First Impressions: Halo PC

[WarLocke]

I've always wanted to play Halo (or is it HALO?), but have never had the chance due to a lack of an Xbox on my part. Now however, with the release of a PC port, I can, and when I saw the box on a shelf I just couldn't resist.

First, a caveat: it's been made a big deal of that Halo PC runs badly even on high-end systems. The quoted minimum system requirements are a 900mhz PIII, GeForce2+, 128mb RAM, and 1.2gig HD space (from memory, I don't have the box here). With my setup (1ghz AMD, GeForce 2 MX 400, 256mb RAM), with every option turned off (shadows, particles, object modelling to the minimum, etc) I can get what 'feels' like a pretty consistent 28-30fps -- while inside. As soon as I get to the outdoor environments, I lose another 3-4fps. I don't find it that suprising, since there's just so much gorgeous landscape to render and turning down object modelling doesn't seem to effect it.

I will say though, that just with particles at low visuals (especially plasma grenade blasts -- enemies don't gib, they go flying in a parabolic arc!) were very, very purdy.

The game starts off with a bang - a human warship, the Pillar of Autumn comes out of warpspace in an unknown system. The onboard AI, Cortana, had to make a blind jump because the Autumn was under attack by an alien race called the 'Covenant', with which humanity is apparently at war. Unfortunately, Covenant ships are faster than humans', and they're waiting for the Autumn when it returns to normal space.

This is where you come in. The captain begins evacuation procedures, and the mysterious, power-armored 'Master Chief' is ordered taken out of cryogenic storage to help repel the Covenant boarders. You get a short tutorial masked as techs checking out your (cybernetic, I presume) systems. Then you're thrown (weaponless) into a full-blown invasion, which reminds me of nothing more than the first scenes in Star Wars.

It's at this point that Halo pounds home: It may not be as pretty as newer games, and it may run slow sometimes, but nowhere else have I seen so much immersion! You may turn a corner and run smack into a marine/Covenant shootout, with NPCs ducking and dodging, taking cover behind wreckage, and insulting each other (the marines in particular have some inventive ones - I like "Get back up so I can school you again!"). After the Master Chief turns the tide of battle, the surviving marines will follow and cover you. It really does feel like you're 'playing a movie' - something like Pearl Harbor meets Aliens.

Other games do as well or better with atmosphere (Deus Ex comes to mind) but I haven't seen any handle PC/NPC interaction this well.

A little bit after you land on Halo itself, you have the opportunity to drive a Warthog, which is like a futuristic jeep/hummer hybrid. You can also carry marine passengers, one manning a heavy gun in the 'bed' and another riding shotgun. Needless to say, this is extremely fun. You can even park the Warthog in a overwatch position and hop out to take on the Covenant yourself, and your marines will provide cover fire for you.

I haven't gotten much further than that yet, so I guess now would be a good time to sum up: Halo's strongest virtue is perhaps the fact that while you're playing it you feel more as if you're engaged in a story/movie than playing an FPS. :blink:

[LiquidDamage]

The best thing about Halo on the XBox was the cooperative play. Running over aliens in a wart hog while your friend gunned down the ones you missed was fantastic. In single player, you can't even use the heavy gun unless the hog is stationary.

My roommates and I were so looking forward to Halo on the PC, just to finally have a good cooperative FPS without having to play split screen on a TV with Xbox-controllers.

[dudearonymus_32]

I first played Halo on th Xbox as well, and i loved it :D . I played co-op with my friend and we got pretty far.

On one level, your character will approach the edge of a huge drop, and kick a rock of the edge, after the movie ends stay still for a while and you can here the rock hit the bottom :lol:

[WarLocke]

Okay, I trolled the Bungie boards and found a way to slightly improve performance. Apparently, Halo doesn't take advantage of anti-aliasing or anisoptic filtering, but if you have a card capable of doing those (which is what? Everything since the late Voodoos?) they still do the computations and waste GPU processing. Solution: Disable them at the card level (Display/Settings/NVidia tab for me, I assume similarly for all NVidia cards). I can now run Halo with particle effects (oh purdy plasma grenade and pistol swirlies!) and still usually get a decent fps.

