I’ve never heard of any of these accessories before they’re really cool

I love gyro controls I used an Armor X Pro on my Xbox controller for years, it was a bit janky but made my aim extremely accurate and the 4 back buttons gyro on/off button were really nice

OMG I love this!!

Dedicated handhelds will perform away better than a phone with the same chip because they usually have big cooling fans

Screenshots

Marathon and Halo but I’m too sluggish and tired to do anyrhing for the last few days lol

Definitely 2.4ghz auto switching that band is very congested everywhere

It’s already been cracked!

The ancient humans (called “ancestors”) that directly preceded the 'Murica humanity are literally native American too lmao

Headshotting the non-shielded flood was fun but the hit detection or aim assist felt very iffy, but I had to lean on plasma rifle spray because of the sheer number of shielded flood and the pistol can only take down 1 before needing to reload. I swear they gave most of the flood shields and the red shielded elites felt like they took more than one clip.

👽 🍿🍄‍🟫

I tried playing the prequel missions first but switched over because Johnson despawned before he unlocked a door and it ruined my run in the first level lol. I’ll be playing them soon but it really put me off the level design was bad and had no cover in my first impression lol

Big post lol, I literally just finished my legendary playthrough

[1/8] Campaign Remastered is Triple AAA Halo. After 5 years we end up with a game where only 2-3 of the 6 main weapons feel right and 2 of the 4 main enemies are broken. The game only feels correct when fighting low-level elites and grunts with the AR and Magnum, and even then the magnum switch is so slow it really disrupts the flow of combat.

[2/8] Hitboxes are broken - the Hunters are so aggressive you have to push into melee range to stay safe from their cannons but their melee hitbox is broken and you’ll be killed despite being a full meter away from their bludgeons and fists. You’re forced to keep distance and shoot at their knees which does not feel good. Especially because they’ve introduced literally 10+ new hunter fights into the game that weren’t in the original.

[3/8] But the most egregious problem with the gameplay is the jackals, the 2nd most common enemy in the game. You fight hundreds of them but the bullet magnetism is broken and will pull your bullets away from their weakspot (their pistol hand, opposite to their hand which holds their riot shield) and towards their head which is behind their riot shield. Jackals also kill you in one hit with a charged plasma pistol even when you’re at full health - they are worse than Halo 2’s jackal snipers and have no counter. They literally don’t have a weakspot. Their weakspot is their pistol hand. They’re so badly made they will 1-hit kill you by shooting a surprise charged shot through their own hands and riot shields without warning. I’ve died to this literally hundreds of times, more than anything else in the game. In a tense fight you always need to save your grenades for jackals.

[4/8] Their level changes are bad, new 343 is in love with the hallway of death. You will encounter them in every level change they’ve made. You have no ammo and you have to walk across a 20m long hallway with no cover to open an automatic sliding door door and die instantly because 20 enemies shoot you at once - you can’t play the door by walking back and closing it because they will push closer and keep the door open, there is literally not enough time to react and survive. The fights in every other Halo game were fundamentally fair, even if they’re a slog. This includes Halo 4 and 5. If you learn the mechanics you’re awarded by surviving, this does not apply to campaign evolved. You survive a bullshit fight because of pure luck, which will make an Iron Skull playthrough absolutely miserable.

[5/8] The Prometheans in Halo 4-5 have weakspots and are vulnerable to their own hardlight weapons. The complaints about them are overblown in my opinion and imo they’re fun to overcome by matching their own aggression and attriting their support. Hunters and flood enemies in the remake have no weakspots, I have a clip of me shooting flood enemy literally 200 times with an assault rifle in its head before it dies. It has no weakspots and one-hits you. The usual utility counters that take advantage of their hidden weakenesses from the other games don’t apply here.

[6/8] Finally the most unforgiveable changes are that the tone of the game has shifted from 80s-90s scifi like Alien/Aliens and Ghost in the Shell to Marvel. Some day someone will write a feminist academic paper on the infantilization of Cortana. Yes her character in the previous games was flawed - and in my opinion 343 made her genuinely compelling among all fictional characters in Halo 4 - but this is just embarrassing. This is Microsoft coming down hard enforcing their brand guidelines, the character in this game is not Halo’s Cortana, this is literally Microsoft Windows Cortana. Her voicelines have been re-recorded and she has been regressed from a challenging but highly competent professional coworker managing a cascading crisis to what GamerGate wants every woman to be. I thought her character would develop throughout the game, becoming more confident, and more like her original self. But no, when she takes over Halo’s control room and is given godlike power and knowledge she still talks to you like she’s your intern and she’s afraid of offending you because you’re going to fire her. You can guess why the executives at Microsoft have pushed her character in this direction. She is no longer an equal partner to you - playing the game with this characterization of her makes me genuinely uncomfortable and solidifies the total chudification of the series.

