Be Excellent To Each Other

..mainly consists of wandering a maze like city scape in the dark while smooth jazz plays atmospherically. Quite good so far, if a lot easier than 3.

Is it out?

Is the guy grunting every fucking time he gets shot as annoying as it was it the trailer thing?

Upgrading my opinion on this to : Bloody Brilliant. From being underwhelmed and disappointed with the underlit city at first, I'm now really looking forward to getting back in to it. Stealthy avoidance of enemies is brilliant fun. Plus the Bladerunner/Ghost in the Shell ness of the city atmos is devine.

Comes on two discs, strangely. One for campaggen and one for multiplayer shenanigans.

Grunting? Haven't noticed that until you're really quite badly hurt. It's the only indicator you get for your health really, as there's no shield HUD or nowt.

I have no desire to get this game, despite enjoying 3 and it almost resembling my idea about what they should do next. (Though its possibly due to the fact that ODST seems to be far too po-faced... if I'm playing cannon-fodder, I want black comedy, damnit!)

It's packed with gentle comedy, man! It's not po-faced at all.

Yeah, strangely I have I no desire to get this either, despite loving all the Halo games thus far.

If Dimrill tells me to buy this, I will buy it.

It's top if my list of games to get, but I'd rather spend £25 on going to the meet on Friday.

Ha, ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha. Sorry, I mean yay, you won't regret that decision. No sirree. Not at all.



See you on Friday!

This too. Which is weird. I spent almost as much time on Halo 2 as I have on CoD4.

I just think the multiplayer menu system on Halo 3 fucked me off to much.

Plus I only ever ended up playing Team SWAT on Halo 2/3, as I enjoyed it way more than any other game mode. And then I seem to recall them removing it.

Just finished the campaggen on Normal. It's about the same length as 3'ses. Veh good.

I'm also very pleased I hadn't bought any of the map packs for Halo 3, as the second disc to ODST includes them all.

*grunts*

Did it last just 6 hours?

I had to cancel my pre-order for this and Forza and MW2 because I don't have time to play anything ever again Probably still pick it up this week and never play it, though.

Oh yeah Dimmers - what happens when you put the Multiplayer disk in? Does it come up as if you're playing Halo 3? Achievements wise, I mean. Also, is it true you can't install the MP disk to the hard drive? (Apparently people installing Halo 3 to hard drives makes it perform much worse, slowing the loading down for everyone in MP games, so instead of fixing the problem, they've just made this disk non-installable).

Dunno, I'll check.

Annoying that the achievement page for it on xbox.com is blank. It means that none of my trackers will pick up the 600 points I've got out of it yet.

I will pick this up at some point when I'm not on holiday and don't have Forza 3, FO3:GOTY and MW2 to play through when I get back. Probably next year, then.

Oh, yeah... Dimmers, you do know that Microsoft said it was going to ban anyone caught playing ODST before street date... which is, erm, tomorrow... right?

Well that's 12000 people that they'll have to ban then, according to Bungie.

How do you have it, Dimmers?

Also, Pundy, they said they are only going after "illegitimate" copies: http://twitter.com/Stepto/status/3591340634

Clarity on the ODST thing. We will not be banning legitimate customers from Xbox LIVE who play early.

— Stephen Toulouse (@Stepto) August 28, 2009

. No idea how they tell the difference.

The Hut shipped it out mid-week last week. Arrived Saturday morning.

In other news: no, you can't install the MP disc to HD.

Apparently it's all copies but they aren't banning people from Live just resetting their gamerscore, it's already happened to a few people on this forum here

Har har.

Shit-the-bed DimDims! You've over 75k Cybergroatz now.

Oh, and there's a Horde like mode called Firefight included with ODST too.

I did wonder why this wasn't in Asda earlier. It's not out yet. And yet Dimrill, being Dimrill, has ALREADY finished it and no doubt got 110% of the cheevos too.

I'm missing the legendary mode, the firefight point scorages and two of the vidmaster achievements.

There's lots and lots we could do with the Halo 3 DLC acvievos too, but it would require a team of 5 or 6 complete gamerscore sluts.

Also: Perks, that lady in your avatar looks like you with a ginger wig on.

Soon he'll be getting 100% on games that haven't been written yet.

Hmmm, I wonder if they'll put out a demo (YEAH RIGHT!) because this might CoDifiy this enough for me to like. Especially as I prefer to shoot aliens that thinly veiled Iraqis.

Do the aliens still take a billion bullets to take down?

