games: halo wars (and MCC)
May. 30th, 2020 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sword_logici finished playing through halo wars for the first time yesterday!
non-spoilery thoughts: i loved it. this game was fantastic. i loved the story it told, and i am SO excited to play halo wars 2. i'm very terrible at RTSes - i don't play them and i'm not good at strategy-type games of any kind, but i played with a friend who's played before and i had a really great time. it was pretty relaxing to build up bases and listen to SUPPLY PAD UPGRADED. SUPPLY PAD UPGRADED. SUPPLY PAD UPGRADED. backed by one of THE BEST soundtracks ever applied to a halo game. seriously, the soundtrack was probably the best part; it's so different from other halo games, but manages to evoke a lot of the same vibes. fave bits include:
so good. so fucking good. so much more synth-y than the other bungie-era entries in the series, and the soft piano notes are so choice.
my first reaction upon finishing halo wars and watching the halo wars 2 trailer was: i get it. oh my god, i get it. i remember people absolutely LOSING IT when the hw2 trailer came out and i get it now. (on top of, like, it's just a very good trailer. that shot when the ODSTs drop in gets me every. single. time.) this game was so fucking cool. i remember it getting panned from just about every angle when it came out - RTS fans thought it was too basic, halo fans wanted an FPS (and got halo 3: ODST later that year... but i digress) - but i really enjoyed it.
the story was SO incredibly interesting - i was hooked immediately by just the fact that we were getting to see an earlier stage of the human-covenant war, which not even reach gave us. the spirit of fire discovering a) a shield world and b) the goddamn flood DECADES before the rest of humanity would was also an immediate "oh shit" moment - i went into this unspoiled for the most part, all i knew was that the spirit was involved with some kind of slipspace something-or-other that left it out of commission for the rest of the war, so watching the pieces line up for that was really exciting. i love it when a series has an entry like this, where they play with what is or isn't known at a given time in the canon. seeing a shield world also made me really, really pumped for halo 4 to come to MCC, too.
all of the characters were super cool, other than forge. i spent most of the game hoping he'd die "heroically" because he was so unbelievably bland and caricature-ish, and it was so off-putting, that i had to brace myself every time he showed up in a cutscene. he was easily the worst part of the game. cutter, on the other hand, was fantastic. the cutscenes did a really phenomenal job of showing him struggling to make the difficult choices (going to arcadia, going after anders, etc.) and his character really worked for me. and anders!! anders!!! clever and decisive and all the things we don't usually get out of the "professor" role in military sci-fi. i loved her. serina was fantastic too; the black box (lol) lore about her writing valentine's day notes to the crew from their families was so incredibly sweet, and i loved how snarky she was. that's the quickest way to my heart.
the visuals... wow. i know it was recently soft-remastered for PC release, but the game looks fantastic. the lighting and all the animations for the ground and air units was really, really good. the cutscenes absolutely blew me away, too - for 2009 they're incredible, and like, of course it was blur who did that. it all held up SO so well. the last big cutscene with the spartans fighting the elites actually had me cheering and clapping out loud and like, what more can i say? spartans being COOL and FIGHTING and being CLEVER? what's better than this?
all around, super awesome game. i'm so glad i finally played it. i don't know when i'll be playing halo wars 2 - i kinda want to wait until after halo 4 comes to MCC - but i'm so pumped for it, i might not wait.
i've also been playing through all the halo games with the same friend as they've been released on MCC recently, and it has done wonders to heal the hurt that halo 5 caused. it's really wild to realize just how deeply upsetting that game was; halo was such a big part of my life for so long and it's been five years since i was last able to think about it without getting really, really upset and disappointed. i guess this has been grieving, in its own way. it's been so great to go through these games again with someone who feels the same way and who's got all the same nostalgia for it, too; it's so good to joke around and be salty and get excited for all the Good Lines and Good Cutscenes.
