Halo Combat Evolved Box Art
Good draw animations are so underrated. More games should have them.
The box art should be Chief looking at the Halo ring’s horizon (like the one at the end of the Infinite trailer). Chief is holding the assault rifle in one hand and an A.I chip in the other. Just using a normal Xbox cover art I cooked up to show a template concept I had. This is mainly for the template but comments on the box overall are also welcome! Printable available on request, as usual. Box updated on February 29th, 2012 original Halo: Combat Evolved Box Cover Comments.
Make the fun start the instant you pull your gun out, rather than when you start shooting stuff.Halo: CE has the best weapons of the franchise imo. Between the deadly accurate pistol, 60-round beefcake assault rifle, the plasma rifle with a slowing debuff, absurd fire rate sniper rifle and mini-nuke rocket launcher (matched only by the equally-nuclear frag grenades), they're nearly all winners. Halo 2 and onward really let me down in this regard. Everything was nerfed to hell. Makes CE the most replayable to me by far.
Halo Combat Evolved Steam
Give me any two weapons and I'm likely to have a good time. I remember being hyped for it, then not that hyped for some reason. When the Xbox launched I was actually MOST excited for DoA3, but due to PS2 shortages all the stores were starting tof orce bundles as preorders.
I preordered from EB along with a dvd remote, halo, doa3, and munch's oddyssey. I had a great day, playing doa and munch, then I finally went 'Well, let's crack into Halo' at my friend's house on his 60 inch TV.
I don't think we stopped playing to even grab a snack until something like 5-6 hours later, early in the morning. Ended up playing through it in one sitting with just the one break.One of my favorite games of all time, even the library which I hated the first time through, is justt so magical to me. It's mind blowing when I see those who are still stuck in decades old console wars try to undersell the importance of this game. It is literally the prototype for every console FPS that has come since. My favorite game of all time.
It pains me to see what has become of the franchise. Each new release further strays from what made the original so great.
With all of the pomp and circumstance comes a lack of love, a desire to monetize and bleed the fans dry by exploiting what little good faith remains. I understand that it is a business, but that makes it no less tragic in my mind.I have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours on the game in all of its various iterations.
I have completed the campaign dozens of times, the only game ever which I have seen end to end more than a handful of times. It is what helped my brother and I forge the bond we have today. Countless hours spent together triumphing over scores of alien oppessors. Even my dad, traditionally adverse to any kind of multimedia entertainment, would play with us from time to time.
In fact, other than Shadows of the Empire, I'm pretty sure it's the only game he has completed.I can't believe it has been so long already. What Bungie accomplished with this game is completely unparalleled, even today. The package is amazing and cohesive, and the fact that you can pick it up now and still have an incredible experience is something to be lauded and speaks to the master craftsmanship that went in to its creation. Bungie was at the pinnacle of their development trajectory at the time, even if nobody knew it then.I'm afraid we will never get another game like it, sadly.
The current state of the industry leaves me with little hope that we will ever see another GPS that is so focused and is so much fun to play. Too many baubles and features and bullshit that bogs down the experience now. Gear, XP, ADS, equipment, special abilities, and all kinds of other shit that detracts from the joy of a straightforward shooter. We have built a prison of our own design as consumers, and willing chose to take up residence.Maybe Metroid Prime 4 can bring us back, but my hope is fleeting. I think I will ask my brother if he wants to play through the game again over the long holiday. Thank you for the thread, OP.
I know it seems strange, especially within the context of my post now that I am re-reading it, but of all of the games that really captured my imagination in the way that Halo CE did, it would have to be Metroid Prime (the original and maybe parts of Echoes). The strange, haunting atmosphere of being on an alien planet of unknown origin, hunted by a merciless alien enemy that (at least at the time of CE) we don't understand, with basically only ourselves to rely on.
Dropped into large, sprawling levels with little explanation as to their purpose or reason, we are left to ponder on machinations of this alien race and decipher their motivations ourselves (in Halo's case, with a little help from Cortana). I think that one of the biggest mistakes Bungie made in regards to the story of Halo was revealing too much about the Forerunners and, to a lesser extent, the Covenant.The lonely tone the original game sets, especially by the time you reach the end and it really is just you and Cortana at that point, is really striking. Outside of Metroid Prime and maybe Shadow of the Colossus, I have never really experienced that kind of feeling in a game before. As much as I loved Halo 2 and 3, it never gave me that same kind of pang of loneliness that you encounter on a fairly regular basis in CE.I thought the city portion of ODST was really clever because it captured this tone almost perfectly for me, and I know that folks have mixed opinions about that game but I personally loved it for that reason.Hopefully that at least sort of explains why I name dropped Metroid Prime.
LAN parties will never be the same. It always strikes me as a futile attempt to recapture the magic of days gone. I really miss those long weekends spent with friends, just gaming our lives away with a relentless parade of back-to-back multiplayer games.
We would just hotswap people in and out constantly - depending on the number of players, if it was an odd amount, we always had a rule that whoever was top performer got to be player one on whatever console had only three, so that they could keep the larger slice of the screen. Everything else about the new trilogy aside, my single biggest gripe is the way 343 has handled the art style.I feel like I could write an essay on the design language of CE alone.
It was marvelous in just about every way. It is exceedingly rare for a game to hold up as well as this game has visually after such a long period of time (another mention of Metroid Prime would not be amiss) and I feel like the game's technical prowess is not solely responsible for that fact (although it is powerful in its own right and some brand of wizardry to be sure).Even the Bungie sequels took a hit in the visual design department, due in no small part to the effort to modernize the graphical elements of the game. As was mentioned, normal mapping, while impressive technology at the time, took away some of the magical simplicity that the game has. I still love the way that Halo 3 and Reach look, but Halo 2 was not exactly pleasing to look at in places. None of them touch CE though, and it's especially clear now when you look back on all of the titles today. The newer games have not aged anywhere near as gracefully as the first.
Halo 1 to Halo 2 was one of the most disappointing transitions for me. Disliked the stronger focus on story, disliked the visual changes, disliked the reeling back of weapon impacts.
I must have replayed the Halo 1 campaign 100 times. No exaggeration. It consumed years of my life. LAN parties were in constant rotation through high school. I remember picking up Halo 2 at midnight and playing all night with a growing pit in my stomach as I realized how the series was taking shape. So much of what I loved about Halo 1 has been lost as the series has grown.
It remains unique. It still holds up. What an achievement it was at release.I get sad even now when I think about that first night with Halo 2, going in with the expectation that it would expand on the AI, open up environments, foster more mystery, finding myself instead punching an alien in a wheelchair with a single button press over and over again as he slowly floated through a hallway guarded by seemingly lobotomized enemy troops, the sheer disgust I felt, wondering what could have gone so wrong.I miss console shooters with wide FoVs. Halo 1 is one of the few first person shooter campaigns that doesn’t nauseate me with motion sickness. I wish 90°+ FoV remained standard.