Zero Punctuation: Halo 3

[Ranzel]

Completely disregarding EVERYTHING Yahtzee said because he hasnt played the other 2 halos is moronic. This being true for 2 reasons-

1. In my opinion, the Halo series never was and never will be a FPS heavily dependent on its story, as you may find Bioshock to be. Saying its not "heavily dependent" is in itself a stretch, because the story is completely average, unoriginal, and poorly executed. Halo is about running and gunning, and so not having played the previous 2 halos, in my opinion, has NO affect on wether or not you can produce a good review of the halo 3 campaign.

2. The other 2 halos where on xbox, and so, not many people played them. I cant say that as fact, but I belive it to be true. With that mindset, you can safely say that, being the first halo on 360, Halo 3 was going to have a large supply of people who had NEVER played Halo before. Heck, I never played Halo 1, and I played Halo 2 once. That doesnt change the fact that I had fun playing the campaign in Halo 3, and being able to have fun DOES allow me to review it without people completely disregarding my review solely because I didnt play Halo 1.

And thats that. My 2 cents. Fantastic review Yahtzee, I agree with every word.

 

[Katana314]

I actually do kind of have to agree that in terms of skill-based shooting games on consoles, Halo 3 is right up in, at the very least, the top 3.
But thankfully it seems everyone agrees here that, no matter how great the game was, it WAS overhyped. For the record I kinda agree with Merlynn on the definition. The "until it's annoying" part is true, but only because at that point living up to the hype would mean the game is PERFECT. Which it's not. (so save those 10/10's, you idiots!)

Also; thanks for clarifying that player statistic. I kinda had doubts but thought it could be possible, and just wanted you to have something to back it up.

 

[Matthew Alexander]

You know what I find weird, specifically with the marketing campaign. That Mountain Dew, which primarily, at least over the last couple years, has focused its marketing on the Extreme Sports crowd, suddenly decided to target us sedentary couch jockeys. When did video games become an extreme sport?

Well, I guess if you were doing a death match at the edge of a volcano and every time you got powned you were lowered another meter into the fiery pit below? that would be extreme.

Anyone else up for a volcano death match?

 

[Alex Karls]

My side note for the day:

10/10 should not be reserved for perfect games. There's no such thing. 10/10 should be reserved for games that are just really really good, because if you want to hold back for a perfect game, you'll never get it. That's also why I believe in not using a 10/10 scale, because I rarely see games get lower than a 5. To me, that's another way of saying that a scoring system is broken.

And yes, I'd probably give Halo 3 a 10/10, perhaps a 9/10.

 

[symphonycometh]

An 8.5 right along side MP3, Shadows of the Colossus, Heavenly Sword, and the rest of the crew.

I gurantee this:

Hype free= Halo 3, 8.5 with no fear of backlash. Yahtzee is the only one with guts...apparently.

@Alex Karls:

Did you ever get the feeling that great...no...grand games are marked down too much for the smallest thing recently just so Halo 3 would appear a bit shinier than its competition?

 

[Alex Karls]

Did you ever get the feeling that great...no...grand games are marked down too much for the smallest thing recently just so Halo 3 would appear a bit shinier than its competition?

No, I don't get that feeling. While I do think that game reviewers frequently fail in their duties to properly rate a game, I don't think that they do it to boost other games.

Although I'm sure in some cases I am wrong, as we do hear the occasional story about journalistic impropriety in gaming journalism mags.

 

[Plays2]

This is my first time in here at The Escapist.

I saw Yatzee's review and I fell of my chair because I was laughing so hard.

As a 14 year old and long time PC gamer, I never got this Halo game. All my friends were telling me that the game is the shit, but the when I played it on my PC, I just saw the game like an average shooter.

What I mean is that I saw nothing revolutionary for Halo on the PC, of course the game revolutionized the CONSOLE shooters, but it wasn't the big thing for the PC gamers, we said things to Halo like "Been there, done that".

So I agree with Yatzee's review, a game that is supposed to be perfect wouldn't need anything to excuse it, so in this situation, Halo 3 was excused by its multiplayer because the SP part was short.

He's the only person I've seen who has the balls to express Halo's weak points, and without throwing perfect scores at it just because it's Halo.

(Going off topic)

I saw some posts that this review made it to Metacritic, if it is true, then can someone give me a link to it?

 

[cctoide]

i'm going to have to agree here. i love the halo series, but halo on my burger king cup is sort of a reach.

Except when said cup falls over. When that happens, it becomes the "Fall of Reach".

 

[Ranzel]

An 8.5 right along side MP3, Shadows of the Colossus, Heavenly Sword, and the rest of the crew.

I gurantee this:

Hype free= Halo 3, 8.5 with no fear of backlash. Yahtzee is the only one with guts...apparently.

@Alex Karls:

Did you ever get the feeling that great...no...grand games are marked down too much for the smallest thing recently just so Halo 3 would appear a bit shinier than its competition?

Shadow of the Colossus getting an 8.5- The biggest gaming travesty ever. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

 

[Joeshie]

Just thought I should throw this out there.

First of all, many of you are complaining that the review is biased because he failed to play the other games. I find that while this argument may have some grounds for basis, it's not entirely true. One does not need to play the original Half-Life to understand the brilliance of Half-Life 2. Not understanding the original story does not affect how the current story is told or presented.

Likewise, it's not as if Halo was only about the story. Even with a story, a video game should still be primarily judged upon the gameplay. In the case of this review, it's clear that Yahtzee was not overly impressed with the overall gameplay of the singleplayer. While some of you may disagree with this viewpoint, it's also a viewpoint shared by numerous FPS veterans.

