...Full Retard from Halo II on?

didnt like halo 3.  I liked Reach when i played it and it felt like halo again.  I didnt like the loadouts with the jetpacks and stuff but team slayer pro was fun.  All it allowed was sprint.

edit to add ascension remake: click

they should have stopped at the first halo...just me, but im not a big fan of halo, even though i liked the first one alot...

I really liked the first Halo as well, and didn't get into the others.

That also could be because I played it a lot on xbox 360 years ago.  I don't have one and played it on PC, but the PC ports are terrible.  Tried Halo 2 on PC, but I just didn't get into it.  Dated graphics, poor performance, Halo over again without anything exiting enough added.

It's not just you.  I agree completly.

this

Halo 2 was awesome, they didn't listen to any of the testers for Halo 3

I thought it was dissapointing. The laggy engine didn't help much. Not too mention plot holes, and a terrible direction for the story.

Halo and Halo II were pure-D awesome. Halo III, ODST, and that gawd-awful 3rd person strategy thing, were not.
I'm really torn about whether I'm going to drop $60 for Reach or not. Everything I hear says it's more like the original with gnarly graphics. But if it's just Halo with different backgrounds and jetpacks, I'm going to be disappointed. Just having more polygons in the battle rifle than they used for the original Master Chief isn't enough to justify spending the time and money.

But I'm sure I'll buy it, just not the first day.

Only thing i liked about halo 2+ were the commercials

HALO:CE was a masterpiece for its time.

The follow-ups were disappointing.  I liked the gibberish-speak in CE & hated the English-translation.  #2 had moments of greatness.  The city episode with the long tunnel highway run & the Scarab boarding & takedown was great.  #3 preteneded to try, but couldn't, & it was dumbed down rather severely.  Taking down that 1 Scarab in #2 was challenging on the highest diffculty setting; in #3 it was a joke.  I really wish they hadn't revealed much about the Covenant.  They were a mystery in CE, & it would've been cool if they would've left their storyline a mystery.  Telling it from their point of view wasted it, IMO.  I liked not quite knowing what they were about, not knowing the whole culture, & the soap-opera story olverly "humanized" & made it bland.  Whatever happened to subtlety in story-telling?  Throwing it all out there just ruined part of what made it work so well.

"Reach" appears like it might deliver on the promises of the original, but I'll withhold judgement until I try it.  There are a few pre-review articles about it floating around online, & they all report that - from what parts they've seen - it lives up to the original.  We'll see.  Fingers crossed.  The Elite is one of the best AI enemies ever created, & it's going to be cool to see them back in the hunt.  I really hated seeing them replaced by the giant teddy bears.

+1
Ive heard the same thing about Reach, alot of people say if you wanna practice up for Reach you need to play CE, because it is that, Combat Evolved, I loved the old style of combat (felt as realistic as you can get) but they went all out on this Halo. Cant wait!!

I hope so...

The original E3 trailer was bad ass for Halo 2.  Humanity was going to be wiped out and the only thing standing between annihilation and survival was the Chief.



Then we get our hands on Halo 2.  The story blows balls.  Covenant brought too small of a fleet to do much.  They're looking for something... other fucking bullshit.



Halo could have been a god damn epic, but instead it turned into soap opera.



I hope Gears of War keeps with the epic story telling... Gears 2 was kinda weak, but still good.  Hoping Gears 3 restores that...



 

Yup. I fell in love with Halo after the first game. It had its faults, but the story was seriously epic and fantastic and it oozed awesome atmosphere at every turn. I beat that game 5 or 6 times, and I still load it up and play it every so often. The multiplayer was one of the best multiplayer experiences I've had since the original Unreal Tournament too.

Halo 2... the preview materials looked amazing, and I seriously thought they were going to outdo the first and continue the amazing line they were on. I was so stoked to play Halo 2 I almost bought an Xbox for it (I played Halo 1 on the computer). However, the game drove the whole kit n' kaboodle off a cliff. Played it with my cousins on their Xbox... it was amusing in its own way, but it was like some crappy TV show spinoff of your favorite epic. Same setting, but all the spark is gone with a pablem story churned out by TV writers, and they try to make up for their total lack of an intriguing plot by coming up with a new alien of the week. Halo 3 was more of the same.

I actually kind of enjoyed ODST, it had more of that open-ish environment feel of Halo 1 and the aliens weren't portrayed as retards floating around speaking poetry with British accents, but it still wasn't up to par with the original offering.

