X10: Halo Reach Vidoc

This is the first look we are getting at Halo Reach as a game, i'm liking it.

The "exploration" feel that they want to replicate from Halo: CE is a good move, with Halo 3 falling short in several areas the nostalgic take is a good move. I certainly enjoyed walking around the second level on Halo: CE, although I don't know if this enthusiasm to recreate the exploration feel will work. Halo was an alien world, with nothing you knew about. This is the planet Reach, where buildings make sense and are familiar to human design. If its exploration through a desolate side of Reach, which I bet it will be then maybe that strategy will work.

I also like their emphasis on the importance of the elites, they're so much more fun to fight than the brutes. Going back to the "Wort Wort Wort" babbling and alien language is a nostalgic step back, but this is sometime around Halo: CE so its continuity as well as something we wanted.

Customizable Spartans, I want more of that. I do, and I really also like the environments. The weapons look cool but can't say much until i've tried the beta.

Looking forward to the beta this May.

Halo Reach Trailer Impressions

It's long overdue, but I felt that better quality videos of this trailer needed to seed youtube before I actually posted one. So before you even consider my opinions on this matter, check out the trailer:



When viewing this trailer, I was pretty excited. The graphics/visuals are good, and Bungie stressed the importance of the cinematic scenes being on the in-game graphics capabilities. Good idea Bungie.

Visuals are all nice and everything, but among the ODST soldiers I did not see a single Spartan. True, Spartans like to act alone but seeing one would have been nice. Having said that, the encounters with the characters were entertaining at the very least. I noticed how different each ODST was dressed, i'm a fan of more customization for your character during online matches.

(rant)The helicopters in the trailer excited me, but for a different reason. Many Halo fans wish to drive the pelican, but i'm willing to forgo this in favor of aerial firing. It would be really satisfying to have a mission, where thousands of covenant litter a valley. Your Spartan/ODST would have to "spray" the field, then get down there and finish all of the rest. That is wishful thinking by me, and merely a rant.

For the most part the trailer was good, but there are clearly dissenting people who think the trailer was nothing special. Sure I would like to see gameplay, but it's quite unnecessary since we are getting a beta in Spring 2010 (at least that is what I have heard).

The Halo franchise brought me into gaming, Halo: Combat Evolved was the very first game I played on Xbox. So this early adoption of the Halo franchise makes me biased in many ways, and I get into arguments regarding Halo 3 and Halo: ODST many many times. Halo Reach is going back to the beginning of the fight, the brutes that dominated Halo 3 don't work with the covenant quite yet. So we're going to get more elite combat action, something I feel the lack of made Halo 3 and Halo: ODST disappointing.

So maybe the franchise has fallen in popularity with some, but would gamers truly consider a Bungie made game bad? No, they are a company who has made good games. We can hope Halo Reach is truly magnificent as a game, but we need to calm down when analyzing the trailer. It is just a trailer.

Halo Waypoint Review

Halo Waypoint, you're probably wondering what the hell it is. Well unlike the suave, cool sounding description you'll get everywhere else. Here's the short and sweet version from yours truly.

Designed in a heartbeat with very little at launch, Halo Waypoint awards Halo fan boys who bought every game and spent every moment playing them with avatar awards. It also excites you by offering a Halo Legends episode weekly even though the series is sub-par and will likely make fan boys cry with the large deviations in the material. In addition it holds Halo news, fanmade content, community screenshots and everything else that makes a Halo fan boy quiver with happiness.

So while there is potential in whatever they add, it offers very little to entertain you for more than 20 minutes.

Halo Legends "The Babysitter" Review

Halo Legends has been a subject of controversy on Geeksquisite, TJ especially cringed at the post production pics where you can see a teddy bear on the ground near a spartan in one picture. Teddy Bears may have been "useful" when killing people in Fallout 3, but what were the animators thinking putting stuff like that in Halo Legends?
*end rant*

On Halo Waypoint the premiere episode of Halo Legends was available, and future episodes will be viewable every saturday. Despite my concern with how Halo would translate into anime, I decided to analyze the episode carefully.

Overall Design in the animation is a mix of good and bad, but the freedoms the animators took are specific. Vehicle Designs are pretty spot on and very cool as far as I am concerned. Especially with the Phantoms, oh my those looked great. Weapon designs and interface on the anime was pretty good too, they had a sniper rifle zoom in moment that looked pretty nice and reminded me of the game.

