I'm surprised Silent Hill hasn't got a mention. For me this is the game in the series that had an unparalled atmosphere of dark, twisted Americana in a way akin to the TV show "Twin Peaks". I don't feel it has been surpassed in the later sequels because while Silent Hill 2 and 3 (I haven't played 4 or Homecoming) have much better graphics with that came a greater emphasis on visceral terror and disgust, and more 'real' representation, rather than the mood and surreality of the first. Having monsters emerge out of suffocating fog was terribly shocking for the time and I don't think that the initial fear factor or the storytelling, which had a good balance of camp and dread, was preserved in the later sequels. Also, I find the visual and audio design were considerably better, despite the awfulness of the PSX hardware and its limitations. Besides a few gameplay issues I don't think it left much to improve upon.

Suikoden 1 and 2 are a good choice because I dont think 3d has done the series any favours, regardless of the quality of the sequels. It seems soulless now.

FFVII and MGS 1 are obvious choices for bringing a cinematic intensity to game story-telling, thanks to CDs, in a way many modern games could learn from.

Xenogears - maturity of themes for an RPG. Same goes for the Persona series, which are very different games to the later sequels, and good in their own right except for Persona 1 which was butchered by the localisation.

Crash Bandicoot.

Beyond the Beyond (sarcasm).

The PS2 collection isn't particularly good, in controls, presentation, or even some of the game selections. I recommend playing on the original hardware if possible. However, the Ultimate Collection for the 360 is improved; the graphics are better, 40 games + arcade versions, and removing some of the puzzling inclusions in the previous compilation (Ecco Jr.?). However, both the X360 and PS2 controllers are pretty mediocre for the games due to their d-pads, unnaturally stiff on the ps2 because it's divided into discrete buttons and pathetic on the 360 - analog helps a little but not much. The Genesis controller has a much more natural range of motion.

Given how cheap the carts are though it's not hard to discover personal favourites; some of my own would be Altered Beast (it's not objectively a great game but it's still fun), Shadow Dancer, Gain Ground, General Chaos, Streets of Rage 1 & 2, Shadowrun, Toejam & Earl, etc. It's part of the fun really.

I have that console or something very similar to it and it is made under license, or at least with the approval of Sega.

To answer the poster's question I have derived a good deal of fun from it but you have to be aware what you're paying for - the emulation is often sub-standard, the controllers break from repeated use [though you can use official sega controllers as well], and its ability to play multi-region games is limited. It will work for some NTSC games but not all, and I don't know how reliable it is for Japanese games but my guess is not very.

[QUOTE="owl_of_minerva"]

(1) Vistas: so you mean Halo was able to do things on a larger graphical scale than before. Given the XBOX's technology, a fair point. But when I talk about design, I'm not talking about the game engine. The outdoor levels are ok, it's more the interior designs that I think are abhorrent. The Master Chief, the enemies, the marines, the vehicles are also uninteresting military techno-cliche. It is a subjective point but then again perhaps I assign a higher value on art than other people do. But I think it would be easy to find more attractive game universes. I would also distinguish between technical ability and the ability to create something genuinely novel and interesting on an artistic level. Again it's not that Halo is poorly executed, it's just average to somewhat above-average.

(2) The criticism that hiding to recharge health breaks the flow of gameplay is not unique to me, and seems to be a common point against Halo for those who are critical of it. And I've already answered your question on both counts: (1) because it breaks the flow of the gameplay (2) it's not a necessarily better choice. There's nothing wrong with having a health bar. As I said, Halo is a compromise and doesn't know what it is. It is tactical yet action-packed, as well as having both shields and a health bar - Halo sits on the fence, and like a major political party you don't know where it stands.

(3) I don't find the control smooth, not then and not now, and I mean the console version.

(4) Some people, such as myself, don't want to have to read pulp sf just to play a video game. It might enhance your personal enjoyment to know the backstory but a game that's the first in a series should be able to introduce the universe and the characters effectively. If it can't stand on its own two feet then it has failed. For instance, the story in the Solaris remake is incoherent if you haven't seen the original film (or read the book at least). Does that mean it has a good storyline because the original movie and book do? I would define "cryptic" as "hardly existent" in this case.

(5) Wasn't avowed in earnestness. Just an attack on statistical thinking in general, including "this many people like Halo :. it's good". I don't think that's an opinion masquerading as fact, that argument can easily refuted as logically invalid. My goal is much less ambitious than the Halo fanboys; they want to prove that Halo cannot be called a bad game by any (at least any reasonable) standard, and I want to prove that it can. These are subjective opinions and if you admit as much as then we have nothing further to argue about.

