Originally posted by: HamburgerBoy
Originally posted by: dguy6789
Do you consider Fear, Half Life 2, or Doom 3 to be any better? They all possess the traits that you say makes Halo a bad game.
Halo is entertaining for many reasons. Halo has a deep story line that people enjoy learning about as they play. Regardless of gameplay, the storyline drives people to play the game. Contrary to some games though, Halo delivers in all aspects, not just storyline. First of all, you have a game that runs great. It maintains playability in all places in the game, which is something that a large amount of games cannot achieve. Halo has a soundtrack that is without a doubt within the top five of any game ever made. The game was the first shooter to offer enemies with such a high and complex level of AI. Very few games even to this day can compare to Halo in the AI department. As a result of this, the enemies in Halo are fun to play against. That is a point that many developers do not seem to understand. The game has a large variety of environments to explore and play through. There is a nice balance between indoor and outdoor areas, so you get quite a nice mix of close quarter, long range, and vehicular combat.(granted the game does just do a repeat in the end) The game has weapons which are quite balanced for the most part, with a few quirks here and there, but nothing to get angry about. I have yet to see any game out that has grenades or any explosive that are as flashy and fun to use as the ones found in Halo. The game has quite a varience in difficulty, allowing players of all skills to play, also something that many games have yet to get right.
It is quite simple. Halo is not a game that hype built. Everyone was saying that Xbox was going to suck and that it was going to fail and have terrible games. People first played Halo with the preconceived and predecided notion that they are not going to like the game. But contrary to expectancies, Halo turned out to be not only good, but good enough to bring about the success of an entire console system. It was good enough to change the minds of people who already made up their mind. Saying that Halo is a bad game really shows how naive and fanboyish some people can be. Does it harm you to have a good game on a console you do not own? Some people think so, so they bash and slam every game that is not on their console.
I like to play video games. I do not care what system the game is on, as long as the game is good, I will play it. I am looking forward to the likes of Halo 3 and the new Metal Gear. But to be honest, the current E3 videos of gameplay on the Nintendo Wii seem far more impressive than either of the aforementioned titles.
I've never played HL2 because of Steam and I do agree that Doom 3 (along with most other iD games) is trash as well.
If Halo has a story then so do 99% of most other games. How exactly was its story told better than any other game? You walked around, shot things, and on occasion you got a little dialogue or a cinematic. Halo runs great? ROFL, it's horribly laggy on computers that were midrange the time it was released. Ask anyone and they'll say it was a horrible port to the PC. I don't understand why people worship the Halo soundtrack so much. The only two songs I remember were a classical-sounding intro song and an 8-bit era quality song when you sneak up on the sleeping aliens.
Don't tell me about AI; it's hardly anything new in that game.
They got the AI from Marathon 2: Durandal (Halo's awesome prequel), added some code for vehicles, and made it so they dodge grenades. If you want good AI, play Far Cry. Yes, there is a mix of indoor and outdoor missions. However, the fact that all the indoor missions and most of the outdoor missions suck doesn't make it good. Silent Cartographer was probably the only good level in the entire game. Yeah, the grenade button and the plasma grenades are nice. Big deal.
To be honest, I don't know how Halo sold so well. My bets are that people wanted something to play on the X-Box and that they (along side the media) gobbled it up. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft advertised the hell out of it as well, and Bungie was already a somewhat well known game developer before Halo.