Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary and its Kinect Features

I picked up a copy of Halo:CEA and I've been playing through it in my free time.  I started with Legendary, thinking that I ought to be able to handle it.  I swear, Legendary mode is exponentially more difficult than Heroic.

I was doing all right, progressing slowly and surely, until I got to the landing bay in Truth and Reconciliation.  I could not for the life of me figure out how to finish off so many stealthed Elites in such a small area, so I had to dial the difficulty down to Heroic.  Now I've pretty much breezed through the rest of the game on Heroic.

The game is as good as I remember, and I'm even playing it at a harder level than I did the first time around. Occassionally I get lost though, since the waypoints are fewer and farther between than nowadays, and the game has the tendency to run you back and forth through the levels.  Also I'd forgotten how hard it used to be to stick a plasma grenade.  Overall I'm really enjoying the game.


The new Kinect functionality is somewhat of an irritation.  Man, I can rant on about this for a while.

You need it on so you can fill the library with data about objects and people in the game.  However the recognition quality is really low, or perhaps 8-10 feet away from the sensor is too far for proper use.  When I'm playing solo, my typical use sounds like this:

Analyze.
ANALYZE.
ANALYZE
(Analyze mode pops up)

SCAN
SCAN
ARGH

I have a Canadian accent naturally.  I'll try with an southern American accent or with a British BBClike type accent, with about equally bad results.

Maybe I should just scream "Anus!" at the kinect like these guys.


It also triggers at inopportune times when you are talking in general, such as when you are trying to play co-op.  I'll be talking to someone and suddenly a menu screen will come up and block my view, or I'll toss a grenade when I'm warning someone that there's an incoming grenade.  Isn't saying "Grenade!" sort of a military standard for an incoming grenade?  Hmm that's worth a lookup.  Wikipedia says this:

Standard U.S. military procedure includes calling frag out to indicate that a fragmentation grenade has been deployed. Yelling the word "Grenade!" is used to warn others to seek cover from an enemy grenade that has landed in the immediate vicinity.

Yeesh.  I guess it's appropriate since most of the time you all end up running away from the extra unwanted grenade you just voice-lobbed, in addition to the one you are trying to warn about.  Even asking someone how many grenades they have left will trigger one of your own.  It's funny how saying grenade will almost ALWAYS work, while the Analyze command only works one in 4 tries for me.

There really isn't anything in the game you can do better with voice than a button.

Upsen.


What they SHOULD have done is implemented a voice command button, hold it down, say your command.  that way, it shouldn't fire if you don't want it to.  Or, maybe implement some keyword to activate voice commands like "Xbox!" in the Kinect console, or "Computer!" like in Star Trek. Oh well, maybe in a future game.