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Let's Play Halo:CE pt 2—Flawless Cowboy
Posted By: VikingBoyBillyDate: 5/31/15 9:19 a.m.

I found the hidden 7s. 2552. 2 + 5 = 7. 77. I should mention the Master Cheif is an exact duplicate of the vacbobs from Marathon infinity. The plasma rifle is clearly a clone of the Alien Weapon from M1. Plasma Chaingun? What was I thinking?

We open flawless cowboy with a pleasant ambient track of birds chirping in the background. This ring apparently has invisible birds just like Lh'owon has invisible loons.

Everyone else onboard died, unfortunately, and covenant dropships are on the way to check it out. In the skybox we can see the game's namesake: the world curving upwards in the horizon, over our heads, and back down in a loop. Marathon gave us a hollowed out world, and this game gives us one that's inside-out.

If you decide to wander around for a bit instead of rushing, Cortana will randomly blather about the complex ecosystem, which looks like green grass, coniferous trees, rocks, water... yeah... this place looks pretty earthy save the giant ring above our heads, but I still like it. This really reminds me of the way Unreal introduced it's alien world. The "their ships are faster than ours and they were waiting to ambush us" thing reminds me of the introduction to Marathon 2: Durandal. Hmm...

Now the difficulty is starting to feel legendary. There's a dropship behind us, banshees shooting at us from above, and scouts waiting for us up ahead. Now I know why they're called banshees; the noise they make is ghostly.

We're introduced to a weapon called the Needler, which for some odd reason only my head knows, I liken it to be like the Wraithverge from Hexen. I mean, it's the only tracking weapon we got so far.

Here we're introduced to a modern gaming concept (which was still experimental at the time, before it became a bog standard) of holding down an area while waves of enemies come at you. One of the marines said "they're everywhere!" Yay! I let them all die. Not yay. Holding the high ground is the key here.

The covenent eventually do this oddly effective strategy of landing dropships in front of you, and then sneaking around to climb up the other side. I kept dying trying to pick them all off from the front until I finally realized what they were doing.

As someone in the last entry pointed out, the red elites do, in fact, have shields. I apologize for what I said last time. I don't know what happened there.

We see a new enemy called a Jackal, which are not dogs, but bipedal bird-lizard things with shields. I don't mean overshields—they have round shields they carry around for defense. They're... not really as effective as you'd expect; they break easily.

The best thing to do seems to be to kill the groups of grunts and jackals from a distance and let the elites come to you. No matter how much I try, shooting them at a distance with the magnum just doesn't work. Needlers work, but the ammo runs out quickly. The most effective weapon on elites are plasma grenades, taking advantage of them being a big target in narrow areas or when they stupidly don't notice us when they're looking the other way.

When that's done, we get a vehicle: the warthog, brought to us by a crew called Foe Hammer. Yes, Foe Hammer. There are apparently a surprising number of human survivors. How big was the Pillar of Autumn? It felt pretty small when I was in it, but I obviously didn't see the whole thing.

We drive into an unnatural cave formation where... WOW! We have to find a button to raise a bridge! Classic game design! An actual button! Platforms!

The coveneant are sending non-encrypted transmissions of their tactics which we can easily intercept, and we drive out of this cave to hopefully meet up with our captain.

The next map is Reunion Tour. Well, we're clearly still on the same map, but that subtitle appeared on the checkpoint, so it must want us to think of this as a new map. What we went through so far was already a pretty huge map. I'd wager we're over 1024 polygons already.

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Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

Let's Play Halo:CE pt 2—Flawless CowboyVikingBoyBilly 5/31/15 9:19 a.m.
     Re: Let's Play Halo:CE pt 2—Flawless CowboyLion O Cyborg 5/31/15 11:08 a.m.
     Re: Let's Play Halo:CE pt 2—Flawless CowboyPerseusSpartacus 5/31/15 1:18 p.m.
           I love dual wielding needlers *NM*ukimalefu 5/31/15 1:57 p.m.
                 That Sounds Mighty Fun, But It's Not In Halo 1 *NM*PerseusSpartacus 5/31/15 8:05 p.m.
                       Phew, I thought I was a mono-wielding idiot *NM*VikingBoyBilly 6/1/15 1:06 a.m.
                             Still, Just Imagine the Pretty Pink Explosions... *NM*PerseusSpartacus 6/1/15 7:16 a.m.
     Re: Let's Play Halo:CE pt 2—Flawless CowboyMartin 6/1/15 4:57 p.m.
           Re: Let's Play Halo:CE pt 2—Flawless CowboyVikingBoyBilly 6/2/15 3:26 a.m.

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Pre-2004 Posts

 

 

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