in any case - wow, halo: reach stood up so much better than i thought it would have. we played it after finishing ce:a, and the difference in gameplay was absolutely staggering. ce:a aged like sour milk in terms of gameplay and level design. reach aged like a fine whiskey. we all love to complain about the library, but really, ce's level design was a long series of slogs through samey maps - and yeah, i'm sure part of that was limitations of the time, but it still aged pretty poorly, all things considered. not that it wasn't fun - it was super fun - but idk how good the experience would be for someone without nostalgia to lean on.
reach was... really good. super extremely really good. i think reach is the game i've played the least, and the least recently, so i got a pretty fresh look at it. we were really struck by the cutscenes (especially kat's death... god.) every time we had one; not that blur's work is ever bad, but there is just a certain something about the in-engine cutscenes that adds... well, something. reach in particular made use of a lot of found-footage-esque shots that really, really added to the whole experience. i was really upsetti™ about the changes to book canon when reach originally came out, but by now, i've both accepted it and come to really love the story that the game tells.
and halo 2? holy shit. we spent the whole time we played reach panning halo 2 and moaning and groaning about all the annoying parts of it and how much of a slog it was going to be, but when h2a dropped for MCC and we got through to about the end of metropolis? holy absolute shit, halo 2 is so much fun. the arbiter levels suffer a bit in comparison to the chief levels, but as a whole, halo 2 was awesome. i think my issue had been just that i'd played it too many times in too short of a timespan previously, and i'd gotten sick of it. oh well, opinion reversed, halo 2 was a fantastic experience and so much of the writing was so wonderfully cheeky.
i'm so deeply excited for halo 3. not much to say here because i think most everyone feels This Way about halo 3 but i cannot wait. we're going to get 3, then ODST, then 4, and i'm so excited. it feels so good to be excited about halo again. i don't think the hurt from halo 5 will ever go away, but playing through MCC on PC has helped so much. i even posted an old kilo-five fic thanks to all this! but yeah, god, i'm so excited for the second half of MCC to come to PC. i cannot wait.
i have no halo icons apparently, i am somehow unsurprised
Date: 2020-06-01 08:22 am (UTC)0.5 seconds later: OF COURSE IT’S THIS SONG LMFAO
god. halo wars has such a fucking great soundtrack. IF I’D KNOWN YOU HADN’T HEARD IT I WOULD HAVE PUSHED IT ON YOU YEARS AGO.
but just, ugh, halo wars!!! i really would love to replay it eventually. at some point i will try and see if my computer can run mcc, and if so i will fuckin take you up on that offer to replay em, because it’s been so long. i too have managed to heal somewhat from the pain that was halo 5 but even so i don’t think i want to touch the games again unless it’s with a friend who Gets It.
GOD AND I KNOW THE SECOND SONG TOO, RIGHT AWAY. the third song is the one whose name i actually recognized and sure enough it’s another longtime favorite. I JUST LOVE THE SOUNDTRACK SO FUCKING MUCH
Re: i have no halo icons apparently, i am somehow unsurprised
Date: 2020-06-01 08:23 am (UTC)Re: i have no halo icons apparently, i am somehow unsurprised
Date: 2020-06-01 04:46 pm (UTC)but yeah, holy shit, this soundtrack was so good. i can't even pick a favorite between those three, every time i listen to one of them i'm like "oh this one's my favorite" and then i go to the next and i think "oh no THIS one's my favorite" and it goes on and on. it's just? so different? and so good? it adds so much to the ambiance of every map and to the story and like, damn. it's so good. i'm almost mad i didn't listen to it beforehand, but at the same time, it was awesome to listen to it for the first time while playing.
when MCC first came out i tried to play reach solo and something just... didn't hook me, but when CE came out ty was like "hey you wanna co-op this?" and that made a WORLD of difference. god. being able to gripe and reminisce and laugh as we play is 100% what has been making this experience so fun. that offer's out there for whenever you're ready! (but MCC is uh. chunky. i think it's at about 80gb with 3 games. :| )
no subject
Date: 2020-06-01 10:40 pm (UTC)