Finally, many of you complained about a lack of review of the multiplayer. Of course, this is a perfectly legitimate complaint. Not reviewing such a large portion of a video game doesn't give you any sort of position to make a judgment of the overall game. However, whatever you do play does give you the position to make a judgment of that certain part of the game. This is why I feel that this "review" should almost be taken as simply a review of the singleplayer.

In the end, Yahtzee illustrated several key points that many others have been bringing up long before him. If a large portion of a game's is indeed half-decent (this case being Halo 3's singleplayer), you can't really give the entire game a perfect score, as many other reviewers were doing, no matter how good the rest of the game is. While Yahtzee certainly presented his points in a manner that seems that he was making broad, sweeping statements of the game, I feel that if you look at the review simply as a single-player review, he was spot on in many aspects.

Hopefully, Yahtzee will take the time in his future reviews to fix the little problem of reviewing the game as a whole when only playing a certain portion of it.

 

[Spinwhiz]

Oh, so funny. I think everyone else has said enough.

 

[Mursam]

I find that there are Halo fans, people who find it okay and people who have no idea what the big deal is about. I hink that to truly like Halo 3, you need to be in the first category an that really only comes with having played the first two games.
Halo 1's story was actually good and interesting, while Halo 2 and 3s were okay- however the Halo 3 storyline is not uncomprehensible if you had played the 1st two games as Yahtzee hadn't. Furthermore Halo 3, while probably not perfect, is certainly a lot more than run of the mill for the simple reason that sometimes i have noticed 1 000 000 people playing it at one time.
Halo 3 was overhyped but it's still a great game
I respect the opinions of those who don't like Halo 3, but i fail to respect it when they pass judgement on a storyline that required the previous two installments to understand (take the 3rd LOTR movie, who here thought they could've understood it if they hadn't seen the previous two movies?), and they completly dismiss the opinions of up to a million people who play it.

 

[Uridum [deprecated]]

this is epic almost 300 post WOW~!

 

[symphonycometh]

I find that there are Halo fans, people who find it okay and people who have no idea what the big deal is about. I hink that to truly like Halo 3, you need to be in the first category an that really only comes with having played the first two games.
Halo 1's story was actually good and interesting, while Halo 2 and 3s were okay- however the Halo 3 storyline is not uncomprehensible if you had played the 1st two games as Yahtzee hadn't. Furthermore Halo 3, while probably not perfect, is certainly a lot more than run of the mill for the simple reason that sometimes i have noticed 1 000 000 people playing it at one time.
Halo 3 was overhyped but it's still a great game
I respect the opinions of those who don't like Halo 3, but i fail to respect it when they pass judgement on a storyline that required the previous two installments to understand (take the 3rd LOTR movie, who here thought they could've understood it if they hadn't seen the previous two movies?), and they completly dismiss the opinions of up to a million people who play it.

This works until a game with a better story/multi-player gets a lower score...because it's not Halo.

Sorry, but Shadows of the Colossus deserved at least a 9.6 . It was being 100% original, GREAT music, touching storyline (Without much talking.), and the gameplay was literally epic....

And here comes the 8.5 solely because it wasn't Halo hyped. Sorry. Unsold.

Reviewers got scared of backlash, obviously, and only Yahtzee has guts, apparently.

@Yahtzee:

Screw the narrow minded that attack you. I laughed when you were doing the Heavenly Sword demo (Which I have the actual game) with no offense, I don't see why the overhype has to blind so many people.

 

[Easykill]

I don't consider myself blinded. I LIKED the game so if people are giving it high ratings I prefer to think that they think like I do instead of them just taking the path of least resistance, which will ultimately be worse for their career than telling the truth anyways.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

So what? Yahtzee's review kicked aces in so many levels for speaking the truth. Overhype is overhype. Period.

What do you define as overhype? He spoke his opinion. Whether or not it is the truth is another matter.

If I happened to disagree with him on pretty much every point, does that mean I am merely a hype machine, that I cannot have an opinion on my own?

Maybe I am a hype machine. Maybe I loved the game. Maybe I hated it.

Or maybe, Yahtzee's review is bias, and that he's just an entertaining reviewer.

I guess what I'm saying is that I dislike getting into absolutes. I don't believe in them.

I admit there's a serious bias when someone who hasn't played Halo before enters the game for the first time and doesn't like it.

Next you'll say a bad game is a good game because the first 2 were "ok"..... Halo is overhyped and as far as overall quality goes it goes down a point per release making 3 at the least no better than 2,the trouble with the bloat machine is that it tends to sque ratings for better games and sque ratings for "ok" games that got overhyped like Bioshock.

I love the rantings system it turns 6's and 7's into 9's and 10's and any real 9+ game to come along they just do not understand it and lower its score...

 

[Easykill]

I dont own Bioshock. I played the demo and I played for like 15 minutes at a friend's house but it didnt really strike me as gods gift to gaming either. The story was cool but the fighting was kinda repetitive, it seems its impossible to die, and if Yahtzee's review of it is accurate then it isn't really original either because it rips System Shock off. It had faults, and in my opinion it was over-hyped. Halo 3 has some faults but its still a great game, just like Bioshock. So don't say Bioshock is a better game, just that you like it better.

 

[november17th]

I'm one of the few americans who hasn't bought this poor excuse for a game.


Thank you for the laugh.