Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Best served with a side order of Heroic or Legendary

[Vulgar Monkey]

alleralleraller?

I can see that wearing thin quickly.

[Guest]

Halo 2 campaign was ace you fools. Yes it had some dodgy enemies and some C&P levels. But then so did Halo:CE

Halo2 also had Delta Halo and those underwater tunnel levels which were ace. Plus the fact you got to team up with Hunters to kick Brute ass. That was amazing.

Jackal snipers were annoying but if you took your time and moved slowly, caused no major issues.

plus, gravity hammer !

Halo3 was even more ace.

[mushashi]

Halo: CE's conceit of making you go up and back down again for story reasons was a brilliant way to reuse levels, Halo 2 was all over the place by comparison (some very good bits and some not very good filler), and Halo 3 was some sort of grab-bag greatest hits, down to the bigger/better/more end level homage. At least Bungie kept on iterating and improving on the multiplayer side, as that was where I spent most of the total playtime for those games, with the exception of the original.

I tried playing the Reach demo, and then realised why I only ever played the campaign modes of these games in co-op. Something Bungie have recognised with their new Halo replacement.

[CarloOos]

There must be some anti-rose-tinting going on here, I definitely don't remember it being actively bad. Worst of the bunch, sure, but it still played like Halo and had some decent levels.

[mushashi]

What about the end? you can't tell me that wasn't actively bad, a crappy boss fight which was no fun. How do the games post 3 handle the end bit now? regurgitate CE or something else?

[CarloOos]

Even the ending wasn't that bad, civil war breaking out on the citadel was great fun (and fairly visually spectacular, iirc) and prior to the boss fight was the banshee section where you escort the scarab, which was grandiose for the time as well.

[CarloOos]

The graphics were definitely worse, that constant horrendous texture pop-in makes early Unreal 3 games look slick by comparison.

I'm not saying Halo 2 is some sort of overlooked gem, just that it's not outright garbage.

[K]

It's the seventh-best Halo game, which is still pretty good going I reckon.

[ZOK]

We should compare what they could do on the XBox to what they could do on the 360? angel, give it a rest.

[Pob]

Halo 2 is an awesome game with a bunch of crap levels and enemy types.

[Harsin]

What about the end? you can't tell me that wasn't actively bad, a crappy boss fight which was no fun. How do the games post 3 handle the end bit now? regurgitate CE or something else?

From memory.

Halo 3 - Halo CE ending homage

ODST - Banshee level

Reach - last stand against infinitely spawning enemies

Halo 4 - QTE

[Guest]

From memory.

Halo 3 - Halo CE ending homage

ODST - Banshee level

Reach - last stand against infinitely spawning enemies

Halo 4 - QTE

ODST's was the highway sequence, which had Banshee's yeah, followed by the showdown against loads of enemies dropping in from Phantoms. It was a great finale.

[Harsin]

Ah of course, all I could remember was that bit with the Banshees and the Scarab, I'd completely forgot the highway and stand-off at the Zoo.

[MW_Jimmy]

All Halos should end with the Warthog ride, and a jump into a warp hole so the writers can make up some rubbish for every game without having to worry about continuity and stuff. Yeah.

[macosx]

I'm going to replay ODST thanks to you assholes.

dont bother

[Mr Do 71]

I'm going to replay ODST thanks to you assholes.

I did recently, and still love it.

[SweatyTravolta]

ODST has the best music

[Benny]

I'm going to replay ODST thanks to you assholes.

Or you could go out and get laid. I mean, you're good at that, after all, chlamydia notwithstanding. Do you really need more humourless, green cyborgs in your life?

[KriessG]

Played Halo 4 in coop a few days ago, in two sittings. Really didn't do anything for me. Went into Anniversary edition Halo after, so much better.

[Nick R]

Jackal snipers were annoying but if you took your time and moved slowly, caused no major issues.