On one level, your character will approach the edge of a huge drop, and kick a rock of the edge, after the movie ends stay still for a while and you can here the rock hit the bottom

I just saw that. :blink: I didn't hear the rock hitting bottom, though. Dunno if I waited long enough or not (also, sometimes the sound seems to fade in and out, so that might have been why). That was a biiig hole...

Oh man, there are just so many little things that are so cool. Some random stuff:

- sneaking up on a sleeping (Sleeping? In a combat zone?) Grunt and killing it with a whack to the noggin is cool.

- sticking a plasma grenade to one of those energy-shield cowards and watching it run around wildly until it goes off is cool.

- tossing a grenade into a room and having the resulting flying grunt stopped by the door closing in its face is very cool.

- just about anything marines do. I saw one shooting a dead Elite and yelling "You like that? Huh!? Want more?" :ph34r:

- Running over aliens wih a Warthog is plain sweet.

I like how the human/Covenant weapons are differentiated. It seems pretty obvious that the plasma pistol/rifle is 'better' than the assault rifle, but it's... just... so... cool. The br-r-ratt! sound of it firing is just perfect, and slamming home a new clip after unloading one into an Elite is way too cathartic. B)

And also, I forgot to mention originally, Halo wins gobs of bonus points for having a ringworld. Ringworld represent!

[Zarathustra]

I saw that you already mentioned Deus Ex. If you haven't checked these others out yet, do so. :D

Thief/Thief II : A revolution in the FPS genre. The graphics are a bit dated, but the gameplay and immersion are amazing. I especially like eavesdropping on two rival sets of guards hurling insults from their respective rooftops. Every NPC has some sort of conversation, mumbling, etc. going on. They've constructed a wonderful world.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein : This one leans more towards the action, but it's one of the few games in recent times that's managed to creep me out with the ambience (the one before that being the original Quake, largely due to Reznor's work with the background and sound effects.

[Mithrandir]

Some of the most fun I have ever had in gaming has been 18 person Halo games with friends. It's been a couple months since we've had a pre-arranged 4 X-Box setup, but I think that it won't take much prodding to get everyone to buy a copy of Halo for the PC so we can start playing online :)

Wow, such good memories... I still remember an 8v8 CTF (15-caps) on Blood Gulch game we had that ended up lasting just over 3 hours (Blue: 15/Red:14... and one of the Red guys was just outside the base with our flag and was about to score as well). I was just "on" that night: finished with over 200 kills, 7 flags, ~40 deaths, and at one point I had a quintiple Running Riot :ph34r:

Everyone was exhausted by the end and we pretty much called it a night after that, of course, but we still occasionally talk about that crazy, crazy game :rolleyes:

[WarLocke]

Performance update: I was turned onto a command-line option (-use11) that forces Halo to use older pixel shaders (1.1 instead of the default 2.0) which really improved my performance. Up until I met the Flood I was running smooth as silk.

Speaking of the Flood, here's a short story of how I met them (with a little help from my library of emotes):

I was walking through this base, see, and I found an abandoned marine combat helmet (among other things); the Master-Chief pulls out its (convenient) little vidcam and watches the marine's last moments (I'm leaving out specifics to try not to spoil anything, here). At this point, I'm thinking... ?

Then, of course, I get to met them in person. Despite having seen footage of them already, I wasn't prepared for the Flood (pretty much literally, too). I nearly wet myself - !

So I'm trapped in this smallish room, with these... things pouring in from at least 3 entrances, every one of em wanting to eat my head. It was just too much...

Finally though, I figure out how to take the things out. They're god-awful numerous, but dumb as bricks. For the rest of the area I'm just 'in the zone'.

In a nutshell, Halo is just (I guess I say that alot, huh?) - heck, don't even get me started on Guilty Spark! "Why did you bring such inneffective weapons to deal wih the Flood?" indeed; the darn thing had the nerve to hum to itself while I was reliving Night of the Living Dead!