When it came to the character designs, this is a much much less good side to the anime. Humans, ODSTS, all look okay, but of course the main character and focus of episode 1 had spiky overdone hair. This is why I was worried about Halo Legends as an anime, anime style is a difficult adaption for existing character design in the Halo franchise. Would the army EVER let someone have such crazy looking hair? NO. The spartan for this episode is horribly designed. I can't describe it too well but while the ODST's look okay in their armor, the spartan looks chubby in his armor and is an insult to the Master Chief's design burned in my head (very minimalistic too which means they aren't doing the spartan's justice). As for Brutes and grunts, they seemed okay. Elites, oh man they looked awful, they really messed up on the elites. The prophet they had was okay, but in a nutshell the non human character designs are pretty half assed.

Story and voice acting, that was okay. I am happy to say that they kept this good for the most part. One thing regarding story they did for this episode felt like a breaking of an old Halo tradition regarding spartans.

SPOILERS

They made the spiky haired kid a hero and made the Spartan take the beating from a brute with a hammer for the kid, killing her. That's right, I said HER. the ODST's removed her helmet revealing her bloody long white haired face, okay first of all...

One of the biggest things about Spartans is their mysterious identities, this Spartan kept quiet as she should but they made it so easy for the ODSTS to rip off her helmet. Spartans remain extremely mysterious and rarely allow removal of their helmets in public, or so the novels seem to indicate. It felt wrong that they unmasked a spartan, but that's not the worst part. It also drove me crazy that she got so emotional in the moments she was dying, i've read the novels and spartans shouldn't be "tell all" as they are dying. Or at least, they should have put less human interactions between the spartan girl and the ODSTS. Spartans make emotions take a backseat much of the time, so it felt like they messed up there. BIG TIME.

So for the most part Halo Legends is quite a departure from the designs and story arcs we are familiar with. The main flaw is lack of creative control that is so clearly not there with the death of the Spartan woman. In the beginning of Halo 3, it's clearly established that soldiers don't tend to a spartan that way. In fact, watch that part with the unmasking in Halo Legends, and then watch Johnson and the Chief in the beginning of the first level of Halo 3 and tell me which scene was better. I'm betting the cinematic video game scene looks better, and thats mostly because the chief is not treated like a non human/alien like in the anime.

Set your bar a little lower because it has depreciative qualities, I will hope in future episodes it isn't as bad.

Halo Elite Animatronics

That is sick!

Thanks to Kotaku for finding this

Halo: Legends Footage Premiered. Does the Horror Continue?

I've been more then vocal about my thoughts on what I consider the total basterdization of the Halo franchise. Well we finally have some footage and no it isn't a trainwreck but it also doesn't mean this piece of shit still shouldn't exist. The animation quality is pretty good but there is still something wrong about seeing Master Chief in japanimation and ODST soldiers with spiky hair. The one thing that makes this footage tolerable is that there are no little girls with teddy bears in sight. Don't be fooled though that footage will be in the final film, as shivers run down my back. I dread and eagerly await the release of this film.





Please let me know your thoughts either here or in todays question of the day.

Halo: ODST (Live Action Trailer)

Guys I know I've been saying how I would prefer a Halo movie to be CGI and not live action. But and that's a big but, if that live aciton movie looked like this I would be totally in. The trailer shows a few ODST soldiers getting into the heat of battle and fighting off the covenant. It is simply amazing, Microsoft and Bungie certainly know how to market their mega blockbuster franchise. Enjoy!

New Halo ODST Vidoc

Nathan Fillion rocks :)

I have to say, this Vidoc should have been the one shown at E3. It immerses me in the Halo universe while also touching nostalgia for Firefly the series, as a browncoat I was delighted. I had no clue Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk were in this game too, but the story really got to me. This is truly a modest heroes story, and I hope Bungie made these characters as cool as they sound. I want to see unique fights against the covenant involving the pelicans since the cinematics showed Banshees mixing with pelicans. No matter what, I gotta pick up this game.

But watch the video, its a nice one.

How Halo Made Me Kill Myself

Remember the article about the new Halo: Legends anime trailer I put up a few days ago?

Remember how terrible I thought the idea was?

