Haha, tossed the idea around with a friend, and he says that it probably isn't likely because he read that there is a Halsey audiolog in the second level of the game that implies due to Cortana's unique origins, she might be able to beat or live far beyond the typical age for which an AI starts to go rampant? I'm going to try and confirm that one for myself. He claims it's near where the Elite is shown barely alive until he eventually just drops dead. If that's true, then Cortana may indeed remain an AI, just survive well past the typical rampancy age. I would much prefer this instead.

Beat the campaign finally :)

+It was awesome, *very* well done gameplay wise.
+Pace was awesome.
+Graphics are some of the best this gen on consoles, 343 used up a lot of tricks (technical and artistic) to give this game an incredible look. Pure sci-fi heaven here.
+I really *really* liked some of the new guns, they are amazing, and there's so many of them!
+Story was great too, best cutscenes in a Halo game BY FAR.
+Sound FX were also top notch.

Now for some negatives:
-I had to enable subtitles as half of the time things are too damn garbled (or mixed in with other sounds) that I was missing a lot of information
-Music is good, but feels way more movie-like generic. Worst music in a Halo game thus far
-Grenades, can they get any weaker now?
-What the fuck happened to the covenant voices? Not even close, and I don't like it.


Misc
*The flying enemies are freaking annoying
*More open environements would have been nice
*Bring back some snow, we've been in the desert too many times beforeThey were shit, that'a fact.Gotta agree with that.

I love the game, and I think even I acknowledged the trailers, the most anticipated ones, weren't very impressive at all for this game, which is stunning considering the wealth of stuff they could've worked with.

Agree on pretty much all counts, Lebato. I'm more lenient on the Music side though for one reason, I thought it fit pretty well, and the deployment of the music throughout the game was close to pitch perfect and impressively restrained. If you grab the OST, you'll notice that a lot of tracks are much more far reaching than you would expect, but by the game itself, you probably couldn't tell, because the composer almost didn't want to force the issue. I agree 100% that it certainly gives the impression of the kind of stuff that you would come to expect from movies, and it was quite different from what you had come to expect from a Halo title, which is why I've floated the suggestion that, in all likelihood, the music of past Halo games may indeed eclipse the stuff in Halo 4. The Halo 4 composer did give, I thought, some pretty cool and well timed musical shoutouts with Marty's classic work, though.

I do get the impression grenades were much weaker. They weren't doing very much damage, I thought. Even grunts seemed like they were shrugging off my grenades at times :( But, you know what? I thought that indirectly helped make the game more entertaining in the sense that the grenades, long a get out of jail free card under rough conditions, suddenly weren't. They were more designed it seems to be just one tool in your arsenal on the way towards downing a tougher enemy or tougher group of enemies, rarely ever guaranteed to give you the finishing blow, forcing you to actively follow up or risk losing your gains in some instances. The enemies seemed about as cautious to avoid getting owned by grenades as we the players are due to the perceived weakness of the grenades. Maybe 343 just messed up, or maybe it was by design, but I ended up taking a liking to the extra challenge.

Totally agree on gameplay, graphics, guns (the fucking guns!), story and cutscenes, soundfx and the pace. The flying enemies were campy mofos lol. I found a fantastic counter more than a few times was to deploy your own flying ally by using the auto turret, and plenty of times it gave me some really nice cover fire, so I could afford to take more risks and chase the watchers that were trying to run away from me, because by no means did I want those fucks reviving the knights.

EDIT: Was Laskey impressively well acted out or what? It wasn't just him, it was Cortana and the Chief, too, but the one who played laskey did such a great job.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbjA6rB98Yk#t=33m51...

I especially liked how outraged he seemed when Del Rio suggested the crazy sss step of arresting the Master Chief. You could tell dude wasn't having any of it.

I'm not really rationalizing it, so much as I'm giving an honest and full assessment of what I genuinely thought about it, and how I sought to mentally compensate to not allow it to bother me nearly as much as it might have. Not everything needs to be a simple black or white, there is room for a nuanced position on different aspects of the game. Trust me, I'm not opposed to saying something was bad or terrible, believe me.

