durandal is real and my boyfriend and owns my cyborg pussy. I think that’s beautiful…
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I’m a big fan of Marathon (was number #1 on the Xbox Live leaderboards, ahem), I wrote an article about it like ten years ago here…
I also wrote an article about the history of FPS games, where I talk about Halo being an evolution of Doom/Marathon’s mechanics (I’m not entirely happy with this article as I had to change my original pitch to get it accepted but still):
I also did a video about Pathways Into Darkness but I have to re-do it because it was one of my earliest ones and I had no idea what I was doing. Still pretty happy with the content, though:
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i was wondering why i was kegeling out of control earlier and its cuz you’re all talking about my husband durandal
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you did end up writing that article! I just read that entire thread on SB1 waiting for that fabled article
That Craig Mullins Marathon art is 10 years ahead of any other concept art any game had access to, they got so lucky with that (it was just fanart at first, right?) and I have to believe it’s directly responsible for the tone of skybox painting Bungie still maintains.
He did a bunch as fan art before and after being commissioned to do the chapter art for Marathon 2 and Infinity.
I’ve been switching back and forth between ORIGINAL ASSETS and MORE GEOMETRIC DETAIL IS ALWAYS BETTER JUST TRUST US for my intermittent plow through halo 2 and I looked at a Skybox Tableau and thought “look at all this yellow, some real Craig Mullins-ass shit” then I hit tab and choked to death on the spot.
it may be that sometimes, less is more
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That’s not the article, I was supposed to write a much longer one but it never happened for a number of reasons. It will likely be in video from now, since I have a channel where I just talk about Mac games
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halo 2’s campaign is mostly awful but the quarantine zone parts have extremely pretty skyboxes for sure. also boy does 343 not understand this series aesthetically in the slightest. I honestly cannot believe these people thought they could make another halo and it would magically be the exact same because they had the fucking lore bible or whatever
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I have a myth tattoo you motherf
obviously the relationship of the player to the dwarves and the frequently recalcitrant AI/physics/grenade fizzle rates that rule them (especially in Myth 1) mirrors that of Durandal to his respective player over the course of the Marathon trilogy; in this talk I intend to clari
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I can’t remember who this guy is, maybe Mark Johns, but check out my sweet shirt
don’t judge my facial hair
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I’m very amused how Bungie managed to turn their detail-mad texture work from Marathon straight into high-fidelity nightmare messes in Halo in the Forerunner and Pfhor Covenant ships
only, I like it and I think everyone does
It’s trashy (nothing that covers that much of the screen and has that much flat space should have that much high-contrast high-frequency detail) but it’s undeniably cool and kind of unsettling
As much as the Covenant ship looks like a 3dfx Voodoo tech demo out of control I like it a lot
By Halo 3 I guess they had enough art staff that they backed away from it, or put the gribble as a more subtle underlay to the color, but it’s not as striking as it was.
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343’s offenses against halo aesthetics pretty much singlehandedly make halo 4/5 unlovable for me
BLOO N ORUNJ
compare that to halo 3 which is still the most beautiful shooter i’ve ever played
look at the light on those trees like damn
my girlfriend bought me a print of valhalla for my birthday (currently shipping) bc she knows im a halo junkie, and I just spent 30 minutes wandering around the level showing her how pretty the rocks are
also spent some time on tsavo highway just splashing around in the little lake where the grunts are running through it. splish splash
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also i think that high charity is a beautiful level. purple n grav lifts…
i actually think halo 2 anniversary is really pretty albeit in a nu-halo way (comparison), but mostly i’m a sucker for those blur cutscenes. main beef is that everything is too bright, like usual for 343. bungie halo really knows how to use the darks properly
idk it’s just something like, every individual light is brighter and more penetrating, if that makes sense. 343 doesn’t really do like dull/dim glowing.
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This rolls right into the Vex and Hive architecture looking like bismuth crystals and Giger respectively.
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The Halo CE Anniversary art is super super awful, but I think the Halo 2 Anniversary art does a fairly nice job at just embellishing what was already implied by the original. Like there is for sure nothing in Halo 2 AE as terrible as dumping the whole catalog of foliage assets from the Unity store onto Truth & Reconciliation. Which is a low bar. But I think what Halo 2 AE does really well is with all the covenant architecture, lighting and effects. I think the Elites look super cool, the weapons look great, there’s a lot more detail in the structures without drowning it in extra stuff. It’s, dareisay, a pretty tasteful remaster (err, redraw?) in most cases.
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Absolutely, I think Destiny shows a refined attempt at similar themes. Precursor architecture It does look a lot like Vex stuff, but they’re really careful to build that in 3D detail and leave the materials less busy:
and a consistent color wash over the top, instead of Marathon/Halo’s 2, 3, or 4-color palettes
(I love love love the sconce lighting alcoves it’s like Cheesecake Factories are all a Pfhor plot)
(and soft recessed lighting against big dark windows is the ‘living in the city’ dream I had as a kid)
Hive stuff again brings things together with a consistent color wash:
Ah, the art direction of Destiny makes me so happy
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speaking of Truth and Reconciliation, i think one of the keys of Halo shootplay is that if you’re in a completely blank field with just you and an enemy, Halo holds that that encounter has to be interesting. T&R’s whole grav lift section has these vast expanses of basically flat ground, where dropships are dropping off enemy grunts (see red arrow):
… and the only real decoration or terrain you have is gradually sloping geometry. it works because the encounter between a grunt and the player at close-mid range is interesting in its own right. yeah this enemy is a pushover, but how will you finish it off? pistol, grenade, melee? and on higher difficulties you get lulled into that sense of security that “i can just rush in and kill this guy”, but uh oh those plasma pistols hit harder than expected. regardless of difficulty it’s just fun interacting with their AI.
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i played my first match of halo CE against a human player and it felt so good i spent an hour afterwards looking up if the magnum has homing
four grenades is so much…
im slowly turning up my sensitivity and practicing stuff. like, its still a western gun game about genocide but i can fanfiction that away in the moment cuz it feels SO GOOOD
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its fine if its spartans genociding each other, its just live fire training
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i picked Reach back up because i heard the audio was fixed but it still sounds bad, am i crazy? half the dialogue is muffled, the gunfire is quiet, and i can’t hear the music during gameplay