HALO GAME ,HALO - COMBATEVOLVED

HALO GAME ,HALO - COMBATEVOLVED
Posted:2002-04-13 By Master Chief Number of View:20431
HALO GAME ,HALO - COMBATEVOLVED By :Master Chief Posted:2002-04-13 xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source Halo: Combat Evolved     For the last week or so, I’ve been wandering through beautiful, lush fields, capped by the soft glow of a shimmering ocean, exploring spooky, darkly-lit hallways and large, cavernous rooms lit only by the glow of distant holograms, and fighting my way through iridescent spaceship hallways covered in textures brimming with detail and depth. I’ve driven a futuristic, machine gun-mounted all terrain vehicle across rocky landscapes and into a sunset which shares the horizon with a band of land that sweeps up into the night sky. I’ve listened to a rich and multi-layered soundtrack full of lush, deep sound, and I’ve dealt with an artificial intelligence-driven alien race so crafty, so cunning, so, well, intelligent, that I’ve literally jumped out of my seat, astonished by my opponents’ reactions.   I’ve been playing a copy of, in my opinion, the most advanced, the best produced, the most amazing first-person shooter to have ever graced my Mac’s screen. That first person shooter is, you guessed it, Bungie Studio’s Halo: Combat Evolved.   Now, as a cynical game reviewer, I don’t ever shower such praise on a title unmerited, and I certainly don’t take my job lightly. Ask any of my friends, and you’ll see that it takes a lot to impress me. This title, quite frankly, swept me off my feet, even after having played through a couple levels of the console version. I know, I know, I’m about to get flamed by all the bitter, jealous, self-centered Mac gamers out there who still hold a grudge against Bungie for a move they were forced to make a few years ago. To be honest, I used to be one of those people. However, after experiencing the fruits of their labour, I’m happy they got the financial backing required to pour the huge amount of resources rquired to produce a game of this caliber. Here’s why.     Gameplay As expected, the single player portion of Halo is a straightforward port of the Xbox version. However, the game does not feel like a re-hashed, two-year old title, due to the tremendous resources that were poured into the game by its original developers.   Like Bungie’s earlier award-winning titles, the game is original, rich in detail, and features a marvelous backstory. As previously detailed in IMG’s Halo Preview, players are thrown in the shoes of the Master Chief, a cyborg warrior who’s woken from cryogenic sleep in order to help save a marine war ship from invasion by a colony of alien invaders near an artificial ring planet called Halo. As the story unfolds, it turns out that the alien menace, a collective of alien races calling themselves the Covenant, have declared a holy war on the human race, and have come to the mysterious planet to seek an ancient alien weapon to use in their deadly advance across the galaxy. Of course, it’s up to the Master Chief, assisted by Cortana, the ship’s artificial intelligence, and backed by wave upon wave of brave (but ultimately doomed) human Marine soldiers to bring an end to the Covenant menace. As players make their way through the game’s fifteen-or-so hours of gameplay, they get more deeply immersed into the storyline, which becomes increasingly compelling with every plot twist and revealed detail. If this isn’t great moviemaking material, I don’t know what is. Luckily for us, the game’s compelling storyline only serves as the backbone to a fully matured and developed game.   As a cyborg, the Master Chief is not invincible, but is endowed with several attributes that make him a more efficient field agent than his human counterparts. For one thing, he’s familiar with the use of alien weapons, which he can pick up and use when his regular arsenal of armaments runs out. This skill comes in handy quite often during gameplay, as players can only carry two weapons at a time, on top of a limited inventory of alien plasma grenades and man-made frag grenades.   The weapons featured in the game, both human and alien, are original, ingenious, and evenly balanced. Not only do they pack a punch against the right opponents, but when the ammo runs out, players can use them in melee mode to bludgeon the opposing forces into submission. My favorite of the bunch are the Covenant’s Needler, a porcupine-shaped hand weapon that fires heat-seeking purple glass shards at opponents; on top of the immediate pain incurred on contact, the weapon dishes out a wallop of damage as the shards explode in a puff of purple smoke and the sound of tinkling crystal. Honourable mention goes to the plasma grenades, little greenish-blue sticky grenades which, much like satchel charges in the Myth series, set off a chain reaction of explosions with other plasma grenades in the blast vicinity.   