Halo ODST Kills Unicorns
I’m a semi hardcore gamer these days and I definitely enjoy hitting up a few rounds of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and even the odd game of Halo every so often. Although Halo more so for the fact that everyone and his dog seems to play it these days and it’s increasingly hard to find anyone who’s willing to play anything else online, which is a huge disappointment giving how many awesome games there are out there even the aforementioned Call of Duty seems to get much less notice, or at least in my group of mates who play games, anyway!
Having said that…
I felt it necessary to only in the last few months, head out and grab myself a copy of Halo 3 simply to have something to mingle with mates online with. Of course, with that Bungie then makes it compulsary for you to purchase more multiplayer maps in order to play particular servers. Cheers Bungie! Ok, no worries I didn’t mind that SO much considering I managed to score a copy from a Hong Kong seller on eBay for $2.95 plus postage. Awesome deal. But… hang on. Yep new Halo game coming out now, better get onto that too.
Sweet, so let’s head out and grab myself a copy of Halo 3: ODST, simply because, you guessed it, there was such a hype already and.. well.. in order to play a few casual games online with my mates I’m pretty well required to have what ever games they’re into. It seems Halo takes the cake every time these days.
Turns out, something I wasn’t aware of before purchasing Halo 3, the only real multiplayer component of ODST was a second disc which is just Halo 3‘s multiplayer. Not only that, but it comes pre-packed with every multiplayer map pack that I had bought extra (The Heroic Map Pack, The Legendary Map Pack, Cold Storage, The Mythic Map Pack) plus an additional three maps, Heretic, Longshore, and Citadel. Fool was I to not realise this beforehand.
Luckily, I managed to score (once again from another Hong Kong seller on eBay) ODST for $34.95 plus postage. Another awesome win. So maybe it kind of balanced itself out with the money spent.
Whether it was worth it
I’m gonna say “Yeahhh.. kinda.” Giving the price I managed to get it for, if I hadn’t picked up Halo 3 it would be a definite “Hell yeah!”. To give the rundown, the first cinematic in the game did not impress me what so ever. The character models seemed stupidly rushed and same too with the dialogue. Not only did the characters faces look like a half eaten meat pie with dated animations, but it sounded as though I was listening to the voice actors straight from the studio. Where was the atmosphere, Bungie? Boy, was it a relief when the character’s slapped their visors on.
The game redeemed itself with me when I found myself thrown into the cock pit of an orbital drop pod streamlining for New Mombasa showing me just how cool it COULD be. Kudos, Bungie on this front, you did exceptionally well here. However a piece of me died inside once again when I jumped into the level and noticied a distinct lack of environmental sound and well… sound in general. To me, it felt as though I was playing a test version of the game that hadn’t had its audio polished off fully.
So campaign was a bit of a let down, feeling as though it was just a repolish of Halo 3 with the same set of fun being repeated over and over again.
Winning multiplayer disc
I’m gonna say yes. I actually really enjoy the new maps after jumping in with a mate to give them a test run last night. Not only visually stunning along with brilliant level design, I could just be imagining this but I have a feeling the multiplayer disc actually runs in native 1080p resolution. I definitely noticed the picture seemed alot more defined, crisp and generally prettier than the Halo 3 disc. Hey, I could be wrong but ODST seems to run in 1080p so I can’t see why they wouldn’t bump the multiplayer disc up the same way to give players more of a reason to jump on the ODST bandwagon. Either way I noticed somethin’ sexy about it that I was definitely pleased with!