(no subject)
halo 2
Believe it or not, Bungie first introduced Halo to the bespectacled masses way back in 1999. At the time, it was a first/third-person action game for the PC and Mac (you know, that cute little box your dad uses to burn CDs) boasting a plethora of unique changes to the action genre. All plans abruptly changed, however, when Bungie was acquired by Microsoft, who morphed Halo into the world’s best console first-person shooter and the number one reason to invest money in their strange green box when it launched in the fall of 2001.
Halo wasn’t the game we were expecting it to be. It was better. What a difference two years make.
So one could only wonder what insane changes might have occurred in the three long years Bungie has been working on the highly anticipated sequel, Halo 2. How exactly do you improve a game that is widely agreed to be among the best of all time? Well, it turns out you don’t do much. Halo 2 is an exceptional first-person shooter that expands on the original with a fantastic multiplayer component, great control and a few notable gameplay tweaks, and while it stumbles a bit in its single-player campaign, it’s still more than worthy of a permanent spot in your collection.
The campaign picks up right where the first Halo left off, with Master Chief enjoying a hero’s welcome back on Earth while the leader of the Covenant forces is branded a failure and sentenced to death. This dual viewpoint approach dominates the game’s storyline, bouncing back and forth between the human efforts to stop the Covenant invasion and a burgeoning civil war threatening to destroy the Covenant from within. It’s a little hard to get into the nuts and bolts of the plot without spoiling the big twists, but suffice to say, it’s your job to shoot things, drive things, and kill things in order to save the universe.
Perhaps due to the popularity of the original game, Halo 2 benefits from a much more comprehensive narrative; a few Halo novels written in the intermittent years have fleshed out the conflict, and this game revels in its newfound mythology. A great deal of the plot focuses on the aliens, which is pretty cool, but at the same time leaves you wanting to hear more from the humans. It’s a little lopsided.
It’s also very, very linear, following much the same formula as Halo. You’ll go from location to location shooting anything that makes your reticule turn red, then figuring out which door/path is open, running through it and killing more things. While it provides a nice enough mix of indoor and outdoor areas to keep things fresh, Halo 2’s campaign is still very much a scripted corridor shooter. You don’t explore, you don’t solve puzzles, you don’t do really anything aside from kill, kill, and kill, and often you’re just doing it to get to the next cut-scene. To be fair, the scripting is good and the game never feels like target practice thanks to the solid A.I., but those who found the rail crawl marginally frustrating before will find it hasn’t changed much over the years.
Some will also take issue with the fact that despite three years in the making, Halo 2 has a cliffhanger ending. We have no idea if another game is planned (though we’d bet our unborn children that it is, were that legal), when it might be out and for what system. Yet BOOM- the game leaves you hanging with plenty of unresolved conflicts and without a particularly satisfying climactic point like the Warthog ride from hell in the original. After such a long wait and such passionate fan fervor, it feels a little cheap of Microsoft and Bungie to leave ‘em out to dry.
The campaign is a little shorter than the original, clocking in at around 10 hours if played by a Halo vet on the Normal difficulty setting. Of course, opting to try it on Heroic or Legendary will extend that play time significantly as the number of enemies increases and the A.I. gets nastier.
You’ll see many familiar aliens from the original game alongside a couple new ones, most notably the apish Brutes and some hard-to-hit flying beasties. Ramping up the difficulty seems to raise their I.Q. as well, which is good to know because on Normal, the game isn’t very hard. You can also play through the full campaign cooperatively (though not online through Xbox Live), which is great fun.
Though the single-player experience is not very thrilling in its design, the fragging itself is top notch. Before Halo, console first-person shooting was regarded as awkward, difficult and ultimately ill-advised. The game not only changed that widely held opinion, but has become the unrivaled benchmark in console shooting, so much so that just about every game after it has 'borrowed' its intuitive control scheme. Lucky for us, then, that the same great gameplay is back, intact and in a few ways improved.