While the Chief’s health is as fragile as a regular human’s, he benefits from a protective shield that can regenerate itself after several seconds if not under fire. If players get hit with their shields depleted, however, they lose their health quickly. As a result, Halo’s gameplay is more strategic than careless – new players soon learn to duck, shield themselves with obstacles, and make the best use of the weapons at their disposal.   Aiming the weaponry is done through the game’s minimal HUD, displaying the player’s health stats, weapon and ammo supply, distance to objective, and a small circular motion tracker, behaving much like overhead radar, that reports on the movement of both your friends and your dangerous alien enemies.   On their part, the alien faction intent on your destruction features a small cast of deadly characters. At the bottom of the ladder are the Grunts, short, turtle-shaped aliens who work in groups. The Grunts are fairly weak and apt to run away cowardly when injured, but are proficient in the use of plasma-based weapons and stationary guns. Next rung up are the sly Jackals, or “lizards with shields”, whose strong energy shields make them hard to beat with projectile weapons. The Elites, who come in several varieties, are the real brutes of the bunch; strong, tall and ruthless, they’re protected by a replenishing energy shield similar to our protagonist’s, and tend to throw their weight around and charge at players in a last-ditch attempt at survival. The Hunters are the real bruisers of the group – big and slow, they make up for their speed in resilience, and take an awful lot of firepower to neutralize.   The game’s characters are superbly detailed, command a real presence, and feature lots of depth. Every single character, from the non-playable characters to the principles, are endowed with distinctive characteristics, voices, and behaviors that match their size, strength, and affiliation. To boot, each character boasts an impressively large collection of animations and sound bites to round out those personalities. For example, the Grunts, short and stout, waddle around comically, while their cowardly retreating animation makes them look like fleeing orangutans. Each character in Halo boasts dozens of unique animations and poses, and transition between each animation smoothly. A huge number of sound clips complete each personality – the Grunts, like all the characters in the game, are endowed with a vast library of dialogue, and are responsible for some of the many in-game references to the Marathon series (“He’s Everywhere!” “Don’t Shoot!”).     The real treat in interacting with these characters, however, goes way beyond their polish, and rests on their intelligence. Halo boasts one of the most advanced AIs I’ve seen in a game. Sure, like in most modern games, the enemies dodge, weave, and roll when under fire, and even retreat when things start looking rough. What surprised me was how the characters interacted with each other while in battle. In one of the early planet side battles, players find themselves in a large field, littered with geographic details, near some alien structures, with wave after wave of alien hordes descending upon the area. Taking position behind some large boulders, I got embroiled in an intense firefight, taking brief rests to replenish my shields. Within seconds, I was killed from behind by two of the aliens from that squad who had taken the long way around when I got distracted. The co-operation between the game’s AI-controlled characters is almost uncanny, both on the offense and defense. Marine troops band together and cover new ground tactically, jump on your Warthog to cover you with protective fire, and Covenant forces are organized enough to have even baited me into a unscripted ambush.   Another vaunted gameplay element are the vehicles. At several points in the single player campaign, players can hop onto any of the vehicles available in the game. The Warthog, the Marine’s staple vehicle, is a three man ATV built upon a heavy-duty suspension, with a machine gun mounted on the back. Players can pick which position they take – driver, passenger, or gunner – to either maneuver the vehicle over the terrain, or provide firepower against Covenant troops. All of the vehicles in the game feature an extremely fun, bouncy, suspension-heavy physics engine, complete with monster-truck style jumps, skids, and obstacle hopping. Movement is controlled by the camera – swing your mouse to the left, and the vehicle’s back end follows suit. The combination is exhilarating - in many maps, I found it way more fun to