Edit: Holy crap I just finished the game. The last bit was extreme (and that's an understatement). Although, I nearly ran out of time because I suck at driving. I think I had 38 seconds left when the cutscene started. :blink:

Man, I'm gonna have to do this again (and on something harder than Easy, tho slowdowns make for an unfun handicap). I want to drive that tank again. B)

Still, I wonder where Halo gets its light from. Unlike a 'real' ringworld, it doesn't encircle a sun (which is the whole point of a ringworld, it can absorb millions of times more radiant energy than a planet - basically a bargain-bin Dyson Shere) and if it was rotating/spinning/tumbling as fast as it seemed to be on the title screen (or in the control room, actually) why weren't the stars visibly moving during gameplay?

Heh, now I know why it was such a big deal back when it was first released. B)

[MonTy]

Hail WarLocke,

Good to see you are enjoying the game! I haven’t had the time to play single player yet, but I just setup a LAN with a bunch of friends this weekend. The experience I had with Halo Capture the Flag on LAN was nothing short of pure awesomeness. We had a 3vs3 on the map Blood Gulch, which is a bit small for the map but still entirely playable. I've never experienced Halo on the Xbox, so all this Warthog riding was new to me =) It was quite something to be in a Warthog with two other friends while gunning down your three other friends. I've had a lot of enjoyable gaming experiences, and Halo CTF is definitely on the top of the list.

Another reason why I enjoyed Halo so much was that I just finished building my new system. I was able to put the resolution on 1024x768 and put all the graphic features on high. Take a look at the specs of my new toy:

Pentium 4 3.0 GHZ
Asus P4C800 Deluxe Motherboard
1 gig DDR 400 RAM
GeForce FX 5900 256 MB
SoundBlaster Audigy Platinum 2
Klipsch surround sound speakers
And other goodies that don't relate to gaming

I've been working full time with full time college, so this system was much needed =) If anyone would be interested in playing Halo CTF MP, just private message me or e-mail me at Lionel2b@yahoo.com. I can play on Saturday/Sunday any time eastern (or I'm on servers around 1 am eastern weekdays if I decide to skip some sleep).

Seems you have been enjoying quite a few recent games WarLocke, with Halo and Homeworld 2. Be sure to tell us more about your gaming experiences! I may not have time to respond, but I really enjoyed your Homeworld 2 post.

[WarLocke]

You need to play some singleplayer. For serious.

Nothing gets the adrenalin pumping like storming a Covenant battlecruiser with a squad of marines, darting through the enemy's own territory, and desperately trying to cover your marines' backs while they cover yours. And feeling a twinge everytime you hear "Ahh! It burns!" or panicking when you hear "Incoming!" or "Grenade!"

I especially like leaving the troops to hold their ground and flanking the Covenant forces, then dropping a grenade in their midst and going in like a madman. Never fails to get the Grunts gibbering. Hearing "He's everywhere!" in those high-pitched voices is just so gratifying. B)

I haven't really been a fan of squad-based shooters in the past, and I haven't played any, I don't think (not Medal of Honor, Ghost Recon, etc.) but it's very well done in Halo.

And also, I don't have Homeworld 2 yet. :( Just the demo. I do lurk on the Relic fora, though.

Edit: Holy cow, with that rig Halo must look incredible! I like to think that I'm not a 'graphics whore', and I find Halo very eye-pleasing even with minimal 'candy, but to play it with all options on... Wow. :blink:

[Walkiry]

OK, my local games shop finally stocked this thing, and I can give my first impressions on it.

This game pisses me off.

No, really.

For starters, I see no reason whatsoever for it to lag at 1280x1024 in my box (without antialiasing or anything of the sorts), an Athlon XP 1900+ (1600 MHz), GeForce ti4400 and 1.5 Gb of memory. The world is not that choke-full of detail and the textures are in general pretty bland, so I say that's poor optimization.

Second: Aiming and reloading. Having to "aim" with a circle that is 1/10th of the screen and the bullet might land "anywhere in the circle, sometimes outside", and having to reload your weapon is fine for games like Splinter Cell (tangent: what a friggin' great game), but in my opinion it has no place in a fast paced first person shooter.

Third: I'm tired of throwing grenades when I want to zoom in with the sniper rifle. In every game right click zooms with the sniper rifle. I can define the right click to be the zoom but that'd render it useless with the other weapons.

Did I say other weapons? I can carry only two anyway.