For one thing, you no longer have to scour the land for health packs - Halo 2 forgoes traditional health entirely by removing it from the game and simply increasing the rate at which your shields recharge. If your shields are gone, you can only take a few hits until you die, creating a more tactical experience. You’ll run into battle, watch your shields erode, and then find cover as they recharge. It creates a faster-paced game and removes the multiple stamina bar management. Health packs are so 2001.
A more heavily touted feature is dual-wielding. Most one-handed weapons can be dualed and you can mix and match to your heart’s content. Both guns can be fired independently using the two triggers, letting you deal out a prodigious amount of damage very efficiently and making previously underwhelming weapons much more intriguing. Dual Needlers, for example, unleash a devastating torrent of homing needles that can eradicate ground units handily. The flipside of dualing, however, is that you lose the ability to toss plasma or frag grenades, which as we all know are perhaps the most useful weapons in the game. Dualing has its purpose but is not overpowered, just a smart, fun addition.
New weapons are here alongside most of the old ones. The SMG isn’t very effective alone, but can be deadly when dualed. Your trusty Battle rifle is back with a new burst fire rate and groovy mini-zoom. Since you spend a lot of time dealing with the Covenant, you’ll enjoy their cool plasma tech in the form of a solid Carbine rifle and a very effective sniper rifle, not to mention a few other nasty surprises. The best weapon in the game, though, is the Plasma sword, which you’ll remember from the original game when the Elites used it to gut you over and over again. Well, now you can gut them right back. You can swing the sword as a melee weapon or lock on to an enemy and perform a usually critical charging uppercut from a good three meters away, which is the most effective attack in the game. It’s great fun and adds a whole new ninja dynamic to the game.
But even a giant blade is no match for a giant tank. Most vehicles from the original are back, including two variations of the world-famous Warthog (one with a machine gun turret and one with a pulse gun turret) and the big nasty itself, the Scorpion tank. The Covenant ships are more exciting, though. The whip-quick Ghost (now equipped with a boost) is perhaps the best in the game thanks to its maneuverability and accuracy, while the graceful Banshee has a couple new evasive moves. The vehicles pleasantly play a larger role in the campaign than last time and are essential to what makes this such a great series.
Not to be outdone by Grand Theft Auto, Halo 2 now lets you jack enemy vehicles by simply pressing ‘X’ as they pass by, at which point you’ll trigger an animation of you hopping on the vehicle and tossing the poor driver headfirst into the dirt. It’s actually a bit harder than it sounds, especially when dealing with a Ghost trying to mow you over at top speed, but the move is hugely satisfying and a great alternative to wasting your cache of plasma grenades trying to bring down a tank. It doesn’t play into the campaign much but is undoubtedly one of the more essential concepts for Halo 2’s awesome multi-player.
Playing the original Halo with buddies was an always exciting but somewhat difficult experience; you’d either have to cram together on the couch to play split-screen or link together a few Xboxes for a LAN party. Halo 2 does away with all that thanks to its fantastic Xbox Live support, which does as much for the game’s multiplayer experience as it does for your aching back - no need to carry your TV up to your friend’s second-floor apartment.
The breadth of options for online play is staggering. Supporting up to 16 players at once, Halo 2 features seven main game types: Slayer, Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Oddball, Juggernaut, Assault and the new Territories mode. Most of these were in the first Halo and should be instantly familiar to vets. Recalling EA’s Battlefield series, Territories is a new mode that has two teams fighting for control over certain locations of the map, while Assault is like reverse Capture the Flag as you plant a bomb in the enemy’s base.
Each of the modes comes with a built-in list of variants created by Bungie, which include Team versions and weapon-specific game types (turn Oddball into Rocketball!). Plus, players can set up customized game and tweak just about every conceivable thing to their liking. With about a dozen maps spanning the gamut from small melee style arenas to vast, open playgrounds, the combinations and permutations are deep. Unlike the original Halo, you can play any type of game on any map. Given, certain kinds of games make more sense on certain maps; you wouldn’t want to play 2 on 2 Capture the Flag on a giant map, for instance. At any rate, the choices are many and the variety impressive.
We do take issue, though, with the continued lack of offline bot support. Since online success depends heavily on learning the maps, the ability to play maps offline with bots seems like a no-brainer, yet again we’re shut out. Curses.