I'm HOPING Reach turns this around, and it looks like it's got all the ingredients to finally be the first GOOD Halo since the original, but we'll see. I thought the same thing about Halo 2 and Halo 3 from the preview materials and the ads, but both games came up EXTREMELY short.

Spot on.

I think it is all games, not just Halo that have gone down hill. I kinda blame online multiplayer. They dumb down the games so that you can pick it up and have fun and be competitive. That takes away a lot of what makes a good game good. The learning curve should be steep, so that once you get it down you can do some really cool stuff. Then the campaign turns into an add on to the multiplayer.

Don't even get me started on multiplayer. I've shelled out big bucks for games that turned out to be a sloppy, pathetic, single user but claim to have big glorious online multiplay.
Pisses me off.

No, it's not multiplayer that lead to the games going down hill. It's a lot of reasons: corporate greed, better computing hardware allowing for more shitty consoles, and 12 year olds with ADHD and enough disposable income to keep feeding the beast and the fact that developing a game now can cost almost as much as making a movie* and takes several years to get on the shelf.



We(PC gamers) had multiplayer 10+ years ago(although networking potocals were not as robust as today) and the games were still 10 if not 100 times better than what is on the shelf today. We also didn't have 12 years olds who where so hyper it was like they were on crack and meth.





P.S before anyone goes off on a rant about my corporate greed statement, I have nothing wrong with people or companies making money. I do however have problems when a company takes a great idea which will make money as it is,dumbs it down to make even more money, turing it into steaming pile of shit. The then put that steaming pile of shit a pretty box, sprinkle a bit of popuri ontop and launch an advertising campaign calling it the most ground breaking achievement of the decade and then vilifies anyone who writes an article giving that pile of shit bad reviews.



I even think the Activision CEO has said something along the lines that "gamers will continue to buy shit because we tell them too"



The only way things will get better is if we have a gaming crash like there was in the 1980s causing the industry to reboot and stop their bad practices.

I agree with pretty much everything you said.  The Total War series is a good representation of what you describe.

Bobby Cottick has earned a rep as someone who has no regard for the people that do the heavy-lifting.  The sudden exodus of Infinity Ward pretty much shows how he & Activision work.  Sadly, Bungie is now in a 10-yr exclusive contract with them, & God only knows what the publisher will do to that company.  RIP Bungie.

The hardware doesn't make or break the quality.  Console games can be as good a developers want them to be - if the publishers will let them.  HALO: CE demonstrated that, & Reach may prove it again.  I agree, however, that the mass market focus is killing quality, & I believe it will degenerate the industry (which might be a good thing in the long run, forcing it to re-focus on quality).  Multiplayer is becoming rather passe.  It's just frag match after frag match, over & over again, no matter the game.  There are some interesting things in multi (horde/firefith modes are a lot of fun), but the single-player experience is still where the true quality of development shows itself.  There's no substitute for a good story & soundtrack to set the mood.  Flight sims are dead (I still can't believe Lucas Arts hasn't tried to reinvigorate their classic X-Wing & Tie Fighter series).

Halo i had the PC version was awesome both single player and MP



Halo 2 single player... little shop of horrors plant and playing covenant was hella lame, the MP was not as good as the first ones PC version.



the 3rd one i barely played with my friends, as I do more PC gaming and the FPS's have left halo so far in the dust.



 

Most certainly.



 

yeah. Halo feels really Old Hat now.

 

I remember when Bungie developed Halo for the Apple in 1997, and then MS came in and got Bungie just months before the release of Halo.   Then the game went back into development, and was released for the original Xbox..   Man, I was disappointed.

It was for both Mac and PC, and they weren't very close to finishing when MS bought them; it was still a ways off.

I can tell you what, though, it was a VERY different game from the FPS churned out for the Xbox. A giant, persistent, open world with battles being waged between the humans and the Covenant on the ring. There's no way you could do something like that with Xbox hardware, though, so away that went. At least they still managed to keep some of the open exploration feel to parts of the original Halo though (the beginning after landing on the ring comes to mind, for instance), unlike the ultra-linear shooters that were its sequels. That and they kept the great story the original Bungie guys game up with, rather than the Microsoftified regurgitated crap that was Halo 2 and 3.

It kinda became obvious most of the original talent had left the company after the first game.

I remember reading about the original concept and being very excited to see if it could be pulled off.

Full Retard would be no human tank in Halo 3 multiplayer...



That was the best part - driving around on a wide open map blowing bunny-hoppers to bits...