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If you buy me an Xbox 360, Xbox Live, and ODST I'll join ... i'll even pay for my own electricity

i played ODST, motherfucking awesome (excuse profanities, had to be done, it is simply that good.

The Bungie folks clearly intend to milk that cow 'till its udders bleed.

Admittedly, this latest milky offering isn't all that bad. A little lacking in original flavour perhaps, and with precursory traces of the aforementioned blood, but on the whole quite adequate. And, sadly, "adequate" seems to be the watchword of the industry these days.

(No I don't have Xbox Live. It will be cold day in hell when I willingly play a FPS without a mouse.)

I has ODST. It was fun...until I realized I paid premium for a 3 hour campaign, a ripoff of Gears of War 2's horde and a Halo 3 multiplayer disc with only 3 maps I haven't bought in the past...

Firefight is actually alot different from horde. The same basic concept is there (shoot guys and then more guys come so you can shoot them) but it's got it's own original flavour.

Unfortunately I don't actually have ODST. Or a working Xbox. Or Xbox live.

So yeah.

Blorx wrote:I has ODST. It was fun...until I realized I paid premium for a 3 hour campaign, a ripoff of Gears of War 2's horde and a Halo 3 multiplayer disc with only 3 maps I haven't bought in the past...

Ahh yes, because Gears Of War 2 was the first game in existence to come up with the concept of enemies of steadily increasing difficulty being introduced in waves. Firefight is awesome.

It's not Bungie's fault that you bought all the maps. I didn't buy any of the maps. lol

You did the campaign in 3 hours? You must have actually done the minimum possible in terms of exploring and avoided as much combat as humanly possible? 3 hours is even a stretch if you're speed-running the game.

What's "premium" anyway? I paid 40 euro for the game. I consider it a steal. The campaign was pretty fantastic.

Zhukov wrote:The Bungie folks clearly intend to milk that cow 'till its udders bleed.

Admittedly, this latest milky offering isn't all that bad. A little lacking in original flavour perhaps, and with precursory traces of the aforementioned blood, but on the whole quite adequate. And, sadly, "adequate" seems to be the watchword of the industry these days.

It occurs to me that sometimes you're a bit of a try-hard when it comes to being witty, and a bit of a serial cynic when it comes to companies like Bungie releasing sequels to their successful franchises. You could view Halo 3: ODST milking a franchise in the same way you could view Metal Gear Solid 4 as milking a franchise, or you could just consider the game without any preconceived notions of the developer's alternate agendas.

Zhukov wrote:(No I don't have Xbox Live. It will be cold day in hell when I willingly play a FPS without a mouse.)

It's actually not that bad when you give it a go. I play Shadowrun the whole time on XBox 360. I'm actually addicted to the game. I'm almost more adept with the XBox 360 controller when playing FPS games than I am with a mouse.

gamertag 'zamzx'

Renegade_Turner wrote:You could view Halo 3: ODST milking a franchise in the same way you could view Metal Gear Solid 4 as milking a franchise, or you could just consider the game without any preconceived notions of the developer's alternate agendas.

Huh? Alternate agendas? It seems pretty damn obvious to me that this particular developer has only one agenda, that being "make money". Nothing alternate about it.

Let's see now...

Halo: CE
Halo 2
Halo 3
Halo 3: ODST
Halo: Reach
Halo Wars

Nope, definitely no milking going on around here.

Now, profit seeking is fine, really. They are a business after all, and it would be absurdly optimistic to expect a business to do anything but go where the money is. But wouldn't it be nice if they could make their money without feeding endless sequels to the ravening hoard of fanboys who will buy anything with the word "halo" in it?


PS. There's really no need for insults. Fanboy.

PPS. Just wait until new Halo MMORPG comes out. It's going to be totally awesome bro!!!

If you were a stockholder, would you want the company you invested in to have a CHANCE of making money, or a guarantee?

Zhukov wrote:PPS. Just wait until new Halo MMORPG comes out. It's going to be totally awesome bro!!!

Didn't you hear? It got canceled xD
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=20153

I love how Halo brings out the best in people. Its an amazing phenomenon.