But otherwise, this is a complete online package. Xbox Live has seen more than a few upgrades since its inception, and Halo 2 takes advantage of the service’s stability by producing a well thought-out set of features. Finding games of the appropriate skill level is easy thanks to handy player rankings and a smart Optimatch system. If your team or group of friends wants to stick together while checking out different game servers, you actually can move everyone through the system together by forming a temporary party. Full clan support is here as well for those wishing to go semi-pro.
They’ve thought of just about everything, particularly when it comes to stat-tracking. Extensive stats are recorded after every match, including medals, hit percentages and head shots, fleshing out the experience for vets who want to see how they stacked up. Astoundingly, Bungie.net actually keeps track of every player’s performance in every matched game by tracking wins and losses. At least it works right now - we’ll see what happens when the number of players online goes from a few hundred thousand to a few million. Heck, if the host cuts out of a game, the server will automatically switch to another user so the whole game doesn’t crash. Smart, smart, smart.
When you combine the solid performance of Xbox Live (I suffered very few lag issues when testing out Halo 2) with the built-in team mechanics afforded by the use of voice, vehicles and modes, you get an unrivaled online fragfest. It might not introduce anything particularly new in terms of gameplay, but what it does, it does better than anyone else.
Not to take anything away from it, but when Halo first hit the scene, it was a revelation in graphical design partly due to the world’s unfamiliarity with the power of the Xbox. Nowadays, we expect big things from Xbox games, and Halo 2 mostly delivers the goods. The in-game action is beautiful, from the eerily realistic bump-mapped surfaces to the accurate physics and animations. Fancy lighting effects are everywhere - the game world is consistent, smooth and popping with color. Aside from one load when you start the game, it all streams in seamlessly with just a tiny hiccup when you pass through a loading area. It’s technically unsurpassed.
At times, however, the game suffers from some weird pop-up texture issues and occasional framerate slowdown, though this is usually constrained to the cut-scenes. You sit through quite a few of them over the course of the story and can’t help but notice their general lack of polish.
The sound, on the other hand, is flawless. Several rousing themes chime in from time to time to punctuate the action and lend a cinematic sense of drama to the goings-on. An enormous amount of dialogue was recorded for Halo 2, so much that you’ll rarely hear lines repeated. In multiplayer games, the voice chat volume changes depending on your proximity to others, adding more to the immersion. Tack on great Dolby 5.1 positional support, and you have every reason to upgrade your sound system.
Your experience with Halo 2 is inextricably tied to your particular wants and needs from a first-person shooter. Despite a genuinely better plot this time around, the short, linear campaign and unresolved ending will certainly aggravate those hoping for a more evolved single-player game. But make no mistake - what Halo 2 lacks in its single-player it more than makes up for in its great gameplay, gorgeous delivery and flat-out addictive multiplayer. This is as good as console fragging gets. Once again, a little slice of gaming heaven from Bungie results in an easy recommendation.
A-
+ Excellent gameplay
+ Great delivery
+ Plasma sword pwns j00
+ Huge multiplayer
+ Interesting story
- Short, overly linear campaign
- Aggravating cliff-hanger
- Not revolutionary, but REALLY good
Teaching an old jedi new mind tricks.
kotor II
During the Mandelorian Wars, there was a great schism between the Jedi. Some advocated a path of peace, arguing that the destruction caused by war would be far worse than anything the Mandelorians could possibly do on their own. Others, led by Revan, suggested that the Jedi carry light sabers for a reason, and that the Mandelorians must be stopped at any cost. You followed Revan.
However, Revan and his followers were, uh, changed by the conflict, and when they returned, the schism erupted into an outright war between the two Jedi factions. For your own reasons, you chose not to take part in any of it, instead returning to stand before the Jedi Council and accept their judgment. Branding you a traitor, the Council stripped you of your Jedi title and your connection to the Force was severed.
For years you wandered distant planets with no will or purpose while the Jedi civil war raged on. The universe, for the most part, ignored you…until now. The Sith, nearly complete in their victory, have determined that you are the last Jedi, though you are no true Jedi. Suddenly, you have become the most wanted man in the galaxy.