Fourth: Having to drive the vehicles with the mouse. It's great that you can, it sucks that you cannot just use the keys like in every other driving game. It was not that hard to implement was it?

Fifth: The incredible lack of good ambient sounds. I have a surround system, I like to be able to rely on my ears to know when something is happening behind me. Talking of sound, I have a 7.1 system, but the game doesn't use standard positional sound, so the rear two don't do anything.

Sixth (this is no fault of the game itself): Localized versions. I'm downloading the original english one so that I can replace all the german. Aliens speaking german, tsk tsk tsk.

Sure it has good things, like the great NPC interaction (those marines sure kick ass :lol:), and the immersion, and I can't wait to try cooperative multiplayer.

But it pisses me off. I give it a 6.5.

[WarLocke]

For starters, I see no reason whatsoever for it to lag at 1280x1024 in my box (without antialiasing or anything of the sorts), an Athlon XP 1900+ (1600 MHz), GeForce ti4400 and 1.5 Gb of memory. The world is not that choke-full of detail and the textures are in general pretty bland, so I say that's poor optimization.

True, but consider that the game was built from the ground up to run on the XBox (that is, after Microsoft bought out Bungie and scrapped the original PC-platform plans) which runs at 640x480. Also, Halo doesn't use AA/AF at all. If they're enabled in your display settings, your card will still use GPU time to do them, but they don't get used by Halo at all; they're wasted processing. Turning them off in your settings (card settings, not game) may help.

I found Halo at 640x480 looked just fine. I've even seen quotes in various places that playing at higher settings is just a waste. Heck, Idunno.

Second: Aiming and reloading. Having to "aim" with a circle that is 1/10th of the screen and the bullet might land "anywhere in the circle, sometimes outside", and having to reload your weapon is fine for games like Splinter Cell (tangent: what a friggin' great game), but in my opinion it has no place in a fast paced first person shooter.

The aiming bit really depends on what weapon you're using. Yeah, the assault rifle is pretty innacurate on full-auto (I find short 3-4 round bursts much more accurate and easier on reloading), but pick up a plasma pistol or rifle and shots go straight down the middle.

Reloading didn't seem to be a problem for me either. Just remember that this isn't Quake and you can afford to duck around a corner and spend a few seconds reloading (you'd probably need to anyway, to give your shields time to recharge).

Third: I'm tired of throwing grenades when I want to zoom in with the sniper rifle. In every game right click zooms with the sniper rifle. I can define the right click to be the zoom but that'd render it useless with the other weapons.

Did I say other weapons? I can carry only two anyway.

Okay, I'll give you that. I'm used to zooming with the RMB too. But I remapped the 'alternate weapon function' (also does a 2x zoom with pistol) to CapsLock, and got used to it after awhile.

The carry limit is cool! C'mon, how many guns can you realistically run around with? You just need to decide what you should be loading at any certain point (I tend to favor human weaponry, as Covenant plasma-tech can be gotten just about everywhere).

Fourth: Having to drive the vehicles with the mouse. It's great that you can, it sucks that you cannot just use the keys like in every other driving game. It was not that hard to implement was it?

Idunno. I'm just gonna point to the Xbox control scheme on this one. For the most part it works; the only vehicle you can drive and fire in seperate directions with is the Scorpion tank, all the others 'work' with the control scheme.

Fifth: The incredible lack of good ambient sounds. I have a surround system, I like to be able to rely on my ears to know when something is happening behind me. Talking of sound, I have a 7.1 system, but the game doesn't use standard positional sound, so the rear two don't do anything.

I thought the ambient sound was pretty good (voices around corners/through walls, footsteps, etc.) but then again my speakers aren't exactly the best, so maybe I have lower expectations or something along those lines?

Sure it has good things, like the great NPC interaction (those marines sure kick ass ), and the immersion, and I can't wait to try cooperative multiplayer.

I don't think the PC version shipped with co-op MP. :(

The marines sure do kick ass though. B)

[Drasca]

Though I was waiting for it to come directly to PC until Microsoft ate it to showcase their xbox. Hehe, Halo comes from a long line of excellent FPS games from Bungie, but they were for the Mac. Pathways into Darkness, Marathon I, II and Infinity.

