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.

Halo Reach: LASO Exodus

This week's LASO is Exodus - thankfully, there are no roomfuls of Elites in this one like last time in Long Night of Solace. I've been playing Borderlands instead of Halo recently though, so I'm probably going to be wrestling with the controls a bit. (like throwing a punch when I meant to zoom in on the scope.)

I'm probably going to give this a go on Friday morning since it's a day off. I gave an open invite to the usual bunch, wonder if anyone is up for it. :D

Upsen.

Tyrant guide here...

[...] You'll be granted a nice break from Elites, and instead, you'll be fighting Brutes. While they're certainly more numerous, due to their lack of shields and field ranks, you'll find that neither the Tilt nor Thunderstorm skull has any real effect on them at all, and when it comes to super-combines with needle-based weaponry, the Minors are still just as vulnerable on Mythic as they are on Legendary.

Halo Reach: LASO Long Night of Solace Fail

I tried this LASO over the weekend with DZ and LD. It was absolutely brutal in the 3 player game. I'd looked up the appropriate Tyrant guide for how to do the Mythic run, but we were very solidly trounced by the enemy control room near the end of the map.

The first part wasn't too hard, we basically sprinted up the left beach skipping the fight, and we got a hold of a rocket launcher and the sword as the guides suggested. However, I really wish we picked up a few more missiles, we didn't bother sticking around to pick up reloads. The flight section was laughably easy as well with 3 of us who knew our way around arcade style flying games.

The first part that started getting to be a problem for us was the enemy ship boarding. We were usually able to take out the 2 elite rangers that leap out to the top to greet us. On one try, a third one actually made it up to join us too. The problem was that everything would be on high alert at the bottom by the time we went in, (thanks a lot, marine support) and I think there were about 6 or 8 rangers in total in the main area. We probably died 50 times trying various methods of getting through this sequence, cheering whenever we managed to get a checkpoint farther in. In the end, we had to do the main part of the work with the one sword I picked up - we would loop around, plasma-fire and sword the rangers that jetted up to the upper walkway we were on. I had to save the rocket for breaching the entry to the shuttle bay room, cause there was one ranger with a bunch of hero grunts supporting him.

Once inside the shuttle bay, that was a painful experience too - in the end after clearing as much as we could, it took a suicidal run from DZ for the activation switch to open the bay doors for Noble-5 to come in. Lucky that we weren't required to kill the last 2 sniper rangers, they were so hard to kill.

Getting into the control room was hard but doable. The control room is where we were absolutely stuck. In the Mythic SLASO guide, the player was doing the game solo, meaning there were a few less foes. He also seemed to be a little better off on weaponry too. For our 3 player game though, we couldn't do an assassination run, something would ALWAYS see us. One time we managed to get in far enough to assassinate 2 of the 3 elites at the far end, including the BOB, but that was a one time fluke, I think. Also seeing as it was like 2am, we were not at our best performance any more. In the end after a few different tries at assassinations and just shooting our way through, we gave up in disappointment.

The night after, I tried it solo, but I was too bummed to really persist in finishing it, so after I got to the shuttle bay, I gave up and played some Borderlands instead.

One thing about it though, is that I managed to up my assassination count from about 60 to 120. As another note, our death count was about that too - 120. >_<

Also I killed so many marines (cause they kept gumming up our strategies) that my total score was zero. :P

Service Record

Allen.

Halo Reach: LASO Tip of the Spear

I ended up doing this one solo - this was the one where you have to fight your way across a battlefield, hop into a rocket warthog, and blaze your way across the map and take out a bunch of anti air cannons + their defenses. After that, you have to take out some sort of tower's defenses and shut down an enemy shield.

Initially, E called me up to do this one on a weeknight, so I figured I'd read up on it first before I tried it, to save some time. I looked at the Tyrant guide for info (I love the guy's video-clip chatter) and found a bunch of really nice time saving tips. No obvious cheating, like the way it was in Nightfall.

However E was totally jetlagged out from a trip by the time we were supposed to start, so I did the mission myself. It took a few tries, and I got it in about 2 and a half hours.

Halo Reach: LASO Nightfall Cheapness

I completed the LASO Nightfall challenge after checking out some strategies online, to save some time. What I didn't realize was just how much time it saved - the whole run took about 10 minutes for me.

It's a really cheap and underhanded way to do it, and its definitely spoiler material, so here's your spoiler warning.

CHEAP SPOILERS AHEAD

The fast run requires you to sprint past the first guy without attracting his attention, and running/sprinting past the courtyard before it gets all full of activity. (legitimate) Stick to the right and leap to the ledge, and work your way around to the 2nd area.

Once in the 2nd area, from inside the building downstairs, you'll see a grunt across from you shooting a mounted plasma cannon at you. Take him out, and sprint along the left to the exit bend. Take out the grunt and jackal whatever way you can (or not) and get past to get to the 3rd area. (legitimate)

Now, what you do is you go to the bridge, and melee everything on it to death. This might be a little tricky, watch that the elite is facing away from you. You'll have to take him and about 4 grunts out while they are sleeping and not paying attention. Only the elite should be awake and looking around. Take out the 3 grunts on the platform above if they are giving you trouble. Or dont worry about them if they are not shooting you. (legitimate)

Hop into the forklift that is just past the bridge, and drive it to the gate. Press the left side of the forklift against the gate, and position your Spartan right at the crack where the 2 gate doors meet in the middle. When you hop out of the forklift, the animation will force you through the crack to the other side, area 4. It might take a few tries to line it up correctly. (This is the cheap part!)