Where you go from there is up to you.
For those of you who have actually been living in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, is the sequel to GR’s Game of 2003 and has also already won my personal award for the Longest Game Title Ever. Aside from adding more verbiage, The Sith Lords also adds a few new features to what was already a potent game. There are new feats and new Jedi abilities, more effects to your in-party relationships, and lots of little gameplay tweaks.
Essentially, though, The Sith Lords is the same RPG as the original KOTOR, only wearing some new Jedi robes. It’s on the exact same game engine and the focus is another epic Star Wars single-player game, the gist of which I’ve already given away (Spoiler! Ha! Too late!). Many people were concerned when Bioware handed over development to Obsidian, but staffed with some old Black Isle RPG veterans, the new crew has crafted a storyline just as compelling and original as the first (and a damn sight better than those recent Star Wars movie prequels).
Progressing through much of that story involves talking to members of your own party. The interaction with your party members has gotten more complex; depending on how you treat them and how much you interact with them, you gain or lose “influence.” With enough influence, a character might follow your lead down the Dark or Light paths, even though they might not be normally inclined to. Alternately, you can piss them off too much and they might betray you. It becomes even more interesting when you consider that there’s no “winning” or “losing” in these interactions; you might want to drive a particular character away. As in KOTOR, you'll enjoy different outcomes as you partake in the game's numerous sub-plots.
The mini-games of swoop bike racing and the card game Pazaak are both back, and remain essentially unchanged with only a couple minor tweaks. The rest of the game is just chock-full of small additions, fixes and balances. For example, you can now bash open many containers, but risk damaging the contents found within (a concept that should have been in Neverwinter Nights to begin with). There are also lots of new items to craft if you have the proper skills. A great deal of thought has gone into trying to make the mostly incidental skill set from the first game more useful.
Some new feats and powers clearly strive for improving the balance between different styles of gameplay. There are several new lightsaber fighting styles to learn when you finally get to build a new saber, each one with certain small advantages and disadvantages depending on the fight. There are now six Jedi “prestige classes” (three per side) to eventually develop, each of which comes with a special Jedi power.
The thing about these changes is that they are all relatively minor. The prestige classes are merely extensions of the three Jedi categories (Guardian, Consular and Sentinel). The new feats and powers are mostly minor upgrades, such as the ability to deflect blaster bolts with your hand instead of your lightsaber, or, in return, the ability to make your blaster bolts a little harder to deflect. Don't expect any new major combat moves or abilities or a force power that lets you set your enemies aflame. You'll be playing The Sith Lords exactly the same way you played KOTOR.
Likewise, the graphics haven’t changed much. The various interstellar locations have their own unique flavors, and while a corridor is still just a corridor, some of the larger outdoor areas will have you using the first-person camera just to look around. On the other hand, the original suffered from some framerate stuttering when the action got thick, and it’s slightly worse in the sequel. With games like Fable and Halo 2 resetting the visual benchmark, the Neverwinter Nights game engine is starting to show its age.
The sound is as spectacular as ever, featuring both original and classic Star Wars orchestral music. From the buzz of a light saber to the howl of a Wookie, the effects are perfect, pulled straight from the movies and surrounding you in glorious Dolby 5.1. Perhaps the most impressive audio is found in the voice-acting, as every single entity in the game has something to say. The voice actors are a talented bunch; as well they should be, because there must be over a hundred hours of game dialogue if you actually stopped to listen to what everyone has to say.
The Sith Lords brings back everything that was great about the first KOTOR while adding a couple of minor garnishes to the already full plate. The campaign retains the magic and moral flexibility of the original, and The Sith Lords’ ability to branch the story based on your choices and your chosen compatriots gives it the same great replay value. On that note, the once-impressive engine is starting to waver and there really isn’t a great deal of new material here despite a good year and a half since the original game stormed shelves. But don’t let that stop you from spending time with The Sith Lords. It’s like having an old friend drop in - you might already know all his jokes, but damn, it’s nice to have him around again.
