popular enough to spin off into a proper character with a retconned backstory — kind of like Barney from Half-Life. I don’t think they even mention Johnson by name outside of that one launch event, do they?

El Spamo posted:

Well, now that we've reached this level, I'll go ahead and post the video that introduced me to the insane physics fuckery that Halo provided.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGQIQljaAc0

Deformed Church posted:

Thinking of the graphics, are you going to show off the old ones in action at any point? So far you've gone mostly for landscape shots, it would be cool to show off the old enemy models and how it looks to move around in those environments. In particular a look at the old energy swords is interesting, the translucent twin-pronged one is almost iconic at this point but in the original they're totally different.

Also I want to nerd out about the grenade stack you showed in episode 3. A key part of halo tricking is that while the overshield is charging you are immune to damage, otherwise you would probably die there on first three grenades, let alone the two following grenade jumps. It's the same thing that enables the fall mentioned in episode 4, you get the overshield just before landing. The other interesting thing about it is that on higher difficulties they scale down damage (rather than increasing enemy health), and on legendary you actually get out on full health. Can I ask, how much practice did that take? Because when I learned the speedrun it took me basically a whole weekend to get it remotely consistently and you looked totally effortless.

Simply Simon posted:

The fact that you can kill the Hunters with a single pistol shot is so wild to me. It works even on Legendary, they really hard-coded that weakness in.

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's obviously way harder to aim on original XBox than it's with a mouse + KB. I don't think I could do Legendary on console, I'm simply not good and practiced enough for that (my buddy maybe, who played the game as a teenager to death) - also, I'm left-handed, so aiming with the right stick is always a bit more difficult for me. Clicking on heads is way simpler than aligning the crosshairs, and the same goes for weak points.

Hunters do get way harder to kill as the series continues, tho. In Reach on Legendary, whoo boy those are some nasty encounters.

FoolyCharged posted:

Being able to hijack the banshee here is pretty odd because if I remember right it's drat close to, and possibly outright, the only time the player can pilot one.

Which is interesting, because you were very clearly not intended to invalidate the level like that. So the banshee was fully realized and player controllable despite the fact that the devs didn't intend you to have any access to it.

They did patch them into the PC version eventually if I remember middle school wars over which version was better.

Ablative posted:

You cannot in Halo 1, but you can in Halo 2. No, I don't know why either.

Simply Simon posted:

Somewhat same (though the Library is also awful), my biggest issue with the level is that I keep wanting to fall down to lower levels to fight Flood there, and that's almost never intended - in fact you loop around to previous rooms a bunch of times, only now you're on the higher level and have to activate a bridge (also sometimes not obvious) to reach a new door. Add to that the fact that some progress door are blown out by the Flood (somewhat obvious), some are simply working as intended, and yeah everything looks the same - fall down once, then go backwards a bit, you still have enemies to fight because the Flood are many, so you don't notice it, and suddenly you went in the entirely wrong direction for 5 min and have no idea where your last point of progress was.

Then your co-op partner teleports you somewhere, which might be its own version of "backwards"

Deformed Church posted:

I really love this level. There's a real feeling of suspense as you go deep underground into an alien base while slowly realising you're in there with something really awful, then you find the flood and realise you're surrounded and have to escape and it becomes a frantic, desperate escape, as you push deeper hoping to find another way out. Then when you finally do get out, you see the sentinels using the same colours and shapes as all the forerunner buildings, and realise the ring isn't quite as dead as before, and then it caps off by thwarting your escape at the final second and teleporting you somewhere presumably even worse.

BlazetheInferno posted:

This quote gets mentioned in the novelization, and in response, Chief just thinks to himself something along the lines of *"Yeah, buddy, you find me something six times stronger than the MJOLNIR Mark V, and I'll be first in line to try it out.

Of course, the big problem here with Guilty Spark boils down to one simple fact: he assumes we already know everything. About the Forerunners, about the Flood, about all the procedures and what Halo is... he assumes we know all this already, and probably assumes the Covenant know, too.

We don't. We don't know poo poo. Chief could probably have avoided a few problems if someone sat Guilty Spark down and went "Hey. I don't know what you think we know about you, this facility, anything that's been kept here, or the people who made this place, but assume we don't know anything. Because we don't. No one left us a history book on this place or its creators, we're figuring all this poo poo out the hard way."

Deformed Church posted:

I can't believe you had to euthanise all those flood buddies

The floods are loads of fun to fight. Adding in the human weapons on enemies makes some of these fights a lot more exciting, and you get a ready supply of ammo for whichever toys you feel like using. It didn't happen in it's full glory but the carrier forms can trigger chain reactions when their explosions catch grenades on the floor, which can get really crazy in the bigger arena fights. And the infection forms flooding (no pun intended) the motion tracker adds an extra level of hazard if you lose track of the combat forms. All in all, they do a lot of really fun stuff the convenant don't.

