You’re welcome, though keep up your post chain with the two remaining good ones first ;^;

I wouldn’t know, actually. Halo 4 is the last game whose campaign I played - since H4 is in the MCC, H5 is not on PC, and H:I costs too much for my opinion of it.

Halo 5 is infamously more book-dependent than Halo 4, and …

… , so IF you want to skip Halo 5, worst case, you may be missing how you ended up where H:I begins.
There may be a reference to a certain Spartan Locke here or there, idr.

I don’t want to spoil your fun, so I’d say you should run through H5 if you’re planning to play Infinite and if (unlike me) you wouldn’t have to buy an Xbox to do so.

To answer your first question: I can’t say too much about a game that I only vaguely remember from watching a playthrough on YT, but from what I do remember, H:I is somewhat more self-contained.

Would’ve bet my money on that exact outcome *^*

The fact that you didn’t really understand the plot is not your fault: 343I Halo games until H:I have an obsession on requiring you to read books to straighten up the story.

If you have questions such as:

1. Why are the covvies the baddies again?
2. What does the Halsey cutscene have to do with anything?
3. Who the hell is the Didact?
4. Why the hell is the Didact doing things?
5. Who the hell is the Librarian?
6. Spartans on the Infinity? Wasn’t 117 the last Spartan or something?
7. Was that ending a QTE?

… it’s because none of those questions are answered within the main plot of H4.
Some answers (3,4,5) you can find in books, some (1,2,6) in Spartan Ops (I never even played those), some (7) here on Lemmy - yes that was absolutely a QTE for a final boss in a Halo game.

If it’s any consolation for Cortana’s death being undone later offscreen, SPOILER AHEAD, her death’s undoing is also undone later offscreen.

…

… on second thought, I lied a bit. Halo 4’s main story does answer the first question in the list above, and the answer is “A lot can change in 4 years”.

I definitely want a follow-up with your opinion of the ending, since you aren’t there yet

I don’t recall, I’ve never really liked it so I’ve completed it twice in my life and only once on Legendary. I remember some youtuber saying ammo is particularly scarce, though I think it’s on par with Halo 3? Perhaps slightly more difficult, like Reach.

There are speedrunners that manage to finish H2 in a few hours, when I say it took a day for us I mean we woke up playing Halo, paused for lunch, and stopped playing after dinner.
What’s impressive is that last year our brains didn’t melt like they did the years prior *^*

Don’t you worry, after H2, H3 becomes a breeze, H:R may be more of a challenge but without H2’s bullshit. Mostly. I wonder if I’ll ever manage to try and LASO some game at some point…

Hey, if it makes you feel better, it gets easier with time.

My cousin and I have the tradition of running the entire Bungie-era Halos every summer, after three years we somehow got to the point where we can beat H2 in a single day.

You’ve just got to learn the cheese strats, like the ones you mentioned or skipping the Sniper Alley™ by going OOB at the beginning of the mission.

Not ALL major political conflicts in the galaxy, you didn’t solve one in the first game and only solved one in the second one (with the solution being “RIP, batarians”).

I disagree with both, ME3 was slightly ok.

First of all, the original concept of the reapers’ objective was way better than the “AI bad” we got;
secondly, most of its story is just tying loose ends - the whole game is a collection of fanservice moments, many of which look good but feel inorganic(heh) if you think about the fact that one undead human soldier (plus a few dozen subordinates) solves all major galactic disputes.

If you’re ok with emulation (or have the hardware & means to acquire the game), the infamous Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is similar to Robocraft - only singleplayer-focused, with the technical limitations of the Xbox 360, and a bastardized version of the BK artistic direction.

I’m not sure the game aged well, but other than that I got nothing

Zambonis

I don’t see any point in claiming free games from it.

If by any chance one of the games I might ever want to play becomes a freebie, then I would simply browse my backlog rather than forsake my principles.

Bungie-era Halo has the best OST in the industry hands down, though recently Lunacid let me hear some certified bangers; someone here mentioned B:G&E, and I second that opinion although I wouldn’t have thought of it myself.

