I recently bought - and completed - Halo: Reach. I even more recently bought - and rather swiftly completed - Call of Duty: Black Ops. Not to beat around the bush, but the latest Halo instalment is the superior game. The only area in which there is any doubt is with multiplayer.
People often complain that they don't "get" Halo - likely in the same way I don't "get" Will Smith. Ali was alright though. Pay attention because I'm going to be knocking out some parallelism in a minute. Look forward to it.
I often think people dislike Halo because they're just no good at it. I don't mean they don't know how to aim or how to take cover, but - broadly speaking - they don't know the most effective way to kill enemies. I dismissed Halo 2 because of this; I simply didn't know how best to counter different enemies. The best example of this is the shield system. Elites - the big, predator-looking fellas - for example, have shields that can take a lot of damage. An inexperienced player would pick up an assault rifle and just start shooting away. An experienced player would punch a grunt's - the little fellas - head off, take his plasma pistol, shred the elite's shield in a second and finish him off with a few regular bullets to the head. Knowledge like this isn't a big secret - it's simply a reward for experimentation. And no, enemies aren't only vulnerable to one weapon. Often, they're just not vulnerable to just one or two weapons. Going into exact detail about each and every enemy would take an age.
Wanna know the best way for killing enemies in CoD? Bullets. What's the difference between a MPK5 and TTLY090? A lot of letters, far as I can tell. They burn through the enemies - which are infinite until you walk to a certain point - just as quickly. Obsessives might point out that the 0.005 second difference makes a big difference online. Not really, considering online play is just a big contest of who can see who first. I found great success just sitting round a corner, waiting for someone to unwittingly stumble in. Seems the most common tactic. That's a matter for another paragraph.
Whereas Halo is a sandbox shooter, CoD is a corridor shooter. That's a fact - it's a design decision on the part of the developers.
Halo confronts you with numerous options - which weapon combo do you use, what direction do you approach from, which enemy do you prioritise, do you attempt to hijack a vehicle, which armour ability do you use, do you run away or trust the AI to protect you while your shields recharge, etc. etc, - whereas CoD confronts you with one; go over there and wait for the next set piece.
Furthermore, I tried playing "intelligently" on CoD. You know, sitting back behind cover, picking enemies off, using smoke for cover, using grenades to flush enemies out. That didn't work. Largely because, unless you move forward to where it tells you, it keeps sending enemies at you. You could kill the entire Russian/Cuban/Viatnamese army and they'd keep coming. Oh, and grenades don't seem to deter them (I'm guessing because unless they actually drop down and try to fuck them, they do no damage). So you have to do the tactic that I ended up doing - running forward like a maniac with two slightly different machine guns and just shooting anything that moves. Like real soldiers do.
There's some cool stuff in there. Ducking under an exploding plane. Firing ziplines and then zooming down them, shredding enemies at the other end. Taking out vehicles with an explosive crossbow that was inexplicably left up a Russian guard tower. Unfortunately, the game just plants you there and goes "look at this cool idea!". More often than not, your involvement is reduced to just holding X or even just watching. You're less a player and more an observer. Cool game - I just wish I was playing it.
In terms of guns, Halo doesn't repeat itself. There's a grenade launcher, a shotgun, an assault rifle, a sniper rifle, a semi-automatic rifle, a needler, a laser, a rocket launcher, etc. No two weapons are alike. They all fulfil different functions and thus should be used differently.
In CoD, they're just variations on a theme. In single player, this is ridiculous. There's about a dozen varieties of machine guns with a dozen varieties of attachments (what the fuck is the point of the suppressor when you're almost always in the middle of a huge firefight? Oh, they'll never guess where I am!) and they all make fuck all difference. There's some fancy ammo types, but the difference is almost entirely aesthetic. The guns are praised for being "visceral" but enemies flop down after being so much as grazed so, uh, not really.
You may expect me to compare stories but that'd be like comparing the stories of Candy Loves Cock to Sally Adores Penis. It's a videogame. You want a story, watch a movie or read a book. Actually, Halo has books written about it. And potentially has a movie in the works. Halo wins, I guess.
I'm now going to describe two online scenarios. You tell me which is which game:
1) I'm walking along in a sensibly sized map. Someone shoots me in the back. I don't die immediately. What happens next is the two of us dancing between cover. I melee him. It doesn't kill him immediately. He goes into armour lock and I wait five minutes for him to come out. Unusually, a teammate doesn't turn up to help him and I get the kill with a well-placed headshot.
2) I'm sprinting between cover in a sensibly sized map. Someone shoots me in the back. I die immediately. The kill cam shows that he was in some random doorway half a mile away and was fortunately very skilful at seeing me first.
Basically, if it weren't for Reach's dumbass armour lock (AKA lol, I'm invincible) then it would have better online hands down. I think people like CoD just because it's constant positive reinforcement. You get points for scratching your arse, kills are embarrassingly easy (granted you camp in a sensible enough place) and you get an explosive remote control car for just three kills.