Here's a link to a video of a guy doing this on youtube.

Cheap but effective exploit, a screenshot of the guy in the video

Area 4 is not active yet since the fight is still going on in area 3, so you just run/sprint through the empty area to the exit, and finish the run. Cheesy but hey, you get the 12k points in about 5-10 minutes.

Also, another bit of cheapness is - just after you die, and you're watching the player's death, you can hit start and save/quit the mission. This allows you to continue the mission as if you had not died. The save/quit/continue puts you at the last save point, much like if you didn't have the iron skull on, just takes a little time to wrap up the old game and start the continuation.

They really should fix this stuff.

Happy cheesin',
Upsen.

Halo Reach: LASO Nightfall

Doh! Daywokker's off travelling on vacation, and the Nightfall LASO is this week. Looks like we will probably not be able to do this one together.

Anyone want the satisfaction of beating Nightfall on the hardest possible setting with me?
(aka a super tough and frustrating game that is totally not worth the 12,000 point reward)

Upsen.

Halo Reach: Yes Sensei

I was thinking the Base Security set of armor looked rather cool, so I was trying to get this achievement this morning to unlock the UA/Base Security Chestplate from Halo Waypoint, but I'm not really into PvP. This achievement is for first strike in a game, so I'll probably ruin my record with a bunch of game quits if I dont get the first strike. I imagine it's a royal pain for the other player on my team, but I dont particularly care much about the PvP playlists.

I was trying in the 2 on 2 games to see if I could better the odds of getting the first strike, but apparently the 7am EST players are all really hardcore - In the span of about 7 games or so (and 7 quits) I was assassinated, sniped, and rocketed 10 seconds into a game where we all start with assault rifles. I generally acted the total noob. It only took about 20 minutes to lose 7 games. :P

Doh.

Upsen.

Halo Reach: LASO Winter Contingency and ONI

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: LASO

170 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.
- Success
Here is us (me) screwing up so bad that I stuck a plasma grenade on Daywokker, oops!
- Fail


Office of Naval Intelligence ONI: LASO

Last 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.

Halo - ODST is harder than Reach.

After I finished the Halo Reach Legendary campaign and umpteen firefights, I decided to go back and pick up Halo ODST and Halo 3 again to get some of those achievements that I'd missed the first time around, or thought were too difficult. With my new skill level, I was able to do a few things that I wasn't able to in the past, such as grenade jump for one of the skulls in Halo3, and do the entire Legendary mode in the ODST campaign.

Actually, the ODST campaign felt even tougher than the Reach campaign. The ODST trooper just doesn't feel as tough as the elite Spartans. (Makes sense I guess)

Between the two games, the control scheme had changed too. It was a bit hard to swap between them, and it kept causing me to lob grenades when I didn't want to. Why don't they just let us have a custom mapping function rather than some presets? I ended up just not playing Reach and concentrating on ODST for the duration of the Legendary campaign so I'd stop wasting grenades.

Speaking of grenades, one nice thing about ODST is that I could carry way more grenades up to 4x3 rather than 2x2 - saved me many times from getting ganked by squads of brutes.

There were parts of the game that were ridiculously tough, requiring you to kill off something like 8 brutes in a tunnel, 2 of them being the tough type that you can't stick grenades to, half of them armed with AOE cannons.
The stealth/silencer factors that help you through earlier parts of the game don't really count for much when it's just you and the brutes packed in an underground tunnel.

The energy pistol is much easier to aim in Reach, imo. The strike zone became a lot larger, cause shots that would be sure successes in Reach were failing to hit in ODST.

Anyways, a bit more ODST and I'll be done with the achievements, then I'll go back to Reach.

Upsen.

Long Hiatus

It's been quite some time since my last post. Let's see, what's happened since my last post?

I've stopped playing City of Heroes. I wasn't really playing it enough to warrant paying for it any more, though I'm glad I was able to experience the new L1-20ish Praetorian content before the account expired. It was a lot of fun and fit perfectly with my alt-itis tendencies. Paragon Studios fleshed out that dystopian world pretty nicely.

I started playing a little Diablo II again. I was figuring out how to set up a virtual CDROM again for my crappy boot disk (so wouldn't have to leave the CD in the drive), when I discovered that it's now available as a completely digital download, and I could convert my CD serial codes into an online Diablo serial codes to use the download. After all these years, I'm free of the CDs at last.

I set up a Sorceress and a Necromancer, and I'm finding I play the Necro a lot more than the Sorc, since you basically walk along and let all the minions do the heavy fighting while you watch. The online people I tried playing with all said the game was tuned a lot harder than before. Apparently there was a ladder reset (rankings reset) at the end of September, and Blizzard took the time to up the difficulty settings.

More than Diablo II though, I've been playing Halo: Reach lately on the 360. The legendary solo mode is Really Hard. You get killed in two shots if you're lucky, one shot if you're not. Minions you can usually mow through become a life and death struggle to defeat. Weapons that you can usually rely on like the Assault Rifle become virtually useless unless you're fighting a basic grunt. Insta-hit scoped rifles become the mainstay of your arsenal, and headshots are pretty much the only way to take things down. At least, until you reach things like Elites whose shields essentially ignore rifle rounds, and Hunters who shrug off a full clip of fuel rods. I've had to rely on things that I usually don't use, like plasma pistol charges, vehicle jacking, and a crazy amount of hand-to-hand. I'll probably talk about it more later on, but for now I'm going to try to finish the Pillar of Autumn level on Solo Legendary. (last one left!)

Upsen.