run over the alien opponents, Carmaggeddon-style, than to shoot them. The game’s level design is nice, but, overall, not outstanding. There is a decent variety of maps, from verdant fields to snowy meadows, that transition smoothly from vast outdoor worlds to small, dark, claustrophobic indoor locations. While the outdoor maps are gorgeous and complement the game’s AI, the indoor maps feel cramped, and aren’t particularly pretty to look at, due to repetitious geometric details and textures. On the bright side, however, the game’s maps load interactively, a la Dungeon Siege, so you never end up waiting for your computer to load the next section of a map (Star Trek game franchises take note). The only time I encountered the game’s load screen was at the very beginning of a level, where loading only took two or three seconds.   Another blow against Halo is its game saving features. Halo charts player’s progress through a series of checkpoints, which advance when an objective has been filled, or some new ground is crossed in the game. The game’s saving structure allows players to save specific checkpoints to disk so they can be recalled later. When a player dies, the options available are to continue from the last checkpoint or restart the level. Problem is, however, that due to the fact that the levels load interactively, it isn’t always obvious when an objective has been reached and the game gets saved. Also, since the game only saves one checkpoint, it’s impossible for players to back up two or three checkpoints earlier unless you specifically stop every few minutes and save your game.     Graphics Halo’s graphics are top-notch. The outdoor environments are particularly pretty to look at, thanks to Westlake Interactive’s solid work of bringing pixel and vertex shaders in the game – a first in Mac history. Texture maps have a real depth to them, shadow falloff and density behave like they do in real life, and shiny objects actually feel like they reflect ambient light rather than simply mirror it.   The visual effects in the game are spectacular, and tell of an impressive attention to detail. Explosions feature realistic lighting effects and glow. Bright objects bloom in distant fog. The really nice touches are the small details that don’t immediately catch your eye – how the ocean glimmers in the distance, how your bullets spark when you fire at a solid object, or how, when you fire a Needler, the shards of glass will explode in a little lens flare and a wispy dark puff of smoke that quickly dissipates.     Unfortunately, the game does have graphical misgivings. While the textures were all up-res’ed for modern graphics cards, polygon counts weren’t, and feature a slightly blocky feel that dates the game. And while you’d expect two-year-old software to play relatively well on a new computer, frame rates on my Dual 2.0 GHz G5, equipped with a Radeon 9800 Pro, courtesy of ATI, were surprisingly low. Playing at resolutions higher than 1024x768, with both vertex and pixel shading enabled and all the effects turned up to max, caused significant slowdowns in frame rate. While the game’s minimum system requirements call for an 800 Mhz Mac with a powerful graphics card, a 1 Ghz is recommended, which puts the game out of reach of a lot of players I know.   The game’s biggest disappointment, however, is its lack of support for full scene anti-aliasing. While there’s an option to set FSAA in the opening screen, turning that feature on will screw up the graphics and slow the frame rate down to a slug’s pace. MacSoft claims that the problem is due to a bug in ATI’s drivers, and will need to be addressed with both updated ATI drivers and a patch from MacSoft at a later date. The FSAA issue is a real bummer – as you can tell by the screenshots accompanying this review, the incredible work put into the textures and shaders are overshadowed by the blocky edges on all the objects on screen.     Sound On the other hand, the game’s sound is magnificent. The game’s sound design and music composition were both executed by Marty O’Donnel, who also designed and composed the audio for Myth I and II, and Oni. The result is a rich and deep audio track that matches the attention to detail in the graphics department.   Halo features a vast and exciting score, filled with life and tension. It was orchestrated with a heavy emphasis on strings, percussion, and orchestral singing, and is as effective in setting the mood in this game as Oni’s electronic score. The game’s voice actors were all well cast, and a great amount of work was put into the multitudinous lines of dialogue. As mentioned earlier, the Covenant’s dialogue is also particularly effective; the unintelligible aural expressions and emotions coming from the more advanced alien races are as expressive as the English dialogue of the Grunts.   