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The last poster wins


TheCalliton

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Yeah it was a broken arm I think. Arms looks so weird after having a cast removed.

 

Chernobyl Diaries... Creepy. Well mostly. After seeing what was after them it was still scary but not as much. But 90% of it was in Pripyat...

Anyway good night people.

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Halo 4 came out yesterday, and for the first time since Gears Of War, I binge-gamed through the campaign in one sitting.

 

It really impressed me, from the moment I picked it up, not just as a technical achievement-it looks like a modern PC game which is incredible as it's exclusive to the increasingly mechanically obselete Xbox 360.. What really impressed me was the way 343 really went against the grain of shooters with the campaign. FPS campaigns are normally tacked-on accessories to train people how to do the multiplayer. With Halo 4, you feel like you've bought a game in two halves; it even comes on two disks. They just feel so completely different, in pace, styling and feel.

 

The multiplayer is much how it was, it has a slightly faster pace now due to lowered player health(slightly) and a totally revamped and vastly enhanced progression system(your credits now buy you guns and gear unlocks, ALL armour is free once you reach the achievement or level needed, no more paying two million credits for a tinted faceplate) while the campaign has a noticeably slower pace, focusing more on telling a story rather than gunplay, and it's the design decisions with this in mind that left me most impressed with this game.

 

What impressed me was that instead of just assuming players were there for the action, 343 had faith in their intelligence and actually tried to tell a good story, and one of the most important trais of good storytelling is pacing. Here's where the unusual decisions come in: cutscenes are quite long, and fairly frequent. You do lose control, but that stops bothering you after only a few minutes. The game does have some very intense sequences, but it's also got some quiet moments the likes of which are almost unheard of in a modern shooter. In all my years of playing, I've never seen a shooter protagonist(via cutscene) actually stop to think about what's happened thus far; it's a very unusual thing to see in a game mostly known for it's combat, but it's very welcome. The story simply wouldn't work without those sorts of moments, and I sincerely hope they inspire other studios to try them on in other FPS games. This if nothing proves you can make a great FPS, without simply needing it to be about revenge, machismo and explosions, and that players are fully willing to accept a game that atleast tries to have some down-time between levels without resorting to long tedious driving sections.

 

I've never played an FPS that managed to pull me in quite so well or feel so rewarding after I finished the campaign. Or one that explained the game's sci-fi lore quite so effectively. Halo always had the big, epic landscape and the deep lore you'd expect from a game of it's budget, but it never did a great job of explaining that lore to you. 4 changes that, it explains a lot of the big unknowns, and while that idea initially didn't appeal, it does make the game's otherwise short(9 hour) campaign feel even more rewarding than otherwise, as you come away with the whole universe making a thousandfold more sense. There's one particular cutscenes where everything just neatly clicks together; it's the sort of revelatory "ahhh, I get it now" moment I'd normally expect from an RPG, hardly from a multiplayer shooter. Maybe one day we'll expect that from all shooters one day.

Edited by Vindekarr
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:unsure:

 

[Picturing frail pale wobbly forearms]

 

The radius is always like, "I'ma let you finish but I'm going to break when you hit the ground." What's up with that?

 

Has anyone ever broken a humerus and NOT broken a rib or a clavicle? Something to think about. Not really.

 

CBS cares.

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Don't mention arms please. I've had quite a giggle catching up. Speak later.

 

I win

 

 

Oh contratz on reaching the 32k mark guys :D

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