I would hardly consider Halo "trying to be different". Games that genuinely try to be different usually meet with some critical acclaim (though not as much as Halo's usually) and dismal sales, for instance Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, Grim Fandango, etc. First-person shooters continually fail to meet that standard because the fundamental premise is hardly ever challenged: namely an epic battle between two or more forces, wait for it, in space. It defined games like Doom, Marathon, Unreal and we're still blundering about ugly, dark pseudo-industrial environments in 2009.

inoperativeRS

(1) I already agreed on that the design often is repetetive, which is the problem with the indoor levels. I personally find the Forerunner art-styIe very distinct and the art in general is IMO fantastic. Maybe you can easily come up with universes you find more appealing, I can't.

(2) If it is a common criticism and yet completely invalid, what does that tell us? What's the problem with compromises and what's wrong with being a bit of both? I'd claim its ability to be many things at once depending on the player is one of its greatest strenghts.

(3) Well then, I can only answer that you are in disagreement with quite a few people.

(4) Already addressed this point in my first post (it's bad design, I know. Never claimed the game was without its faults.) There's a lot of story in there though - and we both know Tarkovsky's Solaris is the only real movie adaption. :P

(5) Fair enough. But I never claimed Halo has to be an objectively good game, only that your arguments were based on opinions (which they were.) Of course you can easily prove Halo can be a subjectively bad game but what's the point in doing so? I've given you two valid arguments (repetition, dependance on background knowledge) which are completely objective, if you want to show that Halo can be called a bad game by reasonable standards you should use those instead.

Halo does not try to be different in the same way as the games you listed. Did you play Marathon? It's a very "different" series because of its storytelling and complexity in a genre that's known for being completely superficial - and does not only feature a battle between many forces but actually has the player frequently change sides and shape past AND future in doing so, essentially embodying fate itself (as pointed out by the ending.) The electric sheep levels are pretty much unique AFAIK. It's not "standard" at all. Halo (the first one) does continue the heritage of complex storytelling, it just adds a more simple layer that everyone can understand on top of it. The actual plot in Halo CE is completely illogical if one analyses it without knowing more about the characters and races. It's supposed to be mystical I guess but it is bad design for a blockbuster game. But Halo doesn't follow the normal two-forces formula that strictly either, there are two parallel stories which are told throughout the games (the one about humans and the covenant and the one about forerunners and the flood.) The stories are connected through the flood.

Why defend such a standard game?

owl_of_minerva

Well, there's two reasons really: one, the arguments you used are the standard ones used by a lot of Halo haters and they're subjective. Wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the apparent belief of some of them that their opinions somehow are better than those of the people who actually like Halo. You're not one of those, that's also the reason I chose to respond to you.

Two, I personally don't think it's a standard game at all.

(1) So we agree, sort of.

(2) In short, jack of all trades, master of none. It doesn't deliver a deep tactical experience and it doesn't offer as fast-paced a shooter experience as the more traditional FPS.

(3) Already surmised that, given the popularity of the series. Although the praise for the controls is usually made in reference to a console standard alone, which wasn't high back then.

(4) Agreed.

(5) My point in offering a subjective critique is (1) to answer the poster's original question and (2) to attack the conventional wisdom that sales are some kind of touchstone for merit, which would somehow render Halo beyond criticism. You may not have argued that, but others have and that's what I was responding to in the first place.

Clearly you probably like the game because of involvement in the Halo universe. But if you don't care about the universe (which I don't) perhaps you can imagine why it could be found boring: there's no meaningful context for the story or the action, which you need if you're going to have any kind of immersive experience. I suspect that for most gamers the action would be enough, but it's not if you play games discerningly, ie. you demind more than a 2d backdrop for targets in a shooting gallery. Given so many years playing games, a poorly delivered story is enough to render a game unworthy of one's time, especially when it's a premise as overused as the space shooter. I haven't played Marathon, but it already sounds infinitely better than the Halo series could ever be. If Peter Jackson directs, it could be an alright movie though.

[QUOTE="owl_of_minerva"]

It's not Shakespeare.

inoperativeRS

(1) The level design is repetetive but also features some of the most magnificent vistas ever created in gaming. Bungie had - and still has - a team of accomplished artists and contacts to many more, for example Craig Mullins. If you think otherwise it's your own personal taste but don't attack it for something like lack of artistic ability because that is pure ignorance.

(2) This is part of what the series is known for, you don't have to like but again you're using your own personal opinion as an argument. What is wrong with hiding to recharge health? Most games do that nowadays and Halo 1 even featured normal health on top of the recharging so you didn't have to do it as often as in newer games. I don't think Halo ever was supposed to be as tactical as R6 or GR (and the fact you use the modern R6 and GRs as examples is very ironic) and the gameplay certainly isn't slow because of it, in fact I think it's more related to point

(3) The controls were designed to work on the xbox, not the PC (I assume you played the PC version.) Actually I still think Halo CE worked well on the PC and I've probably played it as much as the xbox version because of mods but I can at least see why you'd think this.

