Frag’tastic
Rocket launchers, and trip mines, and rag-doll physics, oh my.
The Halo 3 beta for Crackdown owners (like me) got patched to working and went live sometime after 7pm Pacific. Not sure when exactly, I was cleaning up around the house and found the announcement when I got back to the computer. Popped in the Crackdown disc, watched it patch, and then downloaded the almost 1gb beta in a about fifteen minutes time.
I have to say, I only played Halo 2 multi-player splitscreen so I didn’t know quite what to expect once I logged in and found some a match. But damn…. Wow. I suddenly feel old and like my reflexes have dulled. Been years since I played a really fast, really twitchy, really brutal and explosively fun shooter.
There has been a lot of people angrily ranting about how the game doesn’t look good, or how it’s graphics don’t look ‘next gen’ (whatever that is supposed to mean) and all I have to say to those people right now is that they are idiots. The graphics are beautiful. I have never, ever, seen water rendered so realistically. You can see it ripple and move through the creek bed in irregular patterns like if wind was actually blowing across it. Splashes when bullets rip into the water look realistic, the water jumps up like it really should (go find a pond, get a big rock, heave it into it from a distance and watch the splash back up when the rock hits it to see what I mean) and watching your body float for a moment before sinking when someones come up and shot you in the back of the head is a nice effect.
The audio is great too. The sounds of fights in the distance realistically sound quieter and might even properly echo (it seems that way on High Ground, will have to pay more attention next time) in the tight narrow cannons and sound more muffled on the snowy map. Some of the weapon sounds are a little annoying, but I can’t imagine that I’d ever find the sound of automatic weapons fire to be soothing.
I’ve only played a dozen matches so far, mostly Team Skirmish matches for 1 Flag CTF, One Bomb, and Territories. I have to say, I really find the objective based rounds like those far more interesting and fun the Team Slayer is.
Little disappointed at being only able to carry 2 of each type of grenade, it doesn’t feel like enough ‘boom’ to me. Especially the frag grenades which you pretty much have to dead-on nail someone with two of to kill them anyways.
Loving the medals you can earn during the mission too, kind of cool to look at them all after a match is over and see what the other people were doing too.
Haven’t played much with the saved movies feature yet. Haven’t really had a match that I did well enough in that I wanted to save it for posterity. I have had some good matches mind you, especially in One Bomb, but nothing spectacular so far.
Still getting used to the controls, I keep wanting to use the LB button instead of the LT button to throw grenades, and I still haven’t figured out exactly how far a piece of equipment is going to move when I throw it down. Had some trip mines end up further away then I wanted and had a grav lift end up not going far enough. Just going to take more practice I suppose.
But over all, very insane, very crazy, very hyperactive fun.