The sound work in Halo is arguably the most impressive effort of any game I’ve encountered. If you’re curious about the huge effort that went into the sound design for Halo, Marty has written an in-depth post-mortem of his work in this game, which can be found here . Value While the game’s single-player gameplay, graphics, and sound were almost completely unchanged in the Mac/PC port, Gearbox Software completely re-designed the multiplayer aspects of Halo to be more internet friendly. Gone is the co-operative multiplayer campaign; in its place are the standard three mode of online play – Slayer (deathmatch), King (of the hill), each with their own team variety, and Capture the Flag. In order to sweeten the deal, additional resources were also thrown into the multiplayer game. Online play now features access to all four of the vehicles seen in the single player game, plus two additional weapons – a Marine flamethrower and a Covenant fuel rod gun. Access to multiplayer games is granted through an in-game browser, which uses the Gamespy network to find, host, and play multiplayer games.   Given the game’s physics engine, variety of weapons, and use of vehicles, multiplayer is extremely fun. Each of the vehicles are well-balanced and even each other out – the lightweight Banshees carry little firepower but are extremely maneuverable while the Scorpions are slow-moving, but pack a wallop. The vehicles also leave their drivers fairly vulnerable to attack – one good throw hit with a sticky plasma bomb from a pedestrian could easily overturn a tank. As a result of the equipment being balanced out and the vehicles being so enjoyable to maneuver, gameplay is light, fun, and extremely competitive. Gamers will rarely, if ever, be at a disadvantage because they missed out nabbing the heavy artillery. The fine-tuned multiplayer game is way more fun than other multiplayers, such as America’s Army, and, quite frankly, manages to capture the same jubilant mood as the original Unreal Tournament. Thanks to the extensive use of vehicles, Mac users can finally enjoy Battlefield 1942-style gameplay!   If online play isn’t your bag, Halo’s single player mode offers four levels of difficulty for users to work their way through, and, even then, the game’s AI is so robust that players will never encounter exactly the same situation twice. Halo’s famed AI, however, is not available during online play, which is a disappointment.       Conclusion Following in the tradition of well-produced, stylish, innovative and fun game releases, Bungie Studio’s Halo is a landmark first person shooter. Despite being several years old and showing its age in a couple places, the game is still incredibly fresh, and is a complete joy to play. Halo raises the bar on artificial intelligence, physics engines, graphical prowess and sound design, to a level that will probably not be reached by upcoming games for several years to come. While the single player game will keep players fascinated and challenged for hours on end, the multiplayer side brings a fresh new feel to the world of Mac online first person shooters.   Kudos to the programming brain trust over at Westlake Interactive for pouring their hearts and souls into this title. Not only is the port rock-solid, but their work on bringing pixel and vertex shading, as well as the proprietary Windows APIs used for the user interface and networking code, was monumental.   And, before our readers start sending the inevitable torrent of angry emails flooding my way, I urge any and all bitter and ungrateful gamers who still carry their grudge against Bungie after all these years, to stop for one second, put your emotions aside for a moment, and take a fresh, unbiased look at this game. Underneath the blue and white Microsoft logo you’ll find a game that was the heart and soul of the dedicated, talented, and extremely hard-working Bungie Studios team whose games you’ve enjoyed and relished for years. And for that reason alone, Halo is worth buying.   ros В·  Amazing gameplay and great attention to detail В·  Revolutionary graphics, sound design, and AI В·  Most compelling single player game in a long time, extremely fun multiplayer Cons В·  System requirements very high В·  FSAA not working correctly В·  Interior levels repetitive В·  No co-operative mode in multiplayer   xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source we would be happy to answer for your question . if you have suggestion or comment regarding this review our support would be glad to help just join our forum and ask u will get the best answer to discuss check our forum section :-) RATE THIS REVIEW 1 2 3 4 5    / 5   View Stat

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