(4) The oldest, most retarded and most annoying argument ever to be used against Halo. Alright, so it is a very stupid design decision to make the player's enjoyment of the story largely dependant on his previous knowledge of the universe. That does not mean the story itself is bad. Again this is also a pure matter of taste but I can at least point out that Peter Jackson loves the Halo universe and that two well-regarded scifi authors have helped creating the Halo universe by writing the novels. They're definitely not the only respectable fans of the series' story either, if you check out the official site of Tobias Buckell, author of the latest Halo novel, you'll see quite a few of his fellow authors are excited about the Haloverse. Whatever, I'm rambling.

(5) Does not deserve an answer.

Sturgeon's revelation is a pretty poor attempt at giving your opinions-framed-as-facts some kind of appearance of justification. One could even claim Sturgeon's revelation in itself is dependant on a subjective perspective. Halo 2 was an attempt to listen to all the pompous critique directed at the first one but ended up inferior in most ways (at least singleplayer-wise). Luckily Halo 3 is a good compromise. The first Halo was a very different game in many ways though in that it is a mainstream PC-like FPS designed for a console featuring Bungie's cryptic story-telling - which has been a trademark for the company ever since Pathways into Darkness - and the sequels were both "casualised", at least from a story perspective.

You seem to be interested in Roman mythology, if you haven't played the Minerva mod for HL2 I'd strongly urge you to do so. And by the way, the guy who made the mod and now works for Valve is also a huge Bungie fan. ;)

(1) Vistas: so you mean Halo was able to do things on a larger graphical scale than before. Given the XBOX's technology, a fair point. But when I talk about design, I'm not talking about the game engine. The outdoor levels are ok, it's more the interior designs that I think are abhorrent. The Master Chief, the enemies, the marines, the vehicles are also uninteresting military techno-cliche. It is a subjective point but then again perhaps I assign a higher value on art than other people do. But I think it would be easy to find more attractive game universes. I would also distinguish between technical ability and the ability to create something genuinely novel and interesting on an artistic level. Again it's not that Halo is poorly executed, it's just average to somewhat above-average.

(2) The criticism that hiding to recharge health breaks the flow of gameplay is not unique to me, and seems to be a common point against Halo for those who are critical of it. And I've already answered your question on both counts: (1) because it breaks the flow of the gameplay (2) it's not a necessarily better choice. There's nothing wrong with having a health bar. As I said, Halo is a compromise and doesn't know what it is. It is tactical yet action-packed, as well as having both shields and a health bar - Halo sits on the fence, and like a major political party you don't know where it stands.

(3) I don't find the control smooth, not then and not now, and I mean the console version.

(4) Some people, such as myself, don't want to have to read pulp sf just to play a video game. It might enhance your personal enjoyment to know the backstory but a game that's the first in a series should be able to introduce the universe and the characters effectively. If it can't stand on its own two feet then it has failed. For instance, the story in the Solaris remake is incoherent if you haven't seen the original film (or read the book at least). Does that mean it has a good storyline because the original movie and book do? I would define "cryptic" as "hardly existent" in this case.

(5) Wasn't avowed in earnestness. Just an attack on statistical thinking in general, including "this many people like Halo :. it's good". I don't think that's an opinion masquerading as fact, that argument can easily refuted as logically invalid. My goal is much less ambitious than the Halo fanboys; they want to prove that Halo cannot be called a bad game by any (at least any reasonable) standard, and I want to prove that it can. These are subjective opinions and if you admit as much as then we have nothing further to argue about.

I would hardly consider Halo "trying to be different". Games that genuinely try to be different usually meet with some critical acclaim (though not as much as Halo's usually) and dismal sales, for instance Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, Grim Fandango, etc. First-person shooters continually fail to meet that standard because the fundamental premise is hardly ever challenged: namely an epic battle between two or more forces, wait for it, in space. It defined games like Doom, Marathon, Unreal and we're still blundering about ugly, dark pseudo-industrial environments in 2009. Why defend such a standard game?

1.The Library is notoriously repetitive. Thankfully, the action is what made CE; the levels could have been enpty warehouses with tables to hide behind and it would've been awesome.