[7/8] It’s been almost 20 years now since 343 took over and they’ve been consistently getting worse because at a fundamental level HALO studios is basically a sweatshop that churns through 18 month contractors instead of a real development studio. In the same timeframe Bungie went from making Halo 3 ODST to Destiny 2: The Final Shape while 343 went from making Halo 4 (a game I genuinely love and think is compelling a decade later!) to whatever this is. UE5 slop tonally designed to groom children into joining the military, with the exact same child-targeted tone changes made between Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2009) to Call of Duty Modern Warfare II (2022).

[8/8] The game is not good. Gameplay wise it can be fixed but everything that made the series compelling outside of that is dead. Not even going to get into how little the game respects you - the fact that between Truth and Reconciliation and Silent Cartographer Cortana explained what invisible elites are and what hunters are and exactly how to kill them no less than 5 times is what made me realize the game is Triple AAA Mario and Microsoft finally hired that man. Halo 4 got flak for revealing what forerunners looked like in order to have them play an active role in the story, this game stops and explains literally everything you could possibly be wondering about, as if developers showed a full playthrough to a clueless bourgeois executive, and every time he said “what is that? Why’d they do that?” they were forced to insert a line from Cortana explaining what it is. You will come across unexplained mysterious structures or oddities from the original and you’ll get a really disappointing answer the second you get the slightest feeling of wonder.

I’m also very mixed on it, I’m a huge fan of Halo 4’s campaign and 5’s multiplayer but they also ship things that never would have passed Bungie’s quality filter. Generally I prefer how confident 343 was for Halo 4 than this inferiority complex toward Bungie that developed since starting Halo 5 which has only grown through Infinite-CE.

Like the art is solid but the voice acting and cutscene directing is pretty shocking at times, Reddit hasn’t caught up to it but most of the “new” stuff from the cutscenes are pulled 1-to-1 from original storyboards from Halo CE so it’s all stuff that was literally cut because it messed with the pacing or was abbreviated so it didn’t overexplain things. The storytelling literally feels amateurish because they’re undoing the professional editing work that Bungie did (and that they themselves nailed with Halo 4). Also there’s weird gaps like they cut the scene of the escape pod shooting out from the Autumn - it just cuts to the pod outside several miles away instead.

My impression is the studio is in shambles and can still execute on some things but has zero morale on others. Imo the game was just released before it was ready, it needed one more pass for the VA performances, performance, and small but important details for gameplay. For example the wonky plasma pistol charged shots (half-charged shots no longer exist) and no enemy stun effect from the plasma rifle is really messing with my legendary playthrough. Some fundamental things like the Magnum aim assist trying to shoot a jackals head through their shield rather than their hand, you can shoot directly at their exposed palms then see the bullet tracer curve towards their heads and bounce off their shield lol.

Marathon has really good DLSS too so it’s a jumpscare going from a crystal clear game to UE5 temporal artifact city

I got it working but it’s incredibly blurry lol, it looks much better in the YouTube videos than in person. Plays will but it might have the worst implementation of DLSS and temporal effects I’ve ever seen even by UE5 standards

Overall my impression is that it’s kind of like if the Demons Souls PS5 remake (which I really enjoyed tbf) looked like 720p at 4k resolution

Truly bizarre considering the VA performance and direction in their first game Halo 4 was the best in the entire series, as good as any of their competition from God of War 2017 or

The Last of Us

The interactions between Chief, Dr. Tillson, and Cortana on Ivanoff Station in 4 were genuinely compelling and now the series is unwatchable lol, I think the reactionary fanbase and contractor practices at Microsoft quickly brain drained the studio into a husk of itself

This worked! Thank you so much!

Palworld would have been better as a commune simulator with combat, Nintendo ended up taking the best parts of it (the creatures-house-village-economy interaction) and put it into Pokepia which illustrates how badly the Palworld developers missed the point

Playing Marathon made me so much better at shooters after plateauing for years, I was able to go back and breeze through Halo 2 legendary, it really distills everything I love about shooter games

It is definitely Anxiety: The VideoGame, the only times I’m not anxious playing it is when I’m playing the solo Rook with the silenced pistol that has the upgraded free kit because I have nothing to lose (especially because Rook matchmaking times are instant for when I die)

The only relaxing parts of the game was the PVE mode at the beginning of Season 2 and probably the new PVE Roguelike mode coming next week