I just finished about 30 minutes ago and I have to say I’m a little underwhelmed. Before you think I just being whiney let me say that I LOVE the first Halo. It’s one of my favorite video games of all time and by far my favorite shooter.
Halo 2 though…The boards were too clunky and difficult to navigate. I was playing Halo 1 earlier today and there is definitely a huge difference in the level design. The boards on the first game are more “well organized”, less cluttered, and generally more “fun” feeling. The second game had a darker tone with enormous cluttered messes that were, at times, frustratingly difficult to find your way through.
I felt like the story was a little less epic as well and the ending was an absolute GROAN. Another thing that bothered me was - it was already bad enough that you had to play as a member of the covenant - but did they really have to end the game with you playing as one? We didn’t think we were anywhere near the end and boom, credits roll.
Also, what was with the 3 year hype about Halo 2 taking place on Earth? We on Earth for a total of, what, 30 minutes?
Overall it was a good game, and I might even call it great one day, but as of now I do not feel that it lived up to its predecessor.
Also, I have a question. My friend and I decided to play the entire game on his Xbox and then I was just going to copy our save onto mine with a memory card. I copied it onto the memory card from his Xbox but now I can’t figure out how to put it on mine or even load it straight from the memory card to play. Can it be that there’s no way to do this?
Try to play it on legendary and you will be thankful of all that clutter between you and the enemy. The enemy AI acts nothing like they do on easy or normal. They act like enraged PCP addicts who went through Spec. Ops training.
I haven’t used the memory cards, but I thought you could transfer them from the dashboard. Some games do not support the memory card, but I checked the back of the box and it says that it does - so there’s gotta be some way to do it.
Cisco, I completely agree. While I wasn’t the biggest fan of the first Halo, it had some truly brilliant moments, Halo 2 less so.
First, the game opened on a really sour note. The whole covenant council thing really bothered me; must these “councils” infiltrate every damn movie and game I play? Then the entire first level was virtually identical to Halo 1, with the walk-through tutorial, the enemy’s boarding the ship, etc.
Furthermore, I did not enjoy playing as the covenant, especially since I could never tell my team mates and the enemy apart. I thought some of the level designs were just as bad as Halo 1’s, and the levels in Halo 2 I did enjoy still weren’t up to par with the original’s. I found many of them to be confusing and repetitive. And What the hell happened to the Nav points? I don’t enjoy wandering around for 15 minutes trying to find where to go. Nothing in Halo 2 can top the Beach.
At least the multi-player is decent, but where’s my Sidewinder? Grrr.
Turn your Xbox on with no game in the drive and no Internet connection (you can do it with the Internet connection on, but there is less menus with it unplug and I am going for simplicity).
High light memory in the dashboard menu and press A.
You will now have a choice between hard drive and every controller (you should have only 1 controller). Select the controller with your memory unit it in it and press A.
You now have a list of every game with a save on the unit. Scroll down until Halo 2 is highlight, do not press A yet.
Scroll right until the Picture of the Master Chief is Selected now press A.
You now have a choice of copy or delete. Highlight copy and press A.
You will now have a choice of where to copy to. The hard drive should be the only choice and already highlighted (unless you have a memory unit in another controller). Press A again.
Put your Halo 2 disk in the drive and enjoy.
It is important that no game be in the drive when you do this as the Xbox will go straight to the game and not give access to the dashboard menu otherwise.
I assume you all stuck around long enough after the credits to see the stinger at the end? What was that about? I never played Halo 1, so I feel like I’m missing a little bit of the story somewhere…
You mean Audrey the giant plant aka “Gravemind”? That wasn’t in Halo 1, so your guess is as good as mine. The consensus seems to be that it’s a giant sentient Flood, it lives on one of the Halos, and it may control the rest of the Flood. Other than that, there’s not a whole lot to go on. It does say that the Flood containment and the Covenant’s Great Journey are one and the same so it’s been around long enough to see what happens when the Halos are fired.
There’s really two stories going on here. The one with the Arbitor has an ending where you stop the ring from detonating, the other is a big ol’ “To Be Continued…”
Cortana is stuck with no one to talk to but Audrey. I guess they gotta get her back somehow or another.
Well, as with every other cutscene in the entire game, the guy I played with wouldn’t shut the hell up during this part. He actually makes comments like “he follows the story” and rolls his eyes when other people are around. No, I don’t follow the story, asshole. You turn the volume down so you can talk over it every time there’s a cutscene.
Anyway - sorry about that - from what I saw, it almost looked like Cortana was up to no good.
I havn’t had the opportunity to play the game yet, but from info gleamed from I Love Bees, Smart AIs like Cortana have a lifespan of about 7 years. After that they go insane. Homicidal in some cases.
It’s not clear, but it’s implied that she was created specifically to interface with the Master Chiefs armor. If that’s the case, then she’s pretty new since the games take place in a short timespan around the year 2552. That’s the same year the armor gets rolled out.
OMG, I am so embarrassed that I know this. It’s not entirely my fault though. Someone bought me the books… and forced me to read them at gunpoint. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
My brother tipped me off to this - the countdown on I Love Bees has re-started. And given the ending of Halo 2 where Master Chief says that he’s come back to Earth to “Finish This Fight” and then it cuts to the credits… well.
I’d be willing to bet that Halo 3 will be released within six months to a year. Except I don’t have enough money to bet. So nevermind. But I still think Halo 3 is in the works. My guess - M$ figures that if millions of people will buy Halo 2 (it made $125+ million in one day), then they almost all buy Halo 3 as well.
Actually, I just searched around and found:
This link from Microsoft virtually confirms that Halo 3 was produced at the same time as Halo 2. So there won’t be a wait of several years - it’ll probably hit stores fairly soon.
I agree with you that there is another one in the works. However, the above statement was refuted by Bungie and Microsoft almost as soon as it left Ballmer’s mouth. Lying? Most likely. Covering their ass? Sure. I’m just not convinced they can drop another one on the market so soon - unless they had two teams working simultaneously. I’m used to waiting years for games, so call me skeptical. My theory is that it will come out on the XBOX 2 - which they also refuse to confirm that they are working on, but everyone knows they are. If they do come out with another one within the year and manage to keep it secret, then it will be huge. Whatever happens, I have to give a tip of the hat to Microsoft even if they are the evil empire. Not only was there unprecedented hype generated for Halo 2, it’s already building for a game that may never exist. It could backfire on them, but so far this is an amazing act of marketing. There are more speculation threads about Halo 3 on the gaming forums then posts about Halo 2. Truly bizarre.
And explain i love bees to me. I know it’s a phone game set in the Halo universe, but that’s about it. What do you mean that the count-down has restarted?