Remember when I pondered on the podcast as to why the FUCK teddy bears and Master Chief were in the same product?

I now present to you the TOTAL BASTARDIZATION of the Halo Franchise.


To see more of this atrocity click here

Halo Chronicles Dead

LINK

"The Halo project is no longer happening, it sort of collapsed when the movie didn't end up happening." -Peter Jackson

Well, I'm not too surprised. I was hoping the game would happen, but nothing did happen and most people gave up. The problem was I needed a bit of confirmation from a credible source to say it's dead, and Peter Jackson is about as close as you can get.

And considering that Bungie promises Reach will be its last Halo title, It might be the end of projects from Halo. You know what...I doubt this will be the last Halo title but I imagine any Halo project outside of Bungie would fail. Halo ODST probably won't sell a copy if Bungie wasn't making it, and Halo Wars is a small indicator of that. It did have stuff to make it a worthwhile buy for some, but maybe Halo's glory days will be over after Reach.

Now that I really think about it, the way Jackson chained the game with the movie, it sounds like the game would have been a movie tie in. Which is really bad considering movie tie in games fail many many times.

Halo Legends Trailer

Honestly I wanted to make a post a few hours ago about this new Halo anime. I wanted to say how much I didn't think it would work because the Halo franchise doesn't fit that style. Well I waited a while and luckily just as I was about to make that post I check on gametrailers and found the following trailer. So now that I've seen this trailer I can now say...I was right. This just will not work. I'll watch it because it has Halo on it but that doesn't mean it will be good. The animation here from the makers of Appleseed and Ex Machina is just atrocious. Not because of the style but because of Halo. The two styles are completely different and don't mesh. In one scene we see a little girl giving this teddy bear key chain to someone. That might not sound bad but in the trailer it feels like something out of a typical anime and not from something with the name Halo in it. If they wanted to do this right they should have done it in the same CGI of the Halo 3 Super Bowl Trailer. This is just going to be AWEFUL!

Video Games | Halo Legends | Exclusive Debut Trailer HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

SUPERBOWL COMMERCIAL: STARRY NIGHT

Halo 10 year anniversary

Today is Tuesday July 21th 2009 and you know what that means? It means it's the 10 year anniversary since Halo was announced at Macworld 1999. This was before Microsoft even owned Bungie. Steve Jobs announced that Halo would be the game to put Mac gaming back on the map using the OpenGL platform. Microsoft announced that it bought Bungie on June 19th 2000. Then a little over a year later on November 15th 2001 Halo: Combat Evolved hit consoles changing the view on console shooters forever.

It's hard to think that Halo has been with us for so long. I remember going with my mom to buy a bundle on day one from Toys R' Us. The bundle didn't come with Halo so I returned two of the games and got Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee and Halo: Combat Evolved. I always liked games but I don't think I officially became a "hardcore" gamer until Halo came out. So even if the Halo franchise isn't the pinnacle of gaming the way it once was it will always be a part of my life as a gamer. Thank you Bungie :)

Geeksquisite Gaming Diary 6/30/09: Halo Figurines

Ed shows off his unexpectedly growing Halo Figurine collection.

Halo Reach to be Natal Compatible

WHAT!

The idea of a Halo game in cooperation with Natal seems kinda cool with all the ideas people have, chucking grenades like you really are. Crouching to avoid shots would be cool too.

But geez, would they program all of the moves into Natal? That is what I am worried about.

But hey this also means that Natal is going to be released no later than the fall of 2010, but I suspect it will come out sooner. Maybe Spring if we're lucky, and I've got to say there is indeed no better way to kick Natal forward than with a Halo title. But, that hasn't always been the case, Bungie must have been experimenting with Natal for a while now, idk if they did before the announcement of Natal but I wouldn't doubt they had an early look.

Gamestop unveils Halo ODST Exclusive

Gamestop Offer

Gamestop is offering a nice package for those pre-ordering Halo ODST to order from them, in return you will get a controller, a code to play Sgt. Johnson in firefight, the game and the beta code. Wait....PLAY SGT. JOHNSON IN ODST!

