Saturday, November 18, 2006

The Tao of Halo 2...on Legendary.

I love this guy, Mike Miler, author of the Halo 2 on Legendary Walkthough

this is great bit if you've attempted Halo 2on legendary, you'll really dig this!


In any case, once you deal with the stragglers outside (and discard your SMG in favor of the plasma pistol in the process), approach the front entrance of the building ahead and prepare for—big surprise—two elites and a couple of grunts who run down the stairs. Finish them off and head up the stairs to the second level balcony. So far, so good...nice defensive position, so let's take a minute to...
*ZAP!*
By now, the Chief has most likely fallen to the ground dead, a shocked and puzzled expression undoubtedly still frozen on his face beneath the helmet, his aura of strength and invincibility dispelled in a single pink shot.
Meet your new nemesis: the jackal sniper.
Allow me to editorialize for a minute in order to express properly how much I despise this new enemy. It's not so much that they're difficult; indeed, once you go through the initially torturous, brute-force process of memorizing their locations one cheap death at a time, they are more or less downgraded from the level of aneurysm-inducing frustration to severe nuisance. My problem at this point is largely with the way that they shatter the immersion of the game. It's just ridiculous when you can watch every other enemy in the game except drones—including your unshielded marines, and even grunts, for God's sake—absorb multiple beam rifle shots, and yet the Chief, icon of the series, with his fancy armor and upgraded shield, always dies from a single shot. This sort of incongruity serves only to reduce the experience from that of a balanced, consistent interactive world to typical, cheap video game capriciousness. There's also the fact that the presence of jackal snipers, with their one-shot kills and supernatural accuracy and reaction time, tends to limit your options in many areas, subverting the open-endedness of the combat which otherwise is the series' best quality. Bungie, if you're listening: please...don't do this to us again, ok? It's just annoying.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

actually, that's coz they're shooting you right in the face, eh.

you can just get knocked to blinking if you jump out the way, or if you're right fast you can dodge it completely.