B+
+ Great Star Wars saga
+ Branching story
+ Moral choices
+ Good tweaks and balances
- But no new gameplay features
- Some graphical issues
Believe it or not, Bungie first introduced Halo to the bespectacled masses way back in 1999. At the time, it was a first/third-person action game for the PC and Mac (you know, that cute little box your dad uses to burn CDs) boasting a plethora of unique changes to the action genre. All plans abruptly changed, however, when Bungie was acquired by Microsoft, who morphed Halo into the world’s best console first-person shooter and the number one reason to invest money in their strange green box when it launched in the fall of 2001.
Halo wasn’t the game we were expecting it to be. It was better. What a difference two years make.
So one could only wonder what insane changes might have occurred in the three long years Bungie has been working on the highly anticipated sequel, Halo 2. How exactly do you improve a game that is widely agreed to be among the best of all time? Well, it turns out you don’t do much. Halo 2 is an exceptional first-person shooter that expands on the original with a fantastic multiplayer component, great control and a few notable gameplay tweaks, and while it stumbles a bit in its single-player campaign, it’s still more than worthy of a permanent spot in your collection.
The campaign picks up right where the first Halo left off, with Master Chief enjoying a hero’s welcome back on Earth while the leader of the Covenant forces is branded a failure and sentenced to death. This dual viewpoint approach dominates the game’s storyline, bouncing back and forth between the human efforts to stop the Covenant invasion and a burgeoning civil war threatening to destroy the Covenant from within. It’s a little hard to get into the nuts and bolts of the plot without spoiling the big twists, but suffice to say, it’s your job to shoot things, drive things, and kill things in order to save the universe.
Perhaps due to the popularity of the original game, Halo 2 benefits from a much more comprehensive narrative; a few Halo novels written in the intermittent years have fleshed out the conflict, and this game revels in its newfound mythology. A great deal of the plot focuses on the aliens, which is pretty cool, but at the same time leaves you wanting to hear more from the humans. It’s a little lopsided.
It’s also very, very linear, following much the same formula as Halo. You’ll go from location to location shooting anything that makes your reticule turn red, then figuring out which door/path is open, running through it and killing more things. While it provides a nice enough mix of indoor and outdoor areas to keep things fresh, Halo 2’s campaign is still very much a scripted corridor shooter. You don’t explore, you don’t solve puzzles, you don’t do really anything aside from kill, kill, and kill, and often you’re just doing it to get to the next cut-scene. To be fair, the scripting is good and the game never feels like target practice thanks to the solid A.I., but those who found the rail crawl marginally frustrating before will find it hasn’t changed much over the years.
Some will also take issue with the fact that despite three years in the making, Halo 2 has a cliffhanger ending. We have no idea if another game is planned (though we’d bet our unborn children that it is, were that legal), when it might be out and for what system. Yet BOOM- the game leaves you hanging with plenty of unresolved conflicts and without a particularly satisfying climactic point like the Warthog ride from hell in the original. After such a long wait and such passionate fan fervor, it feels a little cheap of Microsoft and Bungie to leave ‘em out to dry.
The campaign is a little shorter than the original, clocking in at around 10 hours if played by a Halo vet on the Normal difficulty setting. Of course, opting to try it on Heroic or Legendary will extend that play time significantly as the number of enemies increases and the A.I. gets nastier.
You’ll see many familiar aliens from the original game alongside a couple new ones, most notably the apish Brutes and some hard-to-hit flying beasties. Ramping up the difficulty seems to raise their I.Q. as well, which is good to know because on Normal, the game isn’t very hard. You can also play through the full campaign cooperatively (though not online through Xbox Live), which is great fun.
Though the single-player experience is not very thrilling in its design, the fragging itself is top notch. Before Halo, console first-person shooting was regarded as awkward, difficult and ultimately ill-advised. The game not only changed that widely held opinion, but has become the unrivaled benchmark in console shooting, so much so that just about every game after it has 'borrowed' its intuitive control scheme. Lucky for us, then, that the same great gameplay is back, intact and in a few ways improved.
For one thing, you no longer have to scour the land for health packs - Halo 2 forgoes traditional health entirely by removing it from the game and simply increasing the rate at which your shields recharge. If your shields are gone, you can only take a few hits until you die, creating a more tactical experience. You’ll run into battle, watch your shields erode, and then find cover as they recharge. It creates a faster-paced game and removes the multiple stamina bar management. Health packs are so 2001.
