- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: Fury161
By the way, just thought I'd edit this becuase reading through the posting three people came across to me as being reasonable, intelligent people who are fighting for an obscurity in the face of comformity (Or marathon and myth in the face of halo) and these three are D Von, Ghandi 2 and Jjarro (who has a funky quote), for me, these three represent the peak of common sense and are totally not your average Joe who bases a game on the sheer viceral content but actually goes deeper and creates an experience mainly from the stories.
After all, what is an game without a story, you can play a text based game and enjoy the lack of graphics. You try to play a brainless shoot 'em up and you cannot get anywhere near the levels of enjoyment because the graphics don't matter, it is story which pulls you in rather than having the sweetest graphics.
::comes running in, panting::
sorry i'm late to the party Fury. ;)
I voted Marathon but it was a difficult choice between it and PiD. nothing made my skill crawl more than slowly creeping around that pyramid holding a 60 year old luger and talking to dead people. Dead poeple who couldn't remember their names, who could recall their horrible deaths, who would describe horrible, demented creatures that you had yet to see, and describe the horrible sounds and the gnashing teeth and . . . .
bungie telling you abouot Brutes: you know you should be scared, but you've seen them in pictures, and you're not all that frightened.
But when a dead person tells you of some creature, a creature that only your imagination can conjure up, and then you can hear its screams from around the corner . . . . that's creepy.
to that day, talking to the dead ppl remains, IMHO, the best way to get story across. However, I felt somewhat let down by the ending: i felt like it ignored some of the stories lines it had built up by the time it ended (kinda like Evangalion).
Marathon though, with its three parts, and its text terminals, had story like nothing else. Oh the header at the top? yah, that line of symbols is actually similiar to a macintosh memory error found on the Apple IIc model: this could signify that the AI construct has run into an overflow error, that may have resulted by attempting to comtemplated its own existence . . . . that's something you might find a bungie fan discussing when it came to marathon. subtle. minor. but brilliant.
Halo has a great story: but the method of story deliver made it way too easy to miss its nuances. It was too easy to just kinda watch the cinematics, and let it do its business. About all you could really do is go "hmmm, is Cortana rampant? Who is the reclaimer? where did the flood came from?" But marathon things were more plentiful, the questions everywhere. The hundreds of armless, legless bobs floating in the hanger bay? erie. the human-like admiral of the Phor? oddly familar. who am i? who was fighting and winning on the colony planetside?
(myth too, i felt, by being delivered through cutscenes made it a little harder to take at anything more than straight face value, though i did love the journey man's journal and the unit descriptions. )
I appreciate those in this thread who have supported halo well; those that have supported halo without much thinking- shame on you! :P And for those who are atttempting to play the old classics: keep trying! you'll never regret it! PiD, marathon, and myth are cliassics that deserve their own hall of fame.
In defense of Halo, i loved the GS swamp level cinematic.
I happened to be playing that alone, in the dark, on a big tv, with sound up . . . when marty's music kicked in, the doors locked, and the FLood, err, Flooded in. . . . i was scared -blam!-less. Thank you bungie for a great cinematic!!!!
i guess in conclusion, i prefer things to not be given so blatantly. I want something i can sit and comlteplate, not something that simply proposes a question, but something that maybe could be answered? Cinematics are great and all, but the terminals were better. Maybe a balance? ;)
Oh, and if any modders are out there: mod Marathon and PiD into Halo!
-Jäger