Really? I had huge problems with the section from 12:45 in this video. I'd clear out all the snipers on the high platforms, I'd move along the ledge a bit, making sure there were none hiding around the corners... and then one would respawn behind one of the pillars I wasn't looking at. It was a matter of figuring out which exactly positions triggered their respawning, and it was not fun.

That player makes it look easy. Of course I don't think I had as many well-armed marines alive alongside me as he does...

[K]

Has Angel deleted his posts from this thread?

[ZOK]

That great video with the tank has made him realise what rubbish he was talking. Love that bit!

[Guest]

I know what the ladies like.

[Nick R]

So this has been confirmed now.

Here's what Gamespot says about it:

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/e3-2014-why-the-master-chief-collection-puts-other-greatest-hits-compilations-to-shame/1100-6420217/

While you could load up Combat Evolved and play that through to completion before moving on to Halo 2, you can also queue up a setlist of missions from all four games. So you can play through every single Warthog mission in succession--or all the Flood missions if you're a masochist--without having to jump back out to a main menu. But you can also create your own continuous, cross-game setlists. That's because all these missions are unlocked from the start--343 is assuming you've played all this stuff before--and the overall game works in such a way that each of these older engines is loaded simultaneously under the hood to make it all flow smoothly.

(A quick note about campaign co-op: Like Combat Evolved Anniversary, online co-op has been applied to Halo 2. But all four games are sticking with their original player counts. So that means Combat Evolved and Halo 2 support two player co-op as they originally did, while Halo 3 and Halo 4 allow for up to four players total.)

Now let's talk about online multiplayer. Yes, it's there--even for Combat Evolved, which never featured network support in its original Xbox iteration. That may come as a surprise considering that the reasoning 343 used for not including multiplayer in Combat Evolved Anniversary was that it wouldn't feel the same going from offline to online. Instead, it shipped that remaster with access to Halo: Reach multiplayer. So what has changed?

In short: dedicated servers. All four games feature multiplayer running on dedicated servers. So now, according to 343, the multiplayer for Combat Evolved--and the other three games--won't have to rely on the peer-to-peer networking that the Xbox 360 used, thus providing an experience that better mimics Halo CE's offline immediacy.

Maybe that's the real reason; maybe it's not. Whatever the case may be, it's just cool to see online multiplayer returning for those earlier games--all of which run in their original engines, exploitable glitches and all. So yes, according to 343, all those tricks and exploits (think EXP boosting) you discovered in earlier games are still there, because the developers wanted to preserve the original character of these games--like a snapshot in time from before the dawn of patching and title updates. Except, you know, with all the downloadable maps included.

But what's really neat is that, like in the campaign, you can choose to play in multiplayer hoppers that shuffle up each game on the go. So in the pre-match voting screen where players cast a vote for one of several potential map-and-mode combinations, you might be choosing a match on Halo 2's Ascension, CE's Hang 'Em High, or Valhalla from Halo 3. And just like that, when the votes are decided, you'll be whisked over to that game's original multiplayer engine.

[Mr Do 71]

[sofasurfer]

1080p and at 60 frames per second

[angel]

Halo 2 multi looked drop dead gorgeous.

[mr_woo]

Jeff Gerstmann said that before E3 when he saw them running the collection they had mouse/kb controls and prompts etc and that when they moved the controller stick it changed to controller prompts. They wouldn't do that if they had no interest in releasing on PC so maybe next year for a release. I certainly don't see it being before xmas anyway if so.

[MW_Jimmy]

So you CAN steal the flag on Beaver Creek from the outside of the base!

[Michael J Glocks]

Maybe that's the real reason; maybe it's not. Whatever the case may be, it's just cool to see online multiplayer returning for those earlier games--all of which run in their original engines, exploitable glitches and all. So yes, according to 343, all those tricks and exploits (think EXP boosting) you discovered in earlier games are still there, because the developers wanted to preserve the original character of these games--like a snapshot in time from before the dawn of patching and title updates...

I hope they leave the dummy glitch in Halo 2 for a few months, before they patch it out again.