Not as many billion bullets, no. I enjoy that in this one it's all about avoiding fights. Not only due to the fact you're a fragile little grunt instead of a hulking great Spartan, but also due to the limited ammo to be found around the city that forms the backbone of the story.

Those veils are not sufficiently thick to comply with our fucked up interpretation of the Koran!

Quickly, we must deploy the Marines to THE MIDDLE EAST, there is unrest in the capital of THE MIDDLE EAST.

Ooh! And the little pistol you're given as a secondary weapon to start with does awesome one shot one kill headshots.

Is it a return to the beastage that was the original Halo (or 'Halo CE' as people seem to call it) pistol? That burst heads like a 14 year old looking in his mirror on class photo day.

These replies have made me giggle and want the game. Woo!

And being a halo game, so many will be sold I'll hopefully be able to pick it up for ~£15 relatively soon. I'm guessing summer 2010.

I played Halo 1 about once. So I dunno.

I got it for twennysix on a pre-order from The Hut. Dunno how much the shops would sell it for.

OOh, thats a quite reasonable, as long as you want the multiplayer stuff, but 1) I can't use the multiplayer menus (it's SO confusing) and 2) I really don't like it.

Sounds like an great 1 player/Co-op game.

I played multiplayer for a few months when I first got my console back in Sept 2007. Haven't played it since apart from the bezzie nights we used to do.

I'm a complete gamerscore slut planning on buying this.

So that's three of us with Perks. Who is a whore.

Aye, when I get round to buying this.

Hokay, got this... some thoughts

Mixed feelings...

Good: The action setpieces are awesome, as everyone knew they'd be.
Seems a lot more atmospheric this time round.


A bit odd: The fact that you don't seem to fight alongside your own troops that much seems a bit strange.
The 'rookie' sections are nice and atmospheric, but it feels at odds with the series.. Like someone made Die Hard 5, and it was a police procedural featuring John McClane writing tickets. Also a bit boring.
I don't really feel that much weaker than the Master Chief.
Having to find health packs to get my health back up... fine, but they seem to be everywhere, making it a little redundant.
Everything seems to have been upscaled to make you feel less like an 8 foot tall cyborg, which means that some of the pick-ups seem comically large... plasma grenades for example.
The new submachine gun is crap, and the pistol feels like a pop-gun.
Every character feels exactly the same. It would have been nice for them to have had different specialities.

Yeah, its a good game, but I'm having a little trouble feeling it...

Agree with all of these things. Furthermore, I'm at the first encounter with a big square full of all the different massive Covenant types, jackals, etc, playing as Mal Reynolds on the way to rescue Six, and I've given up already for all the same frustrating reasons. Very few FPS games leave me feeling utterly spack-handed but this Halo 3 always has. I'm finding it VERY FRUSTRATING INDEED. On normal. Jackals - by the time you've lined them up, they've let off another volley, but you can't see them in 720p on a 20" display through HDMI until they fire half the time, as they are fully accurate when 2 pixels big. I'm now quite bored of all the weapon types so at least the new shit SMG etc are there to provide originality, if not fun. Much of the time to clear areas such as this you are popping out from behind generic cover #7 to unload not-fun-but-plentiful weapon #3 into bored-of-this-now catchphrase little bastard who takes too long to die. Over and over. I can do exactly this on Halo 3 only without the arse of being shot in the back 2 in-game feet from the health packs. And it costs about a tenner as well.

Grr.

Will press on I'm sure, and probably find loads of lovable things about it. I WANT to enjoy being an ODST, it's a cool premise. I've played through all the other Halos too, so clearly shall with this. It is VERY MUCH more of the same though so far and as such not worth 30 bob.

/edit and the conceit of all your comrades falling moments after engaging the enemy - that's old now, Bungie. Very old.

Ah, right, now I get it, you just run through the levels dodging everything to get to your next checkpoint. That's fine then.

Does it stand for Old Data, Similar Toss?

It certainly makes you appreciate the Master Chief's augmentation and Mjolnir armour.

I'm playing on heroic and just got to that big stack of covenant Govmint Yard mentions then at the end of it come after you. As a Spartan they were scary enough - as a weedy normal human being it's fucking terrifying.

So far it's a nice change of pace from the normal Halo games but it's fucking me off somewhat that the weapons seem to take longer to put anything down just because I'm not a Spartan.

Just completed Uplift reserve. MUCH better game once the black-on-black of the early city parts stop choking my fun.