BlindFire

Yeah, I’ve been slacking off on this site. I’m thinking I want to change the format of the site to something that’s more up my writing alley. So if you start seeing weird stuff on the site in the future, like fake news, or other strange things, yeah, that’s probably me just messing around, as usual.

So as a heads-up, if you find anything listed as FalseAlarm in the category part of the post, it’s fake. As in, not real. Well, I mean it’s real, it exists, but it’s not true. You know, false. Yes, that should clear things up.

I guess this is supposed to be about gaming though, so I’ll give a quick update as to what I’ve been doing lately. Lots of Halo 3, although I only play it online nowadays. The arcadey section of Halo’s single player never really appealed to me. Oddly enough, I just got Call of Duty 4 yesterday for my 360, and that game’s online is kinda meh to me, but the arcadey single player mode is wonderful. Now they’re both FPSes, but why do I like the single player of one, and the multiplayer of the other?

Me, before I proudly plant the enemy flag of blue bastardtry into our base of redness and awesome.

Basically, Halo’s multiplayer consists of lengthy micro-matches, little battles that take a good amount of time and effort. In COD4, a micro-match between two people takes at most, 3 or 4 bursts of shots to kill a person, which takes basically 1 or 2 seconds. And usually, the first person to shoot wins. Often, the person who dies had no clue they were even in danger. But to kill someone in Halo (assuming it’s not Shotty Snipers), I’ve had some real good dogfights of just two Master Chiefs jumping and spraying and grenading and punching for what seems like a good 10 or so seconds. And as any veteran of Halo versus any noob or quasi-noob can tell you, in Halo, being shot first does not necessarily mean you will die that fight. To put it simply, COD4 feels like a duel, shoot first and win, kinda simple. But Halo feels like a real test of wits and dexterity. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve played a lot of Halo, and not that much COD4, but that’s the impression I get from playing about an hour of COD4’s multiplayer. I’m sure some people like the more realistic style of COD4’s insta-kills, but I’m more of a Halo’s “I just got shot eighteen times and grenaded and punched, and I feel great!” kinda guy.

Also, COD4 rewards good players with better stuff, which is unlocked by leveling up, whereas in Halo 3, everyone’s equal in terms of equipment no matter what their grade or ranking. So not only is Halo more of an even match-up for everyone, as untrue as this sounds, Halo 3 may actually be more newb-friendly. Only people who like COD4 are going to try and unlock all the guns and camos, and then newbies will have no clue what they’re missing out on.

Shoot this guy’s head, and 100 points pop out! Yay!

Now why is Halo’s arcade style single player less exciting than COD4’s? It’s in the visuals and the multiplyers. So in Halo 3, when you play the arcade mode, the only difference on the screen is a little box in the corner that keeps tab of your score. But in COD4, big fucking “LOOK AT ME, YOU JUST SCORED WHOO!!” +10s, +100s and all sorts of numbers fly out of bad guy’s heads when you shoot them. They’re like pinatas filled with points! How awesome is that? It’s the little difference of a blatant visual reward that helps me tell that I’m actually making a difference in my score, compared to Halo’s “check my score after a skirmish, and I guess it went up a bit, but I have no clue why” style.

Secondly, while you can turn on a bunch of multiplyers in Halo 3 via skulls, in COD4, you gotta earn your multiplyer by “combo-ing” your kills. Now what sounds more fun, turning on a skull that makes the game harder but has a set limit of multiplying ability, or being driven by the fact that killing more people and faster earns you multiplyers that can just keep getting bigger and bigger? Halo’s game rewards skill, but COD4’s encourages bloodlust and murderous rampages within a certain amount of time. That little addition of multiplyer based on the quickness and quantity of kills, instead of just being a switch that is flicked on or off, makes you feel more in control of your score, which works better in anything that tries to be arcade style.

So moral of the story time, Halo multiplayer > COD4 multiplayer because the micro-matches in Halo are like a football game, requiring the right plays at the right time, while COD4 is like a 100 meter sprint between a cheetah and a snail, over fairly quickly, and if you’re the snail, seemingly pointless. However, COD4 arcade > Halo arcade because COD4 is more visual whiz-bang points flying everywhere and chaining kills, and Halo is more turn on a skull and play even though it doesn’t feel all that different and I can hardly tell how I’m getting points or why.

Hmm.. that post was a lot less of a quick update than I had initially intended. Eh.