A more heavily touted feature is dual-wielding. Most one-handed weapons can be dualed and you can mix and match to your heart’s content. Both guns can be fired independently using the two triggers, letting you deal out a prodigious amount of damage very efficiently and making previously underwhelming weapons much more intriguing. Dual Needlers, for example, unleash a devastating torrent of homing needles that can eradicate ground units handily. The flipside of dualing, however, is that you lose the ability to toss plasma or frag grenades, which as we all know are perhaps the most useful weapons in the game. Dualing has its purpose but is not overpowered, just a smart, fun addition.
New weapons are here alongside most of the old ones. The SMG isn’t very effective alone, but can be deadly when dualed. Your trusty Battle rifle is back with a new burst fire rate and groovy mini-zoom. Since you spend a lot of time dealing with the Covenant, you’ll enjoy their cool plasma tech in the form of a solid Carbine rifle and a very effective sniper rifle, not to mention a few other nasty surprises. The best weapon in the game, though, is the Plasma sword, which you’ll remember from the original game when the Elites used it to gut you over and over again. Well, now you can gut them right back. You can swing the sword as a melee weapon or lock on to an enemy and perform a usually critical charging uppercut from a good three meters away, which is the most effective attack in the game. It’s great fun and adds a whole new ninja dynamic to the game.
But even a giant blade is no match for a giant tank. Most vehicles from the original are back, including two variations of the world-famous Warthog (one with a machine gun turret and one with a pulse gun turret) and the big nasty itself, the Scorpion tank. The Covenant ships are more exciting, though. The whip-quick Ghost (now equipped with a boost) is perhaps the best in the game thanks to its maneuverability and accuracy, while the graceful Banshee has a couple new evasive moves. The vehicles pleasantly play a larger role in the campaign than last time and are essential to what makes this such a great series.
Not to be outdone by Grand Theft Auto, Halo 2 now lets you jack enemy vehicles by simply pressing ‘X’ as they pass by, at which point you’ll trigger an animation of you hopping on the vehicle and tossing the poor driver headfirst into the dirt. It’s actually a bit harder than it sounds, especially when dealing with a Ghost trying to mow you over at top speed, but the move is hugely satisfying and a great alternative to wasting your cache of plasma grenades trying to bring down a tank. It doesn’t play into the campaign much but is undoubtedly one of the more essential concepts for Halo 2’s awesome multi-player.
Playing the original Halo with buddies was an always exciting but somewhat difficult experience; you’d either have to cram together on the couch to play split-screen or link together a few Xboxes for a LAN party. Halo 2 does away with all that thanks to its fantastic Xbox Live support, which does as much for the game’s multiplayer experience as it does for your aching back - no need to carry your TV up to your friend’s second-floor apartment.
The breadth of options for online play is staggering. Supporting up to 16 players at once, Halo 2 features seven main game types: Slayer, Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Oddball, Juggernaut, Assault and the new Territories mode. Most of these were in the first Halo and should be instantly familiar to vets. Recalling EA’s Battlefield series, Territories is a new mode that has two teams fighting for control over certain locations of the map, while Assault is like reverse Capture the Flag as you plant a bomb in the enemy’s base.
Each of the modes comes with a built-in list of variants created by Bungie, which include Team versions and weapon-specific game types (turn Oddball into Rocketball!). Plus, players can set up customized game and tweak just about every conceivable thing to their liking. With about a dozen maps spanning the gamut from small melee style arenas to vast, open playgrounds, the combinations and permutations are deep. Unlike the original Halo, you can play any type of game on any map. Given, certain kinds of games make more sense on certain maps; you wouldn’t want to play 2 on 2 Capture the Flag on a giant map, for instance. At any rate, the choices are many and the variety impressive.
We do take issue, though, with the continued lack of offline bot support. Since online success depends heavily on learning the maps, the ability to play maps offline with bots seems like a no-brainer, yet again we’re shut out. Curses.
