Oh yeah...forgot Metal Gear Solid. The first is a classic and the third is one of my all time favorites. Four was pretty stupid overall but the gameplay was rock solid and the ending was enjoyable. Two could be described similarly.
Shit I'm way behind in this thread.
Totally agree with this post, like every word of it. Snake Eater was so fucking good though, it's probably in my top ten of all time. I played the Subsistence version that had the better camera, so that helped, too.
Oh, and dat ending.
I'm a fan of the series, but I found 2 and 4 to be generally kind of stupid like you said, although with fun gameplay. What do you think of Phantom Pain from the looks of it? I have high hopes, I'm thinking it will be to the series what Snake Eater was.
Well see, I've always found the Halo games wildly overrated. The first one was all right, but the campaigns were never terribly compelling and the multi-player was always too slow for my liking. I grew up playing shooters like Unreal, Quake, and Team Fortress, so I prefer a little speed to my shooters. Halo feels like you're running in quicksand.
Generally speaking, I'd assume that anyone who lists Halo in their top five to ten games of all time probably grew up playing primarily console games and never really delved into the PC library, especially during the glory days of the mid to late nineties and early 2000s. I grew up as a PC and console gamer, and I tend to think that PC games were just vastly superior for a long, long time. The gap narrowed as consoles became more popular and less developers created PC games, mostly due to budgetary reasons, but the PC is still the king when it comes to shooters. It's also making a nice comeback thanks to Steam and constantly decreasing hardware prices.
In my opinion, Halo did a lot of damage to the shooter market. Concepts like only carrying two weapons and regenerating health really took a lot of the skill out of single-player shooters. I miss the good old days where you couldn't just hide behind a wall for thirty seconds and suddenly be back to full health, or when enemies and levels could be varied enough to give purpose to all your weapons, not just the two automatics you carry because there's not enough ammo lying around to justify bringing the magnum or the sniper rifle for more than a few minutes at a time. There's also the hilarity of a sniper rifle always just lying around when you're about to need it in games like CoD and Halo. It really cheapens the experience for me.
Interesting post because I fell somewhere in the middle. I began gaming on Sega Genesis at like six years old in 1995. My first PC game ever was Total Annihilation a few years later. I grew up a primarily PC gamer but I always owned one of the latest consoles. I was anticipating Halo BIG time when it was a PC/Mac game and was pissed when Microsoft bought Bungie and made it an Xbox launch title. The game turned out so different. I eventually played it when I bought an Xbox in like 2002 or 2003 and I liked the game a lot, but having also played a lot of those PC shooters you mentioned (not to mention I was a Half Life guy and thus checked out Counter Strike), Halo at the time definitely didn't feel right. I'd played console shooters like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark (great games) and enjoyed them but... It felt so simplistic and consolized, if that makes sense. I didn't find the campaign particularly enjoyable and nothing stood out. Meanwhile, it was being hailed by everybody as the greatest thing ever and I just kind of shrugged.
I didn't get the hype.
I'm playing through the games again on the Master Chief Collection now and I tell you, my view of Halo has done a total 180. I appreciate the games so much more. The controls are tight as fuck, everything just flows so well, you have guns, grenades, melee etc all at your command with a single button. The combat itself is satisfying and fast paced but it's not like, say, Unreal Tournament where you feel like you have jet boosters on your feet. It just feels...
right. The multiplayer in Halo 2 was so good. Most games don't hold my attention that long multiplayer wise, and Halo 2 only did for a few months, but I played it a lot in that time span and had a ton of fun with it. It felt like it took skill but it also wasnt unforgiving like Call of Duty which to this day I still try to get into each new installment's multiplayer but I just cant because you have people that have been experts for a decade at it and I just die 600 times per match, it isnt fun. Halo isn't that way.
So I don't know. My opinions has changed. I certainly do believe it revolutionized the FPS genre...but only on consoles. I understand the hype though now, and I can't wait for Halo 5. Since i was once on the other side of the fence though, I 100% understand the misgivings some people have about the series, especially PC gamers.
BTW speaking on favorite game series, I want to throw Warcraft and Starcraft in there for my top game series of all time. I'm a big RTS fan and almost nothing beats those two IMO. Blizzard are the masters at RTS, at least that style of RTS. For other game series, I'd definitely throw Zelda, Half Life, and Metal Gear in there no particular order. Not sure where Mass Effect would rank exactly but as I said before it's definitely on my list.
