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 | Let's Play Halo pt 7 — Keyes and The Maw | |
| Posted By: VikingBoyBilly | Date: 6/10/15 4:04 p.m. |
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Under New Management Cortana, amusingly, forgets to rotate the Z axis of our body when we teleport into the TaR to the other side of the ring. We hear captain Keyes order us to get out and leave him for dead, but we're having none of that. We find a big hole in the floor into a pool of coolant in the desert, and Cortana annoys us to find another way around, but the flood have us blocked off! If you stand and fight, Cortana will change her mind and annoy you to jump in the coolant, but you can run past the flood to find an amazing amount of nothing to be explored. There's a medkit on the other side of the hole that makes it look like you can jump to it. Can you? I don't know, but it's a mean thing to put there. I dislike that we're outright told the glowing goop is coolant, it takes away the mystery. We fight through some flood in the desert and make it to the gravity beam to go back to the beginning of Into the Belly of the Beast. Keyes, again, orders us to leave. Cortana somehow knows he's in the control room and his life signs are fading, so we have to rush up to the third floor. I'm disappointed that the TaR and (spoilers) the PoA both crashed right side up. It would have been crazy and interesting if we had to run through this place upside down. We find Captain Keyes, and he's a big blob of yuck. The MC punches through Keyes's face, grabs the control gland and inserts it inside his own helmet somehow. We meet Silver Elites, which I assume are their strongest form, and steal a banshee to get out of there (the flood are doing a good job of blowing up the TaR for us, apparently) ...And The Horse You Rode In On We arrive in one of the escape pod chambers, and this place is a burnt up mess. If we stand around for too long, some sentinels (the monitor's flying drone thingies) will fly in and fry us. This is our first clue that the monitor is on the ship, and the cutscene we get when we try to blow it up with the control gland confirms it when he stops down the countdown. He's in engineering, stealing all of human history like the S'pht were doing in Tau Ceti, and we have to go down there and blast some vent cores to blow it up manually. The cool thing about this cutscene is the MC has some agency here in the decision. If this were Marathon, all of this would be Durandal's idea and the SO is just a chess piece to do his bidding. When we get to engineering, cortana informs us to go get a SPNKR from an armory and use the release valves to open those vent cores. Maybe I don't remember the cutscene right, but it looks like the monitor was taking history from the release valves. Okay. Well, there's other computer panel looking things here, so I'm probably mistaken, but why are these two things in the same room? If we go to the armory, another door will open and a cloaked flood will creep out while scary music plays. They'll just keep coming, so we can't stay in there forever. 343 Guilty Spark is, of course, immune to shotgun shells, but he'll be gone after the ring is destroyed anyway, right? We frog blast the vent cores and have to find an elevator while Cortana contacts Foe Hammer to escape! Hmm... not sure what this subtitle is hinting at. MC and Cortana aren't convicts, and neither are any of the other established characters, are they? This is an amazing way to end a game without doing the final boss thing. I didn't know the PoA was so big! It's like these hallways were specifically designed to speedrun warthogs through, with all the ramps and curves. Really, can you imagine what it's like to walk through all this? Well, you can, but we're in a time crunch here. Foe Hammer gets shot down by banshees, so we have to find another shuttle out of here. We make it to another ship in time to get off the ring and watch a cool cinematic of it falling apart behind us, and this is such a depressing ending. The MC and Cortana are the only ones left alive, and the MC delivers a "it's just the beginning" for sequel bait (what do you expect to happen next, MC, look for the covenant homeworld?) and after we watch the credits roll we see a short cinematic of 343 Guilty Spark chasing them to wherever it is they're going (Reach is destroyed, so... Earth?). Halo has aged remarkably well. There's a reason I didn't finish Marathon in the 90s: It was confusing, and PiD was even worse in it's cryptic design. Halo is streamlined; the differences in design choices are a double edged sword in some places, but it's popularity can be attributed to this and it's pick-up-and-play accessibility. (remember having to use the numpad to move in M1?) It would be interesting to see what Bungie would have created during the Quake generation of FPS games, but they got side tracked with a real time strategy game and a cyber punk anime tomb raider, and I'm okay with that. Artists should branch out into different genres, and most companies that make an fps game dig themselves into a rut making only fps games. It just stinks that Halo 3 wasn't ported to PCs, and from what I read on the net, the Halo 2 port botched the visuals, which is bizarre to me because a PC should, if anything, preserve the graphics perfectly, even improve them if the porters are arsed to make hi res art. It's just one of the many reasons that Microsoft is a terrible company. As to all the fanboys who think SO and MC are the same person, the two universes can't be related. The only ways I can think of to connect them is if Halo is actually 2552 years after the fall of the pfhor and humankind reset to a new calendar system, or it's an extreme alternate timeline caused by Infinity warping reality. One lingering question: Why are they called the Covenant? What's their secret agreement?
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