Zero Punctuation: Halo 4

[Section Crow]

Eh, i had no trouble following the story and i never touched one of the halo books.

You can easily understand the story if you take the time to piece it together, i played the campaign twice (Once on heroic and once on Legendary) and that was enough for me to gain a clear mind about the story but that may be because i wanted to hear the story and did not share Yahtzee's boredom.

 

[Jegsimmons]

Damnation Yahtzee, could you actually play the previous games to get the full story before shitting on a sequel?

As a halo fan i adored halo 4. and i felt it explained everything it needed to explain while leaving enough open to explore in future games.


and whats with people saying Master Chief is a boring character? he isnt, he's exactly what he needs to be.

and why are people saying the game is boring? Up the difficulty. i played that shit on legendary solo and i swear it started getting fucking brutal.

not to mention he ignored spartan ops which expands the story a tad bit and adds more gameplay.

halo is awesome...still.

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

I've been a Halo fan since the beginning, and even though I've read a few of the books the story STILL confuses me. I'm given to understand that there are three new books that perfectly explain the story of Halo 4. And the terminals. And comics. And the webisodes... whatever. I just can't be arsed with it. That has always been the weak-point of Halo for me; it fails to tell an engaging story unless you're willing to at the least spend some serious time reading on Wikipedia.

This was also my complaint for Final Fantasy XIII - a story that made zero sense at the start unless you read the 'codex' or whatever they called it. Listen, don't hand me a fucking brochure (or tell me to go find one) in order to enjoy your story. At the very least, tell an articulated story and let that other media be supplemental. Halo has always been for uber-fans and I was hoping that 343 would change this in order to get more people into the franchise. It was a fresh opportunity that was clearly squandered.

Those gripes aside, I enjoy Halo 4 more than I thought I would, given that franchises rarely do well under new management. Maybe it was my low expectations, I dunno.

 

[Daaaah Whoosh]

Yahtzee, I would love to play Halo with you sometime. But first, I need to play it for myself. I happen to love playing with Fisher-Price toy guns in a plastic play castle.

 

[Shockolate]

Master Chief was downloading porn all those years, and with the porn came viruses.
And that's how Cortana snapped! Porn viruses.

Over each iteration, he's also been DL'ing sexier higher poly DLC models for Cortana.exe.

Naughty naughty naughty!

Might be why she won't ever keep her fucking mouth shut.

You're not even talking! Close your damn mouth!

Sick of looking as those fucking teeth.

 

[Geo Da Sponge]

Never been a huge fan of Halo, only played Combat Evolved on the PC and got bored halfway through.

Man, I got bored before the opening cutscene was over and quit ten minutes later. Dull, dull, dull.

Oh yeah? Well I managed to get bored just glancing at the box art! I got so bored I stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated!

 

[Snowblindblitz]

The WORST thing to happen to the Halo series (And probably Shooter franchise in general) was porting Halo over to the PC. Halo is a Console shooter, with mechanics based around using a dual-joystick controller instead of Keyboard & Mouse.

No waves? Well I guess that tides well for Halo fans.

Well, it'll certainly tide them over until the next installment.

...I suddenly feel ashamed of myself.

Torrents of puns are good, except when you repeat a pun on the same word someone else punned.

I agree. I'm perfectly fine with keeping console games and pc games away from each other. What usually goes down:
I play on PC and this game is shitty! Keep it on consoles! This game got ported from console, it's shitty! They moved this game to console, it got more content, the developer/maker is shitty!

I hope to play Halo 4 at some point, played everyone except ODST and like them a lot. I just do most of my gaming on PS3 or indie games on my PC.

 

[Drops a Sweet Katana]

Never been a huge fan of Halo, only played Combat Evolved on the PC and got bored halfway through.

Man, I got bored before the opening cutscene was over and quit ten minutes later. Dull, dull, dull.

Oh yeah? Well I managed to get bored just glancing at the box art! I got so bored I stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated!

Yeah! Well, I was bored of Halo before it was even made. So bored, in fact, I quite literally died.

 

[Jabberwock King]

OK so I'll take that as a "meh." I'm surprised he didn't mention anything from Mission 5 other than The Librarian Voldemort's Mom. The amount of idiotic elements in that mission was jarring, and I think it's because a lot of it was about injecting elements from CoD that didn't belong in Halo. You shouldn't need a target designator to operate the giant artillery piece that is on the same giant vehicle that you are, especially when you're target is a giant anti-spaceship laser cannon, that is what an on-board console is for.

My only gripe is difficulty. I choose legendary difficulty and it isn't even difficult, just inconsistent. As Yahtzee pointed out, you kinda just die from random bullshit.

That should not have been a problem, you just test out the enemy guns and see what they do. Maybe the lack of a proper health bar is throwing you off?

 

[Buizel91]

I would agree with him on the weapon sounds if they weren't made more deadly this time round, the Covy weapons actually sound terrifying, instead of sounding like they were produced by Mattel.

I have never understood the complaints regarding the story, why is it i can play all the games and understand it with little to no questions, and some people get confused when the word "Arbiter" is mentioned? -.- i have only ever heard a few things from the books and looked up a few (unimportant) things on the Halo Wiki, and i understand it near enough perfectly.

I admit, other characters such as Palmer, the Captain and the Commander are a little bland, Palmer is developed more in Spartan Ops, something Yahtzee could of mentioned as, while you need XBl to play it, you can go it alone, kinda like Zombies or Spec Ops.

