Recently there have been some interesting challenges on Halo:Reach.
First, what are challenges? They're officially listed goals to reach in the game, that change on a regular basis. Currently, the system works with 4 daily challenges and 1 weekly challenge at any one time.
Okay so back to the challenges I wanted to talk about - at the end of January there was one called Winter Contingency: LASO. LASO stands for Legendary All Skulls On, which is unofficially considered "Mythic" difficulty. With all the skulls in place, it gets pretty nasty. Double enemy health, Enemies always dodge, Enemies go nuts with fastball grenades, your shields only recharge from melee, deaths set you back to the last checkpoint in multiplayer, and set you back to the beginning of the game in single player, etc. So as you can imagine, it made for a very difficult game. I played it through with Daywokker as a duo, and you can see the stats here:
Winter Contingency: LASO170 minutes! Almost 3 hours.
Hour 1: get through the whole game to the last room. At the beginning, curse at the blind skull for not just making the HUD disappear, but also making your arm holding the gun disappear too. Stick masking tape to our televisions to mark the point where gunfire strikes.
Hour 2: figure out how to get past the Elite swordsman in the last room. Usually, for sword Elites, you break their shields with a supercharged plasma bolt and follow-up with a headshot. However, due to the skulls, one supercharged plasma bolt is not enough to take down the shield. Instead you have to whittle the shield down with regular plasma shots and then get that headshot (or possibly 2?) in. Anyways, it was too hard for us to do in the limited space in the last room. What we ended up doing was we got the sword elite's attention, ran up and hide behind Jorge, the Noble 5 npc. The elite shifts attention to Jorge, and you can assassinate the elite from behind.
Hour 3: figure out how to get past the 2 Concussion Rifle Elites after the sword elite! These guys were absolutely evil. Their area-effect blasting and grenades kept shredding us. In the end, it took some luck separating them from each other, and we pulled an in-close pincer move on each, preventing them from getting off too many concussion shots. I would circle to the right, spamming plasma shots, and Daywokker would circle to the left with sword strikes. It took a few tries and a few friendly fire incidents for us to figure out who was going where, but we got them in the end. Just as a side note, as long as the two concussion elites are alive, you can't hit the switch to end the level, it's not active.
Here is the ingame file share for the successful part of the last room.
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SuccessHere is us (me) screwing up so bad that I stuck a plasma grenade on Daywokker, oops!
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FailOffice of Naval Intelligence ONI: LASOLast week, they had another LASO challenge - the next map, ONI. Day and I set aside a Friday night and wondered if we could finish the game in about 2 hours, given than it took us 3 hours to do the first one. Boy were we wrong - it took us 4 hours to do this one. What can I say, we were terrible. At least we persevered and finished!
One note about this LASO - it's actually a LASOEB - Legendary All Skulls On Except Blind. Or possibly a LAASO - Legendary Almost All Skulls On. Whatever you want to call it, Bungie must have caved in to some sort of whinging about the challenge being too tough with the Blind skull on.
This is where we had trouble on ONI:
The very beginning! Holy smokes this firefight was tough! With hardly any ammo to start, we kept getting blasted to pieces by the multiple Elite Heroes and Jackals. We tried all sorts of methods to run past the mess, from the right to minimize the distance, from the left to circle around, but it was all pretty much in vain since the enemy firepower was just too overwhelming. The one time we DID get through, the gate wouldn't open! We had to kill everything first. Eventually we found a sniper rifle on the upper left walkway with about 4 shots in it, that actually helped immensely, Day could take out the jackals that would dart in and out around the bend. The Elites we managed to kill by having whoever wasn't being targeted, sprint up behind and assassinate. The last two were really tough, I had to sneak by and do 2 assassinations REAL quick while Kat and Day held their attention.
Once past there, it took a couple of tries to nail the Wraiths with the TAG device (They can really move fast when they know they're being targeted!)
Once here, we got a hold of the Warthog with the minigun, and it was pretty smooth sailing until you have to activate the anti-aircraft gun. The phantom in the air seemed to respawn, so we just took out its cannon so it'd stop shooting at us. The enemies on the ground were not too bad until the dang Covenant Rangers showed up with with concussion guns. (Again with these concussion guns!) We ended up getting out of the Warthog for that part, and did the decoy-assassinate routine on them.
Post-activation, we got to ride a gauss hog back to the ONI base. We bounced the gauss hog over the concrete partition with a grenade and laid waste to everything in the way up to and including the 2 hunters. Past that, there were a few tricky parts with Covenant Elite Heroes, but nothing we couldn't get past with a couple tries. Generally, the tactic was to distract with one player while the other does an assassinate or melee-from-behind. There's an especially nasty Elite General with a Fuel Rod Gun near the end of the map, but he is easily distracted if someone stands in the meeting room with the glass wall across from him.
The invisible ranger at the end isn't too bad, 2 people concentrating firepower on him knocks him out easily enough. And the phantom is easily taken out by a series of targeted rockets, taking you to the end of the level.
But really, that first part of ONI was hard. Very Hard.
I should get some files up later when I review the game. The grenade push for the hog and the 2-quick-assassinations ought to be interesting.
Upsen.