Given that... I still feel amazingly cool to have done a level non-linear fashion. In the level for Master Chief to get to the Halo Control room, I ran up and onto the land bridge, rushed past everyone, distracting Elites with grenades (one jumped off to his death), and stole the banshee while denying the other parked banshee from lift-off. Then went off to FUBAR everyone else, the tanks, the ghosts, and anything on the ground, sniping from where I shouldn't be able to (I assume). Now the elites are scripted to go take the banshees as soon as they can, so I had ~5s before its too late--- I repeated that rush so many times :ph34r: Neeenja elite skills.

Whoo! I'm such a fanboy right now. What a rush doing and going where I shouldn't hehe. Covenant asks me to get up to a platform... naturally my instinct is to steal a banshee because its just cool. Sadly, I only started on normal difficulty, so this is not the hardest thing ever-- but for a first run. Wow. Stunning. I love this game for its non-linearality. The ability to be creative. Sniping hunters in the back from strange angles. Sneak--rushing the shielded ones, silent assasination not just the sleeping but the moving is a pure absolute thrill.

Ok. I need to find another halo fan and go over the various adventures. like. Now.

[WarLocke]

Sniping hunters in the back from strange angles.

Idunno if you already know this, but a little note: There's a relatively large area of the Hunter's back that's orange instead of the grey-blue of the rest of their skin. Shooting them there is an instant kill; it may take a burst from an AR due to its' innacuracy to hit the right spot, but ping it with a pistol or sniper rifle and the Hunter goes down.

As for general Halo coolness, I have to agree. I must be fairly conservative, though, because I seem to play through 'normally' - I've never tried commandeering those Banshees on the bridge, I just shot them down. Although, knocking an Elite off that bridge with a melee attack was dayum satisfying! Darn Elites, I hate them. <_<

I particularly like dropping a grenade right by the guys with the arm-mounted shields and then keeping them in place with suppression fire. Apparently blocking assault rifle rounds is a higher priority than getting the heck away from a fragmentation grenade, heh.

Oh yeah, doing a powerslide around a corner while driving a Warthog and running over 3 or 4 Covenant is also fun. :D

Have you run into the Flood yet? I really suggest you tote an AR and/or shotgun for those areas. :o

[Drasca]

Idunno if you already know this, but a little note:&nbsp; There's a relatively large area of the Hunter's back that's orange instead of the grey-blue of the rest of their skin.&nbsp; Shooting them there is an instant kill; it may take a burst from an AR due to its' innacuracy to hit the right spot, but ping it with a pistol or sniper rifle and the Hunter goes down.

I'm aware of the vulnerability in the back, as well as the orange stripe-- as told by other friends. However.. I'm too motion rather than detail oriented. I feel with my body, going with motion. Rather than looking at targets, I'm tuned to their motion. Only paying attention to the movement, not what they look like. So I've never actually bothered to see the stripe myself, I just hit that area as I'm moving. And I do enjoy pinging it in the back ;) Guess what I used to snipe those hunters with... muahahaha. I really should get used to dancing around them and pistol-whipping (melee'ing) their back though. That's generally recommended.

Hunters are annoying, but not bad ass at all. Walking battering rams. My best battles were always against Elites. Boy do they challenge me when I don't have the right weapon prepared for their encounter. Pistols and invisible (non bladed) silvers? uh uh. Not unless I got the jump on them. I need sheer volume of fire to ID their position.

Actually with Jackals in normal difficulty, they don't run away from my plasma grenades. They're oblivious to them, and tend to pop. My aim doesn't have to be good, in the vicinity. Plasma Grenade is golden to take them out--- when they're surrounded by grunts or other undesirables at range. If solo, and in medium range I do a cavalry charge and melee them. Who needs to bother taking down their shield when you can conk them on the head, dead?

My favorite combination in general is Plasma Pistol and Regular pistol. AR not as much, since I tend to melee when at close range. I do like volume of fire when doing a close-up running fight (from zealot-esque sword toting elites).. But I get my thrill from being a sneaky SOB. Sneaking around Grunts, charging Jackals (with arm-shields) and silencing them before they can call alarm (because they do patrol). It seems (I may be wrong) that there's additional damage when running and meleeing, because I can KO the jackals when charging them (and not missing). Sniping everything. It takes a full clip from the pistol to take out a Blue Elite, but it works wonders at range when they can't even see you.

