I once read that save states are called the gamer's deadliest weapon.
If you ask me to play M1 on total carnage, fine. piece of cake. Now if you secretly adjusted the maps to disable every pattern buffer after one use, removed all the shield chargers and replaced them with canisters, then you've almost created something that closely resembles playing Halo on Legendary.
Have me wandering around happily in Arrival for a few minutes and then suddenly throw me into You Think Your Big Time (the vidmaster version) with no warning mid-level, and there you have it. All that's left for the icing on the cake is making the pattern buffers only activate themselves when and where they feel like it without your consent, except the not-so-intuitive method of telling it to not overwrite your last save and store a new one as the cherry on top. It cripples the gamer's deadliest weapon of saving.
I'm stuck in what I call one of the game's many choke points - a section that sticks you in an arena and makes you fight swarms of enemies flooding at you until you're done. When it's just progressing through hallways, it's fun and very doable. These parts at the end of them are nearly impossible. Last night I started playing Halo at 6 o clock, and when my throat started to feel dry from dehydration, I realized it was 11 and I spent 5 hours accomplishing almost nothing.
It doesn't feel unfair, though. There is a learning curve to it, and the futility of it is more subtle than Doom's nightmare mode. It's just at the end of this section I'm stuck on, in the rare chance I cleared the room successfully, two hunters come in and it doesn't make a checkpoint. They kill me and I have to start over. I strongly considered starting over on Heroic. I've been juggling needlers and fusion pistols because those seem to be the best weapons in the area and I was afraid of letting go of the AR. After I gave up I got the idea that dropping the AR to have both might be the solution, but that sounds insane. Just insane enough to work. That, and maybe going back to a saved checked point because the recent one may have doomed me.
Getting past this would be fine and dandy, but I have a feeling there's just more of these ridiculous sections in the rest of the game to struggle on. Do you guys think I should start over? Either way, the next write up may take a while.
