Today, i finally finished up with Halo 3. I beat it on Heroic (the true difficulty setting), and proceeded to get my ass kicked in Legendary. I found all the skulls and accessed all the terminals, so aside from a few other achievements online, I think I'm probably at my limit for the game.
In order to truly appreciate Halo 3, you should really play through Heroic. Normal is just way too easy to be taken seriously. In Heroic, you get a true sense of the enemies actually being strategic when defending or attacking. The brutes will always send in a little grunt to smoke you out. They'll chuck grenades down the hall at you and try to cut off escape routes.
In Normal, you can easily mow down any enemies that stand in your way.. It's really no challenge. Lately it seems like Normal difficult is the new Easy difficult. When a casual gamer picks up a game, he doesn't want to play on easy just because he sucks.. He wants Normal just like the big boys. Developers have been continually dumbing down difficulty levels to the point where the true experience is Hard mode. The same was with Metroid Prime 3. Games are getting too easy.
On the flip-side, though.. Legendary difficulty is simply balls out difficult. I gave up after consistently dying during the first few skirmishes in the jungle. Penny Arcade was SPOT ON when they said Legendary on Halo 3 is a chore. There were a few spots in Heroic that were challenging and took me a while, but they weren't difficult. Heroic was that bowl of porrage that was just the right temperature. Normal is too cold, and Legendary is too hot.
Isn't it rather strange that all the "alien" worlds look exactly like Earth? True, when you're on a halo you can see the ring continue up into the atmosphere and when you're on the ark, you can see the rims in the distance.. But the actual environments you walk on... there's nothing alien about them at all. Why does the ark look exactly like someplace on earth? Why can't their be bizzare plant-life? Why don't we ever see indigenous animal life too?
Metroid Prime 3 has some imaginative places to explore.. Why does something as sacrade as the Ark and a Halo ring look normal? Maybe that's something I'm missing in the story..
Also, there really wasn't any epic battle fought on earth the way it was fought in Halo 2. The second level of Halo 2 had you fighting your way to one of earth's major cities. In the distance, you could actually see the city and the havoc taking place. As you fought your way toward it, it would grow on the horizon until you eventually arrived inside that city you had seen from the beginning of the battle. Then you waged war on the streets and in alleyways.
In Halo 3, there's nothing like that at all. The locations you fight on Earth, look like burnt out Army bases and bunkers. You never fight in a true residential area.. and because of that you never get that emotion attachment to your surrounding to actually feel like Earth is actually in peril.
On the flip-side, though.. The environments are varied throughout the game, so it's not the same level over and over again. There's the jungle, an underground bunker, a desert base, base of a mountain, snowy hills, and so forth.
Honestly, I don't think the story of Halo 3 is all that bad. It's like a fun action movie where you play the unbeatable action hero. Unfortunately, they really didn't do much with the backstory of the first two games. I guess Bungie was assuming that if you're playing Halo 3, then you probably played through Halo 1 and 2 and remember the story verbatum.
Well, even though I have played through Halo 1 and 2, that was so long ago, I hardly even remember it. I remember a little bit of Halo 2's cop out ending, but I really have no idea what the convenant actually is, nor the real importance of the Halo rings, nor most other stuff.
Apparently, the extra disc in the limited edition has all the cutscenes from Halo 1 and 2 remastered and cut together for people to catch up on the story.. So, I should really check that out. I would REALLY like it if Bungie (or whomever these days) would remake the campaign missions Halo 1 and 2 using the Halo 3 engine. I would love to go through them again and not have to put up with dated graphics and no achievements. I suppose if Microsoft did that, each set of campaign missions would be $30 :/
Anyways, I thought the ending for the Halo series worked pretty well. It put a lid on Halo.. hopefully when the do make a Halo 4, it'll be called something more appropriate.
What more is there to say about Halo really? I'm horribly at multiplayer and I really was playing it more for the story. Though now that 2 of my close friends picked up 360s with Halo 3, I might be online a little more messing around with forge or multiplayer.. but I think I've hit my limit for regular multiplayer. I really don't get that much enjoyment out of running around killing a bunch of people I don't really know to ascend the ranks and fight people that I can't really compete against. Plus, there's other games to play ^_^
Halo 3 is a great social game, though.. so if you got a couple friends with a copy, getting yourself a copy isn't such a bad idea. There's more than just Slayer matches.
I guess that's really all I have to say about Halo 3. :shrugs
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