I took the Warthog from the beach assault level (Getting the map to Halo Control) fully into the first entrance-- until the security door (just before the cutscene of Master Chief kicking a rock down the pit). There's "plenty" enough room to take your girl warthog down comfortably--scraping, but easy to get around in that tunnel. Getting back up was bunches of fun too, and swash hoggling through the expectant Convenant...expectant of a solo infantryman, not mechanized squad of machine gun goodness.

Marines, while fun, are cannon fodder. I wish they were smarter and knew how to work as a team but no... This isn't Operation Flashpoint or Rogue Squad or the other Tom Clancy Rainbow Six programmable A.I. Behaviour tactical squad that's absolutely deadly, pulling off the near impossible. They're only human...children's programmed bots. Bungie really could do better should they wanted to. I understand, if the Marines were great, who needs the player, the master chief? But its still disappointing.

As to how "unconventional" I was. I don't know. I guess I'm more conventional than I thought, because the banshee manuever (I read the gamefaqs Mission suggested victory after I went through it) recommends the high action banshee steal as faster, funner and easier in general. For me, it was a helluva lot of fun because the banshee steal is hinted through the computer voice with "If only I had a way to get up on the ledge..." heh heh.

[Copadope]

I don't own an Xbox, but if I did it would be for Halo and no other reason. Luckily, my roommate does have a box with Halo, and I love it. We've both played the hell out of that game, single player, coop missions, and multiplayer (system link games over the campus network. Sooo sweet!).

As for hunters, if you're out of their range and you have a sniper rifle, no problems there. If you can't snipe, I suggest charging them, then sidestep when they rush in to melee you and either shoot or club them in the back. As for sword carriers, stay back from them. I haven't found a way to dodge them, but I haven't really tried very hard either. Once you get into the harder difficulties, you'll learn to hate jackals and love plasma pistols for dealing with them. And you'll learn to hate elites even more ;).

The regular pistol is IMHO the best weapon in the game, especially for mid and long range fighting. You can take elites out with fewer shots, but you have to have good aim and keep the crosshair on their heads. In fact, every gun works better if you land head shots. Of course that only applies if your enemy has a distinguishable head :P.

I dare you to try the single player missions on Legendary :P.

[MonTy]

...but Legendary is no problem to me. I'm very big into first person shooters, and have been known online as someone with deadly aim. I played Quake 3 very competitively--was in a lot of known clans. I also agree that the pistol is one of the best weapons in the game; I use it all the time.

As the saying goes, too much of a good thing can be bad. I'm completely burnt out from playing Halo. Couldn't find any clans that interested me, and public games are messy. But if any Lurkers would be willing to play some, I'd be happy to re-install Halo and play some on the weekends.

Since a demo came out of the game, if anyone doesn't have the game I would be happy to install the demo and frag it up =)

[NuurAbSaal]

Guess what, I'm still here (and where's 1.10?!) :)

A couple of points about Halo on Legendary...

...but Legendary is no problem to me.

hmm...there are dozens of situations in Halo where "deadly aim" doesn't mean a thing 'cause you are faced with a large group of Covenant who will take you down in less than a second. Two Betrayals comes to mind. Even if you are one of the infamous Rail Gun Godz, there are fights in Halo you can't win without luck and/or (even more important than luck :) ) strategy.

Now don't get me wrong: I'm not saying you are a liar/bad player/whatever, but please don't give them pour souls a wrong impression about playing Halo on Legendary! It's comparable only to the "Total Carnage" setting of the (much missed) Marathon Series. The difference between Heroic and Legendary is easily as recognizable as the difference between Easy and Heroic (ok, ok, maybe slightly less) and if you get caught in the open by two Elites you are dead.

Ph34r the Elites, my friends...

I finished the game solo on Legendary and it took me quite some time and lot's of respawns. Maybe I suck, but I have played it constantly since it came out and still do, so I'd like to think otherwise.

