Yay, I’ve finally found time to play through Halo 1 for the PC. To be honest I didn’t even know that I owned the game a few days ago, but when I looked through one of my drawers, I found it together with Supreme Commander and GTA: San Andreas \o/

To make playing it look like work or at least like something worthier than just playing, I’ve taken notes occasionally and here they are:

  • The vehicles are very easy to steer: they always automatically try to drive towards your current view direction and you only use forward and backward to accelerate and slow down. I was used to ETQW’s steering system and it took me some time to get used to, but it’s pretty ok for the game.
  • I like to use my rifle as club. For the first half of the game I had a really closed-combat fighting style: start shooting while running on and when you need to reload or simply are near enough, hit the enemies with your gun before jumping to cover. It was very effective against Grunts and against Elites, too, since my timing was right most of the times and I was there, when their shield broke down. The ability to throw grenades and shooting at the same time (pretty much) also increased combat speed a lot and made everything more fluid, because I was able to react to everything always in an effective way. The Flood was pretty scary at first, because I had to learn a totally different combat technique and after getting used to it during the first few hours, I took me a bit to keep my distance again. After getting the shotgun and surviving the Library level fighting against the Flood became fun or at worst slightly boring and annoying, though I still have to watch out to prevent myself from becoming surrounded. I think, it is a pretty neat idea to make the Flood monsters get up again after being shot for the first time. It facilitates being surrounded and increases the risk of being overrun.
  • Level design is pretty weird sometimes. And with weird I mean repetitive - just look at the Library level to see the beauty of copy’n’paste. The last level, where you have to drive the buggy through a weird obstacle course that makes no sense whatsoever is pretty awkward, too - the buggy is a bit to wide to be driven through everything elegantly using the controls and I got stuck all the time. Moreover the buggy is too slow for all the little ramps you can find and I was left wondering why they put them there (maybe the buggy’s speed was changed after the level was designed?)
  • I don’t like checkpoints. Especially when they’re used to tune the game difficulty by spreading them lighter in later levels >_<

So far, so good. I like Halo a lot and although some levels seemed a bit stretched (Library again), playing it was fun. I don’t know, what I’m going to play next, but I think that maybe I should spend some of my time coding again - nah, just joking, next I’m going to play Call of Duty or more Sam & Max…

Cheers,
Black