Hold X To Consume Blog

It’s Saturday 25th September and tomorrow I move half way across the UK to my new house to start university again but before I get to packing I have time to type out a quick blog. For me this has been a week dedicated almost solely to the Halo: Reach multiplayer which is still unbelievably fun. My enjoyment of the experience continues to be fuelled by the brilliant way the gameplay of Halo flows and the way the weapons, maps, armor abilities and gametypes all seem to fit together almost perfectly, creating a game design which seems too good to be true.

While not a feature that has been that heavily focused on by the journalists I’ve found that the daily challenges have kept me glued to my seat when I’m playing the game and coming back for more when I’m not. I don’t seem to be able to call it quits until I’ve completed at last a couple of these challenges, even if I don’t think I’ll ever get the credits I need for the very highest priced items in the armory.

Another feature of the game which continues to surprise me in its effectiveness is the assassination system. We knew for a long time they were going to have some quality assassination animations and we got a taste of them in the beta but I didn’t feel like I really got to experience them in all their glory until I played the full game. Delivering a killing blow to the back of your opponents gives a real sense of visceral satisfaction, while receiving a knife to the spine yourself can be amazingly frustrating and I think it’s partly because of how long the game drags out the kill. Likewise stealing an assassination from one of your teammates is a great feeling with just a slight tinge of regret and saving one of your teammates from assassination gives a suitable feeling of triumph.

My only major disappointment with Reach has been continually running into SWAT and Team Snipers while playing Team Slayer. If you’ve been playing the Reach multiplayer this week you’ve most likely noticed it too and in a gametype where every headshot is an instant kill you end up with a twitchy, heavily accuracy-based version of Halo more akin to Call of Duty than the usual strategy-at-speed approach to combat Halo usually encourages. I know that the constant reappearance of these gametypes is partly due to the over-abundance of a certain type of player who believes picking any gametype that shows you the word ‘headshot’ on the screen every five seconds make you ‘pro’ but it’s bewildering how many people are looking to play such an un-Haloish version of Halo.

Similarly bemusing is the number of quitters in the game. It was a problem in Halo 3 but with a temporary ban from matchmaking for every time someone quits out of a game it’s amazing how many people are still willing to do so. It’s not even as if this behaviour is exclusive to any particular gametype or scenario, it seems no matter who you are and what you’re doing with other players in Reach there’s the chance at least one person is going to drop from the game, do people really prefer the temporary exclusion from multiplayer to playing a gametype or playing with people they’re not all that into for a few minutes? It’s almost as if people are testing out the quitting penalties. Another slight problem has been idlers cruising through games trying to earn free credits for no work, something I hope Bungie will have a solution for in the near future. To be fair to Bungie though they’re already on top of the SWAT problem and announced less than two weeks after the games release an update that will move SWAT into a playlist of its own. Good ol’ Bungie.

There is of course one game which got its sneak preview in the last week and I personally am very excited for- Bioshock: Infinite. The original Bioshock was fantastic but when reviews for Bioshock 2 rolled around I wasn’t impressed with what I read about it, it didn’t seem like a terrible game but it seemed to lack what the major strengths of the original Bioshock- A strong narrative and a wondrous new environment to explore. Bioshock: Infinite has the potential to give those things back to the Bioshock franchise and if the full game is half as good as the ten minutes of gameplay footage they’ve showed so far then we’re certainly in for something special.

That’s it for this week’s blog, I’d like to thank NinjaDuckie for my new profile picture as well as the amusing photoshops he’s contributed to the site this week and I’d like to thank you for reading. Good luck, have Spartan.

-Gamer_152