A couple of odd strategies and fun things (check out Bungie's Halo site for more ->Spoilers!):

On the last bridge on Assault on the Control Room, there are a couple of fun things to do:

There's an Invisibility upgrade in the last hallway before the bridge (where the inv. Elite's are).
You can shoot the Elite running to the Banshee with the Snier rifle (no, really?!?!)
You can jump on the beam (for lack of the appropriate english word) that runs from the top of the pyramid to the bottom of the valley, saving some time and missing out on some fun.
Explore the pit where the beam from the pyramid connects with the ground.
If you acquire a banshee and want to continue to use it, but don't want to take a shortcut to the top of the pyramid, just land on the bridge, knock the Banshee down to the valley and continue through the door. Once you emerge again into the valley, you're banshee will still be there (and Cortana wants you to take a ghost, ha!).

This is getting a little long, just two more "unconventional" things:

Wraiths (Covenant tanks) can be a pain. But they don't spawn active, instead an Elite appears next to it and hops in, he's visible for about one second. Just enough time to snipe him. Try it with the first wraith in Two Betrayals, it's activated as soon as you either hit the snow at the bottom of the pyramid or advance far enough along the path down.

For the next you need: a frag grenade, one rocket launcher and a twisted sense of humor.

Look straight down.
Drop grenade.
Jump.
At highest point, fire rocket launcher.
Enjoy the view :lol:

I wish I already had Halo 2...::sigh::

Enough (and then some) from me

Greetings
Nuur

[Walkiry]

Ph34r the Elites, my friends...

Talking about Elites, do their shields regenerate like the Chief's one?

Something about The Flood: Cheap! Imagine a long long narrow corridor, and imagine that I've come from one end, making doubly and triply sure I've cleared anything behind, in case I have to pull back. Now imagine I come out of the corridor, see a blitz of monsters, and try to pull back, just to find the corridor is CHOKE FULL OF ENEMIES.

Where the hell did they come from?? Is that the best way they can think of to make the fight harder? What happened to just closing a door behind me as I pass if they don't want me to pull back? What happened to those monsters coming from behind a door (like in some previous levels inside the Covenant ships) that I SAW and couldn't open, but kept in mind as something might come out of it? What happened to getting some kind of visual/auditive warning when something teleports? Am I supposed to go "Oh jeez, they really got me this time hahaha" when a foe explodes next to me for all my shield and half my life that appeared out of nowhere?

*Rolleyes in a non-smiling way*

The little blobs are funny, usually to make it interesting I finish the last half dozen or so with the melee attack.

Ah, and talking of big Hunters, I realized yesterday you can actually snipe them with a pistol headshot. Seems like the vulnerable area is pretty small though, but I managed to nail one in just two shots.

[pakman]

I never actually played the game itself, I always played the PvP version with my friends. I love to TK by throwing plasma grenades on them, hilarious. But I do play for real.....sometime :P. I don't like the console controls, though, I would much rather play it on the PC, maybe I'll have to check it out after I get Max Payne 2.

[WarLocke]

Talking about Elites, do their shields regenerate like the Chief's one?

Yes, yes they do. <_<

That's why Elites piss me off so much. They almost never travel alone, so you can't really concentrate on them until you've taken out their Grunt/Jackal squadmates, and then as soon as you get a few good hits in, they duck for cover. If you don't keep the pressure on, they'll pop out in a few seconds with recharged shields, and all the ammo you spent on them was wasted.

Sometimes one'll duck behind some obstacle, and my vision will just red out and I'll charge through a firezone to hop onto the cover and unload a clip into its' ugly reptilian face. :angry:

Something about The Flood: Cheap! Imagine a long long narrow corridor, and imagine that I've come from one end, making doubly and triply sure I've cleared anything behind, in case I have to pull back. Now imagine I come out of the corridor, see a blitz of monsters, and try to pull back, just to find the corridor is CHOKE FULL OF ENEMIES.

While that is kinda cheap, I rationalized it as the Flood assimilating the Covenant and Marines you left behind. After all, the Master-Chief is Space Rambo, but even he can't kill every Covenant on Halo. There are (were?) undoubtably some that you bypassed and/or plain didn't encounter.