But otherwise, this is a complete online package. Xbox Live has seen more than a few upgrades since its inception, and Halo 2 takes advantage of the service’s stability by producing a well thought-out set of features. Finding games of the appropriate skill level is easy thanks to handy player rankings and a smart Optimatch system. If your team or group of friends wants to stick together while checking out different game servers, you actually can move everyone through the system together by forming a temporary party. Full clan support is here as well for those wishing to go semi-pro.
They’ve thought of just about everything, particularly when it comes to stat-tracking. Extensive stats are recorded after every match, including medals, hit percentages and head shots, fleshing out the experience for vets who want to see how they stacked up. Astoundingly, Bungie.net actually keeps track of every player’s performance in every matched game by tracking wins and losses. At least it works right now - we’ll see what happens when the number of players online goes from a few hundred thousand to a few million. Heck, if the host cuts out of a game, the server will automatically switch to another user so the whole game doesn’t crash. Smart, smart, smart.
When you combine the solid performance of Xbox Live (I suffered very few lag issues when testing out Halo 2) with the built-in team mechanics afforded by the use of voice, vehicles and modes, you get an unrivaled online fragfest. It might not introduce anything particularly new in terms of gameplay, but what it does, it does better than anyone else.
Not to take anything away from it, but when Halo first hit the scene, it was a revelation in graphical design partly due to the world’s unfamiliarity with the power of the Xbox. Nowadays, we expect big things from Xbox games, and Halo 2 mostly delivers the goods. The in-game action is beautiful, from the eerily realistic bump-mapped surfaces to the accurate physics and animations. Fancy lighting effects are everywhere - the game world is consistent, smooth and popping with color. Aside from one load when you start the game, it all streams in seamlessly with just a tiny hiccup when you pass through a loading area. It’s technically unsurpassed.
At times, however, the game suffers from some weird pop-up texture issues and occasional framerate slowdown, though this is usually constrained to the cut-scenes. You sit through quite a few of them over the course of the story and can’t help but notice their general lack of polish.
The sound, on the other hand, is flawless. Several rousing themes chime in from time to time to punctuate the action and lend a cinematic sense of drama to the goings-on. An enormous amount of dialogue was recorded for Halo 2, so much that you’ll rarely hear lines repeated. In multiplayer games, the voice chat volume changes depending on your proximity to others, adding more to the immersion. Tack on great Dolby 5.1 positional support, and you have every reason to upgrade your sound system.
Your experience with Halo 2 is inextricably tied to your particular wants and needs from a first-person shooter. Despite a genuinely better plot this time around, the short, linear campaign and unresolved ending will certainly aggravate those hoping for a more evolved single-player game. But make no mistake - what Halo 2 lacks in its single-player it more than makes up for in its great gameplay, gorgeous delivery and flat-out addictive multiplayer. This is as good as console fragging gets. Once again, a little slice of gaming heaven from Bungie results in an easy recommendation.
A-
+ Excellent gameplay
+ Great delivery
+ Plasma sword pwns j00
+ Huge multiplayer
+ Interesting story
- Short, overly linear campaign
- Aggravating cliff-hanger
- Not revolutionary, but REALLY good
Teaching an old jedi new mind tricks.
kotor II
During the Mandelorian Wars, there was a great schism between the Jedi. Some advocated a path of peace, arguing that the destruction caused by war would be far worse than anything the Mandelorians could possibly do on their own. Others, led by Revan, suggested that the Jedi carry light sabers for a reason, and that the Mandelorians must be stopped at any cost. You followed Revan.
However, Revan and his followers were, uh, changed by the conflict, and when they returned, the schism erupted into an outright war between the two Jedi factions. For your own reasons, you chose not to take part in any of it, instead returning to stand before the Jedi Council and accept their judgment. Branding you a traitor, the Council stripped you of your Jedi title and your connection to the Force was severed.
For years you wandered distant planets with no will or purpose while the Jedi civil war raged on. The universe, for the most part, ignored you…until now. The Sith, nearly complete in their victory, have determined that you are the last Jedi, though you are no true Jedi. Suddenly, you have become the most wanted man in the galaxy.