And, um, I think that's just about it.
People often complain that they don't "get" Halo - likely in the same way I don't "get" Will Smith. Ali was alright though. Pay attention because I'm going to be knocking out some parallelism in a minute. Look forward to it.
I often think people dislike Halo because they're just no good at it. I don't mean they don't know how to aim or how to take cover, but - broadly speaking - they don't know the most effective way to kill enemies. I dismissed Halo 2 because of this; I simply didn't know how best to counter different enemies. The best example of this is the shield system. Elites - the big, predator-looking fellas - for example, have shields that can take a lot of damage. An inexperienced player would pick up an assault rifle and just start shooting away. An experienced player would punch a grunt's - the little fellas - head off, take his plasma pistol, shred the elite's shield in a second and finish him off with a few regular bullets to the head. Knowledge like this isn't a big secret - it's simply a reward for experimentation. And no, enemies aren't only vulnerable to one weapon. Often, they're just not vulnerable to just one or two weapons. Going into exact detail about each and every enemy would take an age.
Wanna know the best way for killing enemies in CoD? Bullets. What's the difference between a MPK5 and TTLY090? A lot of letters, far as I can tell. They burn through the enemies - which are infinite until you walk to a certain point - just as quickly. Obsessives might point out that the 0.005 second difference makes a big difference online. Not really, considering online play is just a big contest of who can see who first. I found great success just sitting round a corner, waiting for someone to unwittingly stumble in. Seems the most common tactic. That's a matter for another paragraph.
Whereas Halo is a sandbox shooter, CoD is a corridor shooter. That's a fact - it's a design decision on the part of the developers.
Halo confronts you with numerous options - which weapon combo do you use, what direction do you approach from, which enemy do you prioritise, do you attempt to hijack a vehicle, which armour ability do you use, do you run away or trust the AI to protect you while your shields recharge, etc. etc, - whereas CoD confronts you with one; go over there and wait for the next set piece.
Furthermore, I tried playing "intelligently" on CoD. You know, sitting back behind cover, picking enemies off, using smoke for cover, using grenades to flush enemies out. That didn't work. Largely because, unless you move forward to where it tells you, it keeps sending enemies at you. You could kill the entire Russian/Cuban/Viatnamese army and they'd keep coming. Oh, and grenades don't seem to deter them (I'm guessing because unless they actually drop down and try to fuck them, they do no damage). So you have to do the tactic that I ended up doing - running forward like a maniac with two slightly different machine guns and just shooting anything that moves. Like real soldiers do.
There's some cool stuff in there. Ducking under an exploding plane. Firing ziplines and then zooming down them, shredding enemies at the other end. Taking out vehicles with an explosive crossbow that was inexplicably left up a Russian guard tower. Unfortunately, the game just plants you there and goes "look at this cool idea!". More often than not, your involvement is reduced to just holding X or even just watching. You're less a player and more an observer. Cool game - I just wish I was playing it.
In terms of guns, Halo doesn't repeat itself. There's a grenade launcher, a shotgun, an assault rifle, a sniper rifle, a semi-automatic rifle, a needler, a laser, a rocket launcher, etc. No two weapons are alike. They all fulfil different functions and thus should be used differently.
In CoD, they're just variations on a theme. In single player, this is ridiculous. There's about a dozen varieties of machine guns with a dozen varieties of attachments (what the fuck is the point of the suppressor when you're almost always in the middle of a huge firefight? Oh, they'll never guess where I am!) and they all make fuck all difference. There's some fancy ammo types, but the difference is almost entirely aesthetic. The guns are praised for being "visceral" but enemies flop down after being so much as grazed so, uh, not really.
You may expect me to compare stories but that'd be like comparing the stories of Candy Loves Cock to Sally Adores Penis. It's a videogame. You want a story, watch a movie or read a book. Actually, Halo has books written about it. And potentially has a movie in the works. Halo wins, I guess.
I'm now going to describe two online scenarios. You tell me which is which game:
1) I'm walking along in a sensibly sized map. Someone shoots me in the back. I don't die immediately. What happens next is the two of us dancing between cover. I melee him. It doesn't kill him immediately. He goes into armour lock and I wait five minutes for him to come out. Unusually, a teammate doesn't turn up to help him and I get the kill with a well-placed headshot.
2) I'm sprinting between cover in a sensibly sized map. Someone shoots me in the back. I die immediately. The kill cam shows that he was in some random doorway half a mile away and was fortunately very skilful at seeing me first.
Basically, if it weren't for Reach's dumbass armour lock (AKA lol, I'm invincible) then it would have better online hands down. I think people like CoD just because it's constant positive reinforcement. You get points for scratching your arse, kills are embarrassingly easy (granted you camp in a sensible enough place) and you get an explosive remote control car for just three kills.
And, um, I think that's just about it.
