Games You Played Today ##RELOAD

Oh! Good call!

Especially on PC where the mouse fights against the wide spread of all the guns. Probably the most tightly-considered gun design for controller limitations of the day, making it more noticeably uncomfortable on a mouse

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I was actually kind of excited about it because it was controller-friendly, so I haven’t tried mousing yet. I imagine kb&m will be necessary if I venture into deathmatch or Slayer™ or whatever it’s called.

ah, good. I wasn’t sure if the Flagship Vista Game had decent controller support or not. I was generalizing because the first time I played Halo was through the PC port; I was underwhelmed specifically because of gunfeel.

How is Halo 1 on PC? And should I just play that new free Win 10 one?

This series completely passed me by.

halo 1/2 never ever felt good to me on PC, the free windows 10 one is okay if you just want to do some deathmatching!

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Halo 3 (first half)/ODST/Reach are the only Halos I can whole-heartedly recommend today, if we’re talking single-player campaigns. The first half of 3 delivers a lot of the semi-open-worldiness of the series, with some larger outdoors battles that allow you to engage in varied tactics (hijack a tank and do an allout assault, sneak into the butt of a huge mech and ambush the dudes in side then blow it up, etc.). ODST is almost a throwback to Marathon in its moodiness and its narrative delivery via logs, and playing the game without Spartan Armor (read: you’re soft) places more emphasis on individual tactics per enemy that is encountered. Reach has a good synthesis of all the highlights of the series, with some of the most considered level design without prescribing specific approaches. Like there were definitely times where I got frustrated trying to carefully battle rifle my way into a building so I rammed a Warthog into the side of it, tossed some grenades inside, and stormed it with an assault rifle and was like ‘hell yeah’. I recall the verticality in the interior levels being pretty good and interesting too.

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I got a cold this past week and also picked up Dandy Dungeon again. It’s quite charming! I bought a duck about half-way through the game. It’s pleasant in the way CONTACT was pleasant, and I appreciate getting Yoshirou Kimura via Tim Rogers. There’s some pretty hideous RNG bs, but the game is easy enough that it’s not a huge bother.

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Halo: Reach on 360 is incredible co-op, both campaign and firefight

firefight in reach is probably the utter pinnacle of the series for me. endlessly enjoyable.

halo 1 has a nice campaign
halo 2’s campaign is OK when you’re not playing the arbiter section, which is ass
halo 3 is somewhere in the middle
haven’t played odst
halo 4 is OK when you’re not fighting the prometheans, which are ass
haven’t played 5

the pc versions are ass (though that new win10 one feels nice)

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This weekend I finished up Wolfenstein The New Order after a long break. I appreciate how that game handles the dynamics between stealth and mayhem, and how important positioning is. (Important: play on hard. It’s a cakewalk on medium and you can just 80s action movie slow-walk guns-a-blaze through the entire game.) It also becomes clear how it informed DooM 2016 with regards to some of the weapon and encounter design (very specific applications of weapons, quick switching, the ways weaponry and enemies interact with level geometry and distance, etc). The plot garbage is way worse and (even more) schmalzy than i remembered it.

Also, I finally am done with Overwatch. I don’t feel like taking competitive seriously, and I’m kind of tired of goofing around on quickplay. It’s a good game! I may come back to it some time. I definitely enjoyed it and feel like I got a good 35ish hours out of it.

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it sucked when they patched out the few moments you had to recover your life after your HP got to zero so a lot of my deaths were due to my brain still thinking those moments were there, but aside from that I enjoyed it through the end. There was just one time in the second-to-last boss where I gave up and bought the 6 onigiri pack, but it’s entirely possible without it, and without spending any money at all

just picked up & started playing A Link Between Worlds since i guess i didn’t have enough unfinished games on my plate!!

Ironically, for a Zelda game that uses the world map and continuity of a 26-year-old game, it feels wonderfully fresh. i really love these brassy new arrangements of classic LttP tunes

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yeah, something about the mix made the instruments sound really nice. Granted, the SNES Zelda rubs my ears in every bad decision a SNES sound designer could make

I like this track:

For some reason it makes me think of Morricone’s score for The Mission, a movie I should have left at the soundtrack and the promotional stills and the picture in my head

Re: Dandy Dungeon’s 0 HP allowance, you can keep a health potion/scroll queued when you’re low on health and the game will pause and let you use it even at 0 HP. It’s definitely clumsier.

It’s still weird to me that there are more than three Halo games

there aren’t; there’s CE, ODST and Reach

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Naruhodo

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Halo: Original Damn Soundtrack

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but Halo 2 has the VGA award-winning best boss fight of the year for the first Scarab fight!

Halo 2 has not aged as gracefully as CE and was already not as good as 3 or Reach, so

you can safely ignore the terrible campaign of 5. the MP though, that’s probably like 4 if 4 was good. and the free updates! enough in fact that the H5 install on my Xbone is a gig or two shy of 100 GB

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halo 1 on PC is good, play it. don’t listen 2 anyone else

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