Remember how hyped and excited I was for that jrpg from Tri-Ace, Infinite Undiscovery? Do you recall how much I talked about it, and how much I said I couldn't wait for it to come out, but once I actually bought and started playing it, I totally flipped out at just how terrible I felt the overall game design was, and how unbearable it was for me to play it any further, and what a massive disappointment and waste of money it was for me? I'm inherently an optimist on most things, even things I originally don't like very much, and I will try to find a way within the confines of how the game was designed to hopefully try to understand or simply come to grips with just what the dev could have been thinking. Sometimes this works, hence it diminishes the intensity of my complaint turning it into tacit acceptance, and then there are times where it doesn't, and then we have an infinite undiscovery moment, where I just about acknowledge how wrong I was about the game. :P

What I said is almost the definition of a rationalization, I know, but I think it deserved context.Never thought of it this way. I guess I would have to agree that this could be what's going on. Maybe they might adjust it in an update of some kind?

Wanna bet? If this site has a archive that goes all the way back to Infinite Undiscovery's release, then you're in for a surprise.

Is there no way to go back to old forum threads about particular games on here?

You mean I didn't criticize Infinite Undiscovery? Or I wasn't excited about the game, which do you mean, because I'm a little confused. I'm having trouble finding old forum discussion threads on IU. So If you can sniff out any of those on release discussion threads for me, you'll be in for a surprise, because you'll see me tearing Infinite Undiscovery a new asshole, and expressing disappointment about how excited I was for the game. I even made a pledge that I would never get so excited about a game again after that. I totally broke that excitement promise, but I had genuine disappointment about that game, because I was REALLY looking forward to it. On Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon, both games were everything I hoped they would be. I loved both. Were they perfect? No, but what little there was I felt was wrong with them wasn't nearly enough to detract away from what I felt were otherwise fantastic jrpgs. I felt both totally delivered. They are, to this day, probably still the best jrpgs of this entire generation, although Xenoblade Chronicles for the Wii seems fucking amazing. I started playing it, but haven't beaten it yet.

I couldn't even get off the first disc of IU, it was that bad. I think I got to the early catapult section of the game, and just decided I had enough and couldn't bother playing it anymore.

Ah ha!!!

There are those who said this day would never come, what are they say now :p

http://gamersyde.com/forum_infinite_undiscovery_re...And here is just one of my threads I created in anticipation of Infinite Undiscovery.

I dubbed it Infinite Undiscovery thread of infinitely undiscovered hype

http://gamersyde.com/forum_infinite_undiscovery_th...

I've never in my life been so excited for a game, only to have it let me down before. I won't say that there is absolutely no bias when I defend games I really love and anticipated greatly, but if a game I heavily anticipated really lets me down, I'll be brutally honest about it.

Almost forgot the awesome TOV, that's another jrpg I loved this gen along with Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Xenoblade Chronicles. My tov praise was before I played Persona 3 and 4 :P Those are utterly unbelievable games as well. Still haven't beaten Persona 4 yet, but 3 was incredible!

You say all I did was inform myself of my own behavior, but are you really stunned to see me incredibly impressed with, in my view, hands down the best Halo campaign I've ever played? This does come down to opinion, and there's very few, if any, excuses or rationalizations that I need to make about how incredible a game I think Halo 4 is. What almost baffles me is you seem to be of this belief that I must be making up (no way around it) my opinion that I think Halo 4's campaign is incredible and the most enjoyable Halo campaign I've ever played.

Make no mistake, this is the Halo game I've been dreaming would get made. It does all the things exceptionally well that I've wanted to see a Halo game do for a very long time, and I'm sure you've seen me talk about at length on this very forum. It's actually one of the greatest games I've ever played, period. The most enjoyable FPS campaign I've ever played. I enjoyed it more than Half Life 2. Halo 4, for people who are really into the Halo books, and who are practically obsessed with the ins and outs of the Halo universe fiction, which I most certainly am, this game represents good, old fashioned fanservice at an absurdly shameless level, and I couldn't be any happier about that. I had already completely opened the door for the possibility that Halo 4 would be this good, all that was left was for 343's game to drag my ass through that door, and boy did they ever. They gave me the Halo game I've been wanting, an even better one than I hoped I had any chance of getting, expectations being through the roof and all. If you find this all hard to believe, then I can't do anything about that. Just know it's the truth.

You don't care about the Infinite Undiscovery stuff, but it's proof that I'm a lot more reasonable about games I'm really excited about than you folks sometimes give me credit for being. Am I excitable? Do I hype games I'm excited about to hell and back? Yes, yes I do. Do I sometimes go overthetop to defend games I like, yes I do. But I defend them honestly (my opinion of honest, obviously, because if I say Blue Dragon is great and give my reasons, others may disagree). I wouldn't dare defend them so much if I felt they had disappointed or let me down. The ones that do, which isn't much I'll acknowledge (I tend to pick the games I'm highly interested in very well, so I don't end up too disappointed), I'm honest about, and am willing to take whatever criticism that others feel appropriate if I feel I was wrong.

