It’s true, all three topics in the title are related to Halo; frankly I’m glad to write about something other than Lost, not that I don’t enjoy it.

Anywho…..

Halo Wars – Truthfully I’m surprised by how much I’m enjoying the part of the game I have played so far. Sure, I played the demo and thought something along the lines of “it’s better than I expected”; but I fully expected it to become repetitive and boring.

I’ve heard that opinion from others, but it is certainly not mine yet. I’m up to mission 5 and it’s quite challenging and enjoyable. My niggles from the demo are, as expected, still there — I don’t like the fact that you can’t look further afield i.e. that you can’t move the camera to face forward enough for my liking… I think there was something else that annoyed me, but, as I can’t now remember it, it can’t be that big of a deal.

Graphically the cut-scenes are fantastic; clearly a lot of time and money has been spent on them. As for the actual gameplay graphics…. They’re ok, if not inconsistent.

Moving swiftly onto the Mythic maps for Halo 3….. Well, any downloadable content for a game which I spend so much time playing is always appreciated and this is no exception.

My original thoughts about Sandbox were that it would be another Foundry; designed mostly for Forging and therefore not really any good for actual games (all my opinion, of course). However I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was when matchmaking — I like it.

Assembly – Whatever was said about this map not being a remake of Halo 2’s Midship was true… However it cannot truly be said that it is not like Midship…. lots about it seems familiar and….. well, at the moment I’m not loving it. Easily the worst out of the three.

Orbital [as I said on twitter] is way bigger than I expected. So far it seems okay… Though as both Clarkson and I agreed, it should have had the option of deploying warthogs on it. As I have probably already said in person, in a rather English way, it’s an awful long way to capture a flag on this map and I think it will actually suit 6v6 games better for this. Also… that level above where the mongooses are – why isn’t the flag up there!? [Perhaps because it’s already a long way away]

I could *probably* have found a more reprasentative picture of the Mythic Maps, but oh well.

And finally, a whinge about the bastards that are employing Denial of Service attacks on players of Halo:

What the hell is the point? It just makes for more laggy, shitty games resulting in more anger and frustration from not being able to kill the enemy when you should have or simply not being able to hear the person that you are gaming with clearly.

Since there is no viable solution to these kinds of attacks, unfortunately it looks as though they will continue for the foreseeable future. Though I do advise people to get anti-virus and anti-spyware software updated and use it on a regular basis to ensure that your computer, or those of anyone you know is not unwillingly being used as part of a botnet to spam others with malformed and erroneous packets of doom…

/