When I first played FL I thought it came out with all the others *^*

I don’t outright dislike X4, but IMO it feels too… streamlined, in a way. You’ve got less wares, less ships, less sectors, no jumpdrive (yes I see the reasoning, no I still want the jumpdrive), the Xenon lost their aesthetic just to look like Mass Effect reapers, and fuckers stole my magnificently redundant ship classes. Can’t have ship in Detroit.

X3: Terran Conflict.

Yes, we got X3FL in 2021 AND X4, but X4 is a very different game and X3FL is just a heavily scripted X3AP (more or less).

It’s a more-than-me years old game with a lot of mods that keep it enjoyable to day – as “enjoyable” as it can be, that janky piece o’ junk – but I feel about it the same way I feel about Halo 2: imagine what it could have been, if the devs had the resources they could have today. (if you say “X4” I’m going to fucking flip)

I haven’t played E:D so I can’t really make comparisons, but maybe X3/X4 can pique your interest?
I don’t think they can justify a home cockpit setup, they’re also kinda hard to get into (especially X3, you can’t get far without a guide), but hey, there’s a combined 1.5% chance that you haven’t heard of them and that you’ll enjoy at least one of them if you don’t care much about graphics. Or voice acting. Or UI/UX.

Also gamers when any scene at any point has less than 500000 polygons and UINT32_MAX particles, each with its own material

https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/perfect_dark

You’re also going to need a ROM, which shouldn’t be too hard to find on the high seas

Kb+M controls are awesome, especially for diagonal movement that lets you run at a steady 141% speed - it’s also way easier to land your shots while aiming.

I have a few in my library:

• Signalis (low-poly (not that you can notice), low-res, CRT effect)
• CrossCode (2D, low-res)
• Valheim (low-poly, low-res, still graphically intensive due to lighting)
• Lethal Company (low-res, bitcoin miner levels of GPU load)
• Super Alloy Ranger (2D, low-res)
• Terraria (you know Terraria, don’t lie)
• Iconoclasts (2D, low-res)
• Starbound (Terraria, but a bit worse and in space)

I don’t think these games aim for nostalgia, nostalgia alone is not a good reason to choose low-poly or low-res graphics.

Low-res textures and sprites have the advantage of being much easier for artists not only to hand draw, but to explicitly choose what details to give to a certain surface.
3D games with low-res rendering also have their own appeal, like you say: they tell you what you’re looking at but still leaves your imagination the burden of filling in the details.

To me low-poly models don’t really have their own appeal, unlike pixelated visuals, however I also don’t mind them at all.
I still occasionally play games like Perfect Dark and TLoZ: OoT on their recompiled PC ports, they look good despite their low-poly nature because they don’t need high-poly models and their animations would look uncanny if they did (goofy ahh textures though).

However, there are some retro effects that I find to be straight up ugly: Signalis applies a CRT effect occasionally, which I can’t say I’m fond of.

Shut up, I’m not old stop lying

I don’t know of it’s considered a classic or if it will ever be, but to me Crysis 2 generally looks way better than most of the stuff you see nowadays.

Otherwise, I think Halo Reach is the best looking Halo and it doesn’t show its age too much, if you look at the MCC/PC version.

I see it more like a “we’re good for now I guess, fuck around again and I’ll change it back to negative”

10% is a lot by I WANT MORE MONEY RIGHT NOW shareholder metrics

Agreed. For detecting cheaters, statistics work like a Dream

I’d imagine some of them are here:

(edit: forgot to un-dox the user)

If that’s the only problem, can’t you make a new one?

c/PatientPatientGamingPosting

• Halo 2, I know most cutscene quotes by memory
• X3: Terran Conlict, huge time waster, janky, infuriating and I love it
• Chromehounds (not really, I lost the CD and my X360 is dead (Armored Core ain’t got shit on Chromehounds, fight me))
• Crysis 2, better looking graphics than all the AAA games *I* have seen in the past 3 years
• Terraria, it’s Terraria
• Starbound, it’s Terraria but in space
• Valheim, it’s Terraria but you’re a 3D lowres viking (it’s low resolution textures exhalt my love for normal mapping)

If you have a legal copy of OoT you might want to check out Ship Of Harkinian or similar projects, especially SoH’s randomizer

X3:TC?
It’s a very acquired taste, but it’s unique in the already niche genre of space sims

I’m Shepard commander, and this is not a geth infiltration on the Citadel