Well, Grift, at this point it really doesn't matter how you choose to look at it. I said one particular thing about not minding the grenades seemingly being weaker than you would expect, and you're somehow trying to extrapolate from that basic argument and apply it to my entire impression of Halo 4's campaign to somehow fit with your belief that I can't possibly like Halo 4 as much as I say I do. Well, you've got your work cut out for you.

Why the hell wouldn't it be my favorite FPS campaign ever? It's basically 10 hours worth of totally kickass fanservice for my Halo universe/fiction addiction. Is it really that hard for you to believe? Exactly what other FPS's universe out there would I even waste my time reading every book about, that I would waste my time looking at fan sites for, just to see some different perspectives? Not Half Life 2, not any of the Call of Duty games, none of the battlefield games, I didn't even like Doom 3 (couldn't even finish the fucking thing mostly because it scared shit out of me :P), and I really enjoyed all the other Halo games, but none of them, in my honest opinion, have a superior campaign to what's in this game.

It's the most well put together Halo campaign, in my opinion, that I've ever had the pleasure of playing. Master Chief has never looked more amazing, more heroic, more skilled or highly trained. There has never been better story development of the Chief's character, or of Cortana's character in any previous Halo title. To argue that much, I think, is a fool's errand. You actually got a nice glimpse of the Chief's human side without it seeming overdone or coming off cheesy. The character modeling, especially human characters, is amazing, best the series has seen. The cutscenes have never been more impressive, more strongly acted, more strongly presented or, just plain, more BELIEVABLY acted. The art is a drastic fucking improvement over what I've seen in any other Halo title. The sound design is the best of any Halo campaign (More sound in the Chief's armor is something I've wanted to be handled better for some time). As much as I love Halo games, sometimes forerunner can be another term for boring looking. Not so in this game. No Halo campaign does vehicle based combat better or more completely than this one does it. The pacing, in my view, is also the best of any Halo campaign I've played, and even if I expand it to other fps titles, this still remains true. They never really have you feeling as if you're doing too much of the same thing too often. Right when you feel like you may want a change of pace, you get just that in the form of a nice vehicle section, or in the form of a more calm, story focused section. You can tell the devs know how beautiful this game Is, and sometimes they seem to set shit up just so you can watch and appreciate it. This helps with the experience. Cortana was acting more like an AI, doing cool shit like diverting power from your shields to turbo charge the boost function on a ghost. The weapons are the most fun and most diverse that I've personally ever witnessed in a Halo campaign, and I absolutely loved the enemy encounters. They feel more diverse and more interesting overall. The forerunner weapons, simply put, just kick all sorts of ass. I could talk about this game for days. Believe what you want, but it's my opinion that this is the best Halo campaign ever made.

I've been begging for more of the same feeling I get from the books in the games, and I got that tenfold. If you believe nothing else, believe that this game had a heavy dose of fiction. What some call convoluted or confusing, is right in my wheel house, because I've been following it all in the books, and having read the books totally enhances your enjoyment of this game. If you haven't, then perhaps you might not have as strong an impression of it as I do, and, hell, I don't expect everyone to agree with me, but people are sure as hell going to have to learn to deal with the fact that I personally believe this is the best Halo campaign experience, story I've ever played.

LOL. Even better gif, Chief looks up at forum post, then looks back at Nuke, then decides to detonate nuke :P That said, I've pretty much said all I need to say about the game. It's an incredible game, full stop.

Well, you know what they say, if the bitch is putting out... *pin drop*

more interesting than a wall of text. i finally rem to put my code in..
LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THE DICK ON MY HEAD.. YEAH BABY!

That Spartan looks like he's about to steal my wallet.

God damn experience cap...

no my fault that spartan ops combined with pioneer gives me 7170 experience every match

yeah Op with grift here the grenades are shit, there not halo grenades there damn uncharted grenades, there just not very good

Also Pulse grenades OWNS online, retards ignore it because its the pulse grenade.. :D

I try to avoid those pulse grenades like the fucking plague in Campaign. Ever have two tossed at you? Not a pretty thing if you're in the wrong spot at the wrong time. They are even more of a bitch on levels, where if you're not careful you fall to your death.

http://www.amazon.com/Halo-Silentium-Forerunner-Gr...You know, the description for the last Forerunner book actually makes it sound like the Didact we defeated in this game was in fact the original, not the Bornstellar Didact. I like :) And the talk of the Precursors makes it that much more likely that they will return in some form, which I always suspected they would. Can't wait to learn the full secrets of the flood.