This will probably appeal to many hardcore Halo fans, I am one of those people. But to put this in an economic perspective the price tag for this pre-order is a 100 bucks. People are already up in arms about the price of Halo ODST at 60-65 dollars, getting a code for the Reach multiplayer beta was a nice "cushion" among other things to make people believe it's worth full retail. And I won't be stopped by price to get ODST, but the Gamestop deal I'm probably going to pass.

I have three controllers, and while I could use a fourth controller while making machinima, I'll pass. Being able to playing Sgt. Johnson makes me envious nonetheless, but the killer for me is that Project Natal is replacing the controller for about 30 percent of your controllers functions. Only time will tell if it replaces a handheld controller more, but with the rumors of a new console as well I'm not in the mood to hold four controllers for a possibly obsolete console.

But should anyone take this deal, its a sweet deal to be sure. The controller looks sick :D, and being able to play Johnson is pretty awesome. It's kinda funny though, because I kept talking to Rob saying "where does he fit into ODST?" since ODST's trailer clearly shows it takes place after Regret left Earth in Halo 2. And Johnson went with the chief after Regret, but since this is in firefight it makes sense now. But to be able to play only in firefight? meh it's not much for me.

So since an Xbox controller costs about 40 bucks, and this one is special. Your not really paying for the Sgt. Johnson extra, so it's a nice deal. It's not for me, but if you don't have more than two controllers, I recommend it.

Book Review: Halo: Ghosts of Onyx

Without a doubt my favorite one of the Halo series. Coming from the best author in the series, Eric Nylund who started the novels, I feel more comfortable in his story structure than others. Contact Harvest, The Flood and the Cole Protocol are written by other authors. 

Ghosts of Onyx centers around a unique spartan apart from the others we already know named Kurt, Kurt is noted by Master Chief to "spend alot of time making friends". Or basically to be the humanitarian coach to the Spartan-III, the next generation of Spartans he is in charge of.

Eric Nylund also has exclusive storylines around Dr. Catherine Halsey, the brains behind the Spartan Program. I happen to like this character because she is a mother to the spartans, but in a surrogate angle where she is comfortable company to the Spartans unlike the intense reactions from everyone else in the UNSC.

It was interesting to see the creation of Spartan-III's, and it was also good to get a storyline on the Covenant side. Nylund started this after William Dietz did in The Flood, Nylund started this in First Strike. The story of the elites banding together in light of the prophet's betrayal seemed like a glorious moment in the book, and then it went downward in so many areas I really got eager to flip page after page to learn fates of the characters. 

This, to me, is the best Halo novel and I recommend you read it. Even if you don't like to read. 

Halo: ODST Impressions

When we got a first look at Halo ODST at Microsoft E3, I was a bit skeptical when all of us saw the ODST Shock Troops with Recon and ODST Helmets, those helmets looked silly on the soldiers since i'm used to seeing full spartan armor going with it. I also was hunting to hear Nathan Fillion's voice (being a fan) since he's playing the captain in ODST. Anyway onto impressions...

First of all, Joseph Staten delivered on a fanfare by showing that the "power" of the M6D pistol from Halo: Combat Evolved is back! yes it was stronger than a pistol should be but we loved using it and we finally get it back. No Zoom? either they didn't show it or it made it too strong but that's not too bad. At least we get the power of the M6D slugs back. 

You know how Master Chief didn't really talk? so the ones around him weren't ready to engage in conversations. Well since your playing a rookie marine, I expect some more dialogue in gameplay, bungie had some good dialogue in Halo 3. So I'm betting there are some funny moments coming for us. 

Also, the HUD is different as T.J noticed before I did. But then again it's expected when you aren't a Spartan this time around. 

One of the biggest things finally answered for me was the timeline. Halo ODST comes before Halo 3, but exactly when was not specified until now. At the start of the trailer you see the Prophet of Regret's ship going through slipspace over New Mombasa, you would of thought from the way they handled that in Halo 2 that New Mombasa was destroyed. Nope.

The Gritty, technological future of New Mombasa excited me for the little I got to see, but it looks like you'll tour the city fighting the covenant. Which is great, because when they showed the Halo 2 demo, we got to see the city. We wanted to tour the city ourselves but it never came to be in Halo 2 or Halo 3. But now we shall have that chance. 

One of the things i'm concerned about is, once again, you're not a spartan. So I hope they take the idea that marines might have a harder time against brutes, elites and various covenant. 

Otherwise, can't wait for Halo ODST.