2.You actually move faster than you do in most FPSs. Go try it out. Only FPS I can think of in which you move faster is the original Half-Life. And recharging your shields certainly doesn't break the flow of the game, especially considering that if you try and "hide," the enemies will find you and kill you. If you really need time to recharge your shields, you need to run and throw some grenades in your track. Besides, do you know how many FPSs have implemented some rechargeable health system since CE? I'll give you a hint: almost all of them, and certainly all but a very few of the better ones.

3.Halo CE was the first console FPS to have controls that worked. It was also the first that laid such a heavy emphasis on the one-button melee and, I believe, the first to have a grenade hot-button. You were saying?

4.This comment is laughable. Go find me one professional review of CE that didn't praise the story.

5.You're right. Poor artistic design. Like the cinematics that could've by themselves won an oscar, the tremendous voice-acting, the incredible graphics for the time it came out and a score worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. You're right.

Yeah, we'd be way better off listening to your "opinion" then the aggregate opinion of the entire online gaming community. I believe ign.com was talking specifically about people like you when they said the following:

"When you get past all of the chatter about the potential of Halo looking better on a PC, and all of the yip-yap about Halo being "just another" first person shooter, and all of the lip-flapping about Halo not being able to compete with the very best games on PS2 or GameCube and you actually sit down and play the game on your Xbox...you're in for one hell of a game."

(1) That's an opinion. Some gamers need more than marines in space to hold their interest.

(2) Halo is an extremely popular series. Companies want to make money, given how much games cost to make. Therefore the choice to follow Halo has much more to do with economics. Again, it's not Shakespeare. Also, the 'tactical combat' is more of a lukewarm compromise than an innovation; it's too action-oriented to be tactical and too tactical to be fast-paced.

(3) The controls worked, but that's only if you compare it to the dreadful swill that came before on consoles. I've played many games before and after Halo with much better controls. The powerful melee attack is more of a innovation in weapon balance than control, though I agree that it's a cool part of the game.

(4) A questionable appeal to authority. What elevates a game reviewer's opinion over the opinions of the average gamer? They just get paid for what they do, and maybe they play more games. That doesn't mean they have some magic formula which instantly makes their opinion worth more than everyone else's. Given that most people probably have nothing more to go by than a subjective feeling of enjoyment when they rate a game, that in itself is not a reliable measure of quality. I realise that a lot of people like Halo, but asserting that doesn't tell me anything I don't already know.

(5) When a movie based on a game wins an Oscar, then maybe I'll concede your point. I hate the adolescent machismo of Halo and all the games it's inspired: the endless array of space marines in massive armor suits beating their chests with arms the width of the average human body, Lee Ermey one-liners, heroic officers who go down the ship, etc. It's a bad rehash of war movie cliches, and hardly epic storytelling or cinematic material. Am agreed on the graphics and sound, though the art design remains ugly and the cutscenes aren't much to look at in terms of the direction or graphics.

Again the appeal to authority; I don't care what some abstract community thinks, nor is that a valid argument. Conforming to the general opinion is part of the problem with modern society, an inability to think critically or advance claims without falling into group-think.

To offer more substantive reasons concerning why Halo 1 is a boring game [I haven't played the others nor am I holding my breath]:

(1) Bungie's level design is poor. Not only because some sequences are notoriously repetitive and poorly thought out (Library) but everything in the game is ugly to look at. It's not a fault of the graphics engine, just lack of anything approaching artistic ability.

(2) The gameplay is slow: you move like a tortoise, and you constantly have to hide to recharge one's shields breaking the flow of the game. You can be challenging or tactical without being slow: case in point being Rainbow Six Vegas or GRAW.

(3) The controls are average to below-average.

(4) Storyline is laughable.

(5) Game is soulless, ie. it lacks any distinctiveness, probably due to the poor artistic design choices.

I don't think that Halo is a *bad* game, but it is boring and mediocre. Personally I don't get my kicks out of defending the commercial products of massive corporations, and although Halo is a popular game I invoke Sturgeon's Revelation; 90% of everything is crud including the taste of those who bought it. Game reviewing is also a poor yardstick given that the aesthetic standards of the game industry are quite low. It's not Shakespeare.

I hate the game more than IGN did, finding God Hand incredibly boring. I got less than $4 entertainment out of it [the cost of the rental]. I can't explain it other than a feeling of instant hatred. Granted, fighting endless hordes of enemies and button-mashing are not my cup of tea. The graphics and environments are pretty bland and ugly as well. The draw-card is punching out enemies out at the speed of light...

Also, I didn't have the patience to endlessly customise my moves to come up with the best combos. It's really up to the player as to whether they want to invest the time into the game or not. The story and music were amusing in a goofy way at least but I think it's a game you will like if you like hitting things in the face a lot. Otherwise you'll be trying out some God Hand moves on the CD in a matter of seconds.