I have a dirty confession, which is that on my recent replay (I was trying to keep pace with you but accidentally had too much fun and made it halfway through H2) I really enjoyed this level. I'm not a big fan of the new graphics but they go a long way towards making this level better, both with the arrows and just putting definition on all the surfaces. It's thematically reall cool how the flood are literally coming out of the walls, and the floor, and the ceiling, from every direction. Added to that, most of the game you're basically just doing a fight and then walking forwards and then doing another fight and so on, but in this level there's a lot of bits where you just kill what you have to and keep pushing forward. Also just the overall variety of spaces, the rooms look boring but they're a pretty good range of shapes and sizes. Overall it's just a really good showcase for the game's combat, and with the new graphics a lot of my big problems with it are much reduced.

BlazetheInferno posted:

I mean, I get that realistically, there was never a chance to sit him down like that. I just mean, if there had been a chance to stop and sit him down for a second to explain that much, a lot of problems probably could honestly have been avoided.

Deformed Church posted:

It was effective in killing off all the Flood outside the testing labs that the forerunners kept them in, just like how we've kept smallpox samples around. Halo is actually a cautionary tale about scientific ethics that got way out of hand.

From 343GS' point of view, everything is going according to plan until the Covenant turn up and let the flood out. Then the Chief, exactly the person he needs (although that's not fully explored for a while), turns up heavily armed and armoured in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to activate Halo again. That's exactly what he'd expect to happen in the event of a containment breach, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for him to assume the Chief is there to activate Halo and just rush into the process.

Ablative posted:

Ice physics show up in Halo 1 exactly three times (four if you count PC multiplayer): Assault on the Control Room, this level, and Sidewinder (and Ice Fields on PC.)

The Warthog is the only vehicle affected by it.

Ablative posted:

Also, Widdershins is a real word. Just means "counter-clockwise".

Cythereal posted:

I will always be amused when video game protagonists know perfectly how to operate ancient alien UIs to operate everything in ruins older than the human race.

El Spamo posted:

Well, now that we've reached this level, I'll go ahead and post the video that introduced me to the insane physics fuckery that Halo provided.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGQIQljaAc0

AradoBalanga posted:

For the longest time, I did not know this was the same Covenant ship from earlier in the game. I took Cortana's statement at the start of the level to mean that this ship was a second Covenant ship that got left behind in the chaos of the Flood appearing, and all of the Covenant troops in the level were launched from the Truth and Reconciliation in a desperate bid to scuttle it before the Flood took over.

Ikasuhito posted:

Doing anything that might damage Halo is a complete non-starter for the Covenant, as at the very least it is a irreplaceable holy artifact. In fact in the books the Autumn is only able to make it to Halo for this very reason.

malkav11 posted:

Just a quick note regarding coolant: y'all seemed to think coolant would automatically be super cold (thus, frost effect) - actually a lot of coolant used in the real world isn't. It's just efficient at heat transfer, cooler than what's being cooled, easy to circulate, etc. Water is the most common coolant used in the real world, including on some nuclear reactors etc. There are even applications where the coolant is very hot - but temperature stable, and still cooler than the thing being cooled. Liquid sodium is used to cool some fast reactors, for example.

Obviously whatever they're using in this level is meant to be some exotic substance the Covenant have (hence, glowing green). But there's a decent chance it's not cold.

FoolyCharged posted:

I really love that ending for some reason. It's very bleak and desolate in a way that matches the rest of the game and the sole survivor bit fits with the shift into horror genre the game does. It would be a real shame if almost all of it got retconned later on...

BlazetheInferno posted:

Fun fact about that helmet tease - if you hack the camera to be able to see inside the ship during that scene, his helmet doesn't actually come off. It just puts an extra helmet in his hands to put next to him, and the actual model, since it was never meant to be shown like that, just keeps the helmet as per normal since the cutscene camera can't see his head when it happens anyway.

Garrand posted:

Deformed Church posted:

I really like the comedy bits, Halo just doesn't have enough backing it up to take itself that seriously. I feel like they kind of lose that throughout the series, it gets pretty joyless later on.

Outpost22 posted:

Does anyone know how Sgt. Johnson survives that ending?

FoolyCharged posted:

Until now I never realized how much the warthog needed a shitton of Jerry cans strapped to it for no reason.

CzarChasm posted:

I don't know if any goons would be down to play in some friendly matches, but it might be fun.

Ablative posted:

Guy on YouTube, name of InfernoPlus, did Massive Crimes to Halo Custom Edition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMxIjGjMJz0

It's... A thing.