Zhukov wrote:PS. There's really no need for insults. Fanboy.

I did not say anything which was intended to be construed as an insult. The only way anything I said could be construed as an insult is if you allowed yourself to be insulted when I was merely making a valid argument.

Secondly, I am by no means a fanboy. I did not purchase the RTS game that Bungie made and I don't even know what Halo: Reach is. I did have the first three games and now have ODST. I think fanboy is a bit excessive, and I suspect you're only saying it as a retort to my supposed "insults". If "fanboy" means that I am a fan of Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST, then yes, I am a fan of those games. =]

No, of course, them continuing the franchise couldn't possibly mean that they also just enjoy making the Halo series and know people will enjoy playing them. A consequence of this is that they're going to make a hell of a lot of money (consequence in this context is not intended to have negative connotations). But no, it's terrible for them to be making money. They have no values. How evil and corporate of them.

To beat a dead horse that I just found, I didn't find Halo 3 ODST too refreshing. It was a fine game but frankly just average in quality, one of the many mediocre fishies swimming in the next-gen pond. Firefight was definitely overrated, I didn't find it too immersing and it was pretty similar to Horde. Campaign was dreadfully short, beat it in about four hours on the second hardest difficulty setting I wanted an arsenal of new weapons, or at least three or four of them, and a new enemy or two, but Bungie just slung out the same candy its been slinging; while tasty, it gets boring after a while.

Definitely left me wanting more, which is I returned the game after I had milked out all the fun after three days. (Which made me realize something- don't bother 'renting' games, just buy retail games and you have anywhere between 30-90 days depending on the store to return them for what you payed. Ends up being more or less free.) I really hope Halo: Reach turns out better, because ODST frankly didn't seem like a sincere effort on the part of Bungie. Like Zhukov said, it really seemed like they were just milking the franchise.

Meanwhile, Ren, I really don't think ODST can compare up to MGS4. The latter was definitely a fuller experience (even if half of that experience was cutscenes) and my first playthrough of MGS4 on the Normal difficulty took about eleven hours. The depth/complexity/etcetcetc of the story made me orgasm at the end and I feel that the canonical part of the MG series was tied up perfectly. It had two decades' worth of backstory supporting it, and there were constant references to said backstory, and the large-scale firefights added variety to the game because you had several paths to go; retro sneaky snaking, covertly helping out Militia/Rebel forces for mutual good, getting out right in the front of the action with an M60 and slaughtering PMCs, or blowing the crap out of everyone and becoming Public Enemy #1. Anyhoo, there was definitely a reason for it- answering 20 years' worth of questions that have sprung up from Kojima's writing in the previous games. Frankly, all the questions, even the ultra-subtle ones that most people probably hadn't even thought of (WHAT COLOR IS JOHNNY'S HAIR?!?!) were answered in the end; whether that was intentional from the very beginning or just a bit of a last moment thing, it was masterfully done. It definitely didn't seem like a milking of the franchise in anyway, it was simply the climatic finish to the series that people have expected and drooled over, then drooled over some more when it delivered everything it promised and then some.

Enough MGS4 cock stroking, back to ODST: It, meanwhile, served as a prequel to the Halo series and was a much shorter experience. The 'flashback' technique that was used for most of the story was neat but it also made the story a big mess and all the characters' actions lost their meaning because frankly I didn't give two shits about this squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (try saying that three times fast) that I had never ever met before. There was not much variety or new additions to the game save for Firefight which, as I said, got boring rather quickly, and while it was good game it was not exceptionally good. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being Goldeneye and 1 being Superman 64, I'd give ODST a 6 because it really failed to deliver to the hype, and Firefight, which seemed to be the center of all this hype, was a big disappointment.

Maybe I'm just negative about all this but I don't like paying $60 for an expansion pack (which is, remember, what Bungie originally wanted this to be- I see the whole 'repackaging as a retail game' as nothing other than a milking technique to earn money)

Ragdollmaster wrote:Meanwhile, Ren, I really don't think ODST can compare up to MGS4. The latter was definitely a fuller experience (even if half of that experience was cutscenes)

Cutscenes that last longer than 5 minutes make me feel like breaking my computer.