The 8-bit art and sounds are great, the music is pretty good, the action is super responsive. But you gotta fight Sodom three times, and it’s worse every time! He crushes across the screen almost instantly and knocks you down. Uugh. So a lot of the game I like moment to moment but thinking back about it…man I can’t say I’m tempted to make myself fight Sodom three more times again, you know? Dang.
It’s so nice! And fast! I wish they could’ve just kept making 8-bit games looking like this. ^_ ^ And I wonder why they haven’t ported it to anything else. Maybe they realized the triple Sodom boss was pretty terrible. ; D
So I snuck in a bit more Halo time today before the Superbowl and I’ll be honest with you, if this game/series didn’t have such a sterling reputation (for the early entries) I’d have quit as holy hell the driving controls in this game are among the worst I’ve ever encountered. I legit minimized the game to google if the game was like glitching out but no, apparently you can’t turn the vehicle and it just goes wherever you turn the camera and Halo fans believe this is superior to… you know, how every other game does things.
I saw the argument that it controls the same Master Chief does; Master Chief also is controlled from a first person perspective and can move side to side which this jeep most certainly does not.
Anyway it took me the better part of an hour but I finished the second mission and pray there isn’t a lot of driving in the rest of… well the whole series really.
I actually love the warthog in Halo. Driving around in the second level or in Blood Gulch is a fun game of playing with the momentum, kind of satisfying like bouncing a balloon and tying to keep it from touching the ground. I don’t think it would cut it in all vehicle games but I like it in Halo.
Halo was calibrated for the OG Xbox controller better than just about any other game I can think of (the same way Mario 64 was), it was like butter in the hand, a revelation, and even though I have never been that partial to virtually any other aspect of Halo, didn’t play a single other installment upon release, etc, it still feels exactly like this after 20+ years and probably coasts on that for me
I made a crossover cable with my teeth in 2002 for an 8 player game on two huge old CRTs, it is the quintessential LAN party game for me even though I wasn’t strictly too young for quake, just that nothing really topped the pre-xbox live era
similarly morrowind is not really a PC game in my memory, it’s a console game
2002 was the only year I ever had regular access to a Microsoft console and I never really bothered buying one after that either but it was pretty darn good imo
I think literally half of the hour I spent on the second level was driving into walls and trees, dying so often in the combat encounters with it that I eventually just left it to do them on foot. I think the only time it went well was on the final encounter where after dying a bunch (the checkpoint system in this level at the very least is insane, I got respawned no where near it and in fact came back at different locations half the time) I parked far away, got in the back and just used the infinite ammo gun to kill most things from a distance for several minutes.
the warthog is precision driving in halo, you have to be able to handle the fishtailing and be able to do donuts in it, it is literally a light skirmishing vehicle that cannot survive if it is immobile, especially because enemy fire is fairly accurate in halo. it would be completely and utterly useless if you couldn’t toss its ass around like a rally car. this is why they gave it air control in infinite, to make it even better at throwing itself around
it’s honestly one of the most high skill vehicles in halo, most drivers fucking stink and gunners ain’t much better, i cannot count how many times my warthog has been disabled by a plasma pistol and my moron gunner won’t start dealing with the shit directly around us because he has tunnel vision on some fucking jackal 100 feet away while there’s a fucking grunt on the windshield pulling out two plasma grenades to blow us to hell, or how many times i’ve been putting in work on the gun while some fella is attracting all the gunfire possible in a several mile radius trundling around at 15 mph blocking every single line of sight i could possibly have on the enemy
out of all the people i play halo with i think only two of them don’t make me drive always, it sure is an acquired taste i guess
fwiw the covenant vehicles do control like this but with the unsc vehicles you’re supposed to whip the camera around to drift. there is a secret ebrake on the a button in halo 1 iirc
the handful of hoverbike sections in destiny raids add 5 other players and player collision a la new super mario bros. just exquisite pain
no it’s that the warthog has an effective ebrake in every game after the first one, it’s on the fuckin left trigger or some shit in halo 2 and 3. the A button thing isn’t a secret, it’s regular braking, it works on all the vehicles that aren’t a ghost and is especially useful for the banshee. you can control the warthog’s roll by moving the camera to adjust the tires also