Where you go from there is up to you.
For those of you who have actually been living in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, is the sequel to GR’s Game of 2003 and has also already won my personal award for the Longest Game Title Ever. Aside from adding more verbiage, The Sith Lords also adds a few new features to what was already a potent game. There are new feats and new Jedi abilities, more effects to your in-party relationships, and lots of little gameplay tweaks.
Essentially, though, The Sith Lords is the same RPG as the original KOTOR, only wearing some new Jedi robes. It’s on the exact same game engine and the focus is another epic Star Wars single-player game, the gist of which I’ve already given away (Spoiler! Ha! Too late!). Many people were concerned when Bioware handed over development to Obsidian, but staffed with some old Black Isle RPG veterans, the new crew has crafted a storyline just as compelling and original as the first (and a damn sight better than those recent Star Wars movie prequels).
Progressing through much of that story involves talking to members of your own party. The interaction with your party members has gotten more complex; depending on how you treat them and how much you interact with them, you gain or lose “influence.” With enough influence, a character might follow your lead down the Dark or Light paths, even though they might not be normally inclined to. Alternately, you can piss them off too much and they might betray you. It becomes even more interesting when you consider that there’s no “winning” or “losing” in these interactions; you might want to drive a particular character away. As in KOTOR, you'll enjoy different outcomes as you partake in the game's numerous sub-plots.
The mini-games of swoop bike racing and the card game Pazaak are both back, and remain essentially unchanged with only a couple minor tweaks. The rest of the game is just chock-full of small additions, fixes and balances. For example, you can now bash open many containers, but risk damaging the contents found within (a concept that should have been in Neverwinter Nights to begin with). There are also lots of new items to craft if you have the proper skills. A great deal of thought has gone into trying to make the mostly incidental skill set from the first game more useful.
Some new feats and powers clearly strive for improving the balance between different styles of gameplay. There are several new lightsaber fighting styles to learn when you finally get to build a new saber, each one with certain small advantages and disadvantages depending on the fight. There are now six Jedi “prestige classes” (three per side) to eventually develop, each of which comes with a special Jedi power.
The thing about these changes is that they are all relatively minor. The prestige classes are merely extensions of the three Jedi categories (Guardian, Consular and Sentinel). The new feats and powers are mostly minor upgrades, such as the ability to deflect blaster bolts with your hand instead of your lightsaber, or, in return, the ability to make your blaster bolts a little harder to deflect. Don't expect any new major combat moves or abilities or a force power that lets you set your enemies aflame. You'll be playing The Sith Lords exactly the same way you played KOTOR.
Likewise, the graphics haven’t changed much. The various interstellar locations have their own unique flavors, and while a corridor is still just a corridor, some of the larger outdoor areas will have you using the first-person camera just to look around. On the other hand, the original suffered from some framerate stuttering when the action got thick, and it’s slightly worse in the sequel. With games like Fable and Halo 2 resetting the visual benchmark, the Neverwinter Nights game engine is starting to show its age.
The sound is as spectacular as ever, featuring both original and classic Star Wars orchestral music. From the buzz of a light saber to the howl of a Wookie, the effects are perfect, pulled straight from the movies and surrounding you in glorious Dolby 5.1. Perhaps the most impressive audio is found in the voice-acting, as every single entity in the game has something to say. The voice actors are a talented bunch; as well they should be, because there must be over a hundred hours of game dialogue if you actually stopped to listen to what everyone has to say.
The Sith Lords brings back everything that was great about the first KOTOR while adding a couple of minor garnishes to the already full plate. The campaign retains the magic and moral flexibility of the original, and The Sith Lords’ ability to branch the story based on your choices and your chosen compatriots gives it the same great replay value. On that note, the once-impressive engine is starting to waver and there really isn’t a great deal of new material here despite a good year and a half since the original game stormed shelves. But don’t let that stop you from spending time with The Sith Lords. It’s like having an old friend drop in - you might already know all his jokes, but damn, it’s nice to have him around again.
B+
+ Great Star Wars saga
+ Branching story
+ Moral choices
+ Good tweaks and balances
- But no new gameplay features
- Some graphical issues