I wish there was a Boss Battle, but Halo has never had true boss fights (even the Prophet of Regret is killed by button mashing in H2) but they could of done it better.

All in all, it's not by any means perfect, but it's still a good game, and doesn't (in my opinion) deserve the amount of criticism it gets, basically, if you have played it since 2001...you will love it, if you haven't played the other games, you will be left out on the loop a little, but should be able to follow it fairly well, and if you hate the Halo series, don't bother. I would choose this over Black Ops 2 any day.

 

[Thomas Barnsley]

i think you really need to have started halo at a young age to fully appreciate it. i think Yahtzee just doesn't understand it for that reason, starting off in halo 3. 1 and 2 were the best anyway.
the thing i personally disliked about halo 4 was the lack of signature halo music. thats what made the series for me. my favourite cut-scene was when it played some of the original music.

 

[Cecilthedarkknight_234]

I'll just say it as a halo fan, the story was wrapped up in the third game despite not being the ending everyone wanted. Tacking on new story seems pointless to me when some big name characters died in the 3rd game as well. I know that halo 3 hasn't aged that well multi player wise as well, however that's not really a reason to release a brand new game and mess up story that was finished/Rant over.

did you not complete it on legendary? they left it wide open

oh for the love of god are you kidding me??? No I never went back to the campaign after doing the play-through and in all honesty games shouldn't require to play "HARD AS HELL SETTING" to unlock a secret ending. Time to hit up you-tube I suppose <_<

 

[Reddy4U]

I remember playing Halo 2 on my original Xbox, which was my first experience with Halo at the time, and thinking it was incredibly boring. I played Halo 4 thinking it would be just as boring but actually had a good deal of fun with it. Playing it on Heroic in Solo and then Legendary Co-op gave a great deal of satisfaction everytime I managed to beat the next encounter.

Can't wait to see the Call of Duty Black Ops 2 review. hehehe

 

[LazyAza]

I was really looking forward to 343 really messing around with the Halo formula and instead they made the safest blandest entry in the series to date. Oh well maybe now that they've proven to the fanboys they can make the old boring Halo they like they can make a new crazy Halo that people like me will like next time around.

 

[Batou667]

As a long-suffering fan of Halo, I'd say Yahtzee is fairly on the money. It's still a good game, unfortunately with a pedigree like Halo, nothing short of groundbreaking would make the fans (myself included) happy, and boy oh boy did 343i play it safe with this one.

 

[Carlos Storm]

That's something about Halo that's always perplexed me, the alien weapons. They all look so ridiculously like toys. When you envision alien weapons, do you think nerf guns with glow sticks on them? I don't. Also, why is it in every Halo game, human weapons always seem to be the best guns, or is that just me?

I've found on the hardest difficulty human guns aren't worth carrying around for longer than it takes to find their alien equivalent. A nice contrast to the BR being the best gun around on easy

Edit: Wrong quote

 

[Xdeser2]

Im not gonna lie, Halo is one of my favorite franchises, but its nice to see it cut down to size now and again lol

 

[Xdeser2]

hmm these are odd complaints i have never heard before nor exsperienced
but whataver

Well, since this thread is pretty much just an echo-chamber for Yahtzee's opinions, none of us are probobly gonna hear the end of it lol

 

[eternal-chaplain]

I had to go and check out the ending 'battle' on youtube, assuming your description to be an exaggeration, and boy did I have a laugh. Not only was the QTE worse than I thought, but those awful textures, obnoxiously loud SFX, terrible and monotone voice acting, and pitiful writing in general really gave me a good laugh.

 

[Ishal]

That's something about Halo that's always perplexed me, the alien weapons. They all look so ridiculously like toys. When you envision alien weapons, do you think nerf guns with glow sticks on them? I don't. Also, why is it in every Halo game, human weapons always seem to be the best guns, or is that just me?

On another note, Halo 4 is the only Halo game since 2 that I'd say was decent. My only gripe is difficulty. I choose legendary difficulty and it isn't even difficult, just inconsistent. As Yahtzee pointed out, you kinda just die from random bullshit.

The forerunner weapons he criticized as looking like toys also caught flak in other areas too. I don't remember if he said it in the review but they are basically light-based versions of human weapons. There are reasons for this, however. The promethean knights that wield them have a backstory explained in game and it kinda explains in canon why they are like forerunner versions of human weapons, and since you played it on legendary you prob already know that. Plus, there is the multiplayer side of things for balance of weapons in competitive matches.

As for the Covy weapons, I've always liked them. I agree they do kinda seem like toys but I just accepted that as the aesthetic of the covenant. They shoot energy projectiles based more often on an energy source/battery than an actual clip of ammo. Also, I love the colors. Halo has always been colorful. I remember people always throwing it in with the rest of the grey/brown shooters and that always irked me. The fact that Yahtzee acknowledged Halo 4 wasn't like Battlefield or CoD is one of those things that will keep me watching ZP. In Halo and Halo 2 on legendary you'd be taking cover behind a wall being shot at by...

Plasma pistol (green)
Plasma rifle (blue)
Needler (purple/pink)
Plasma grenade (blue)
Brute Plasma rifle (red)

The fact that all those ^^ are a neon colors makes it practically a Pink Floyd light show.

I've always thought that the human semi-auto guns like the BR and new one have always had their aim a little screwy. Like I'd use them to get headshots on the knights and I'd kill them, but sometimes I'd swear to myself I didn't hit them in head for the kill shot but they went down anyway. I dunno