The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Take a moment, and listen to some of the music of Halo 3: ODST right now. Listen to this, and this, and this.

You’ve basically experienced the best part of the game, in my opinion.

Seriously, that soundtrack is amazing. It takes a game series where my brother and I, when playing through it, would yell “GUNS! WE MUST SHOOT OUR GUNS AT THINGS THAT ARE BAD” during cutscenes and dialog because that was all that was going on. It takes a game that is basically that, and makes it intensely atmospheric.
Then, of course, you get into the flashbacks and you have more normal fare. Alright, but not mind-blowing.

Other than the music, though? I dunno.

Playing so much Halo 3 with the Talking Tyrants was a shit-ton of fun, but it made me intimately familiar with the workings of all the weapons in Halo 3. This caused me to hate them so much. Maybe you can only pick Halo or Call of Duty, but if that’s the case, I’ll pick CoD every time, because your weapons feel powerful. Sure, it’s a LITTLE arcade-y. People still take more damage than they actually do. But if you snipe them, it’s one shot. You can kill a person with less than one clip of ammo with all but the weakest pistols against the heaviest-armored opponents, and even then you can negate that bonus by getting headshots. Compare that to the Halo Assault Rifle, where it takes at least 2 clips to kill another player. It’s just so frustrating and stupid to attack people in Halo. It makes me mad that I can get the jump on somebody and lose, because it takes so many shots.

And so, through all the matches, I began to loathe all Halo weapons. Odious Tea did nothing to negate that.

The game really makes me wish that Bungie had gotten to create something else. The game does a shockingly-good job of being atmospheric in the Rookie segments. It feels like a game I want to play. But then I come upon some Covenant and it becomes a game I’ve played to death and is really annoying to me. I really couldn’t get over it as I played. It was so frustrating. A non-Halo game like this I would probably fall in love with.

Still, I was going to hold out up until I learned that Bungie hates people playing their game the way they want to. I have never played a Halo game by myself, and yet I was going to play Odious Tea in that way. I die constantly on Normal in Co-op, so, of course, to play alone I set it to easy, to which I was greeted with a description that “the game basically plays itself.” Thanks, Bungie. Needed that insult. But I continue on anyway, until I realize that I am not getting a lot of achievements. I check them. Apparently you can get the achievements on anything BUT easy. Any other difficulty, but they don’t allow easy for absolutely no damn reason for achievements that are just “Beat Level 1,” “Beat Level 2,” etc. I’m not a complete achievement whore, but I do very much like achievements. I like earning them. They do give me incentive to keep going. I was very pissed Bungie so desperately wanted me not to play their game the way I wanted that they removed that incentive from me.
So after that big fuck you from Bungie, I didn’t feel like pressing through the mechanics I didn’t like any more. I sent it back.

If you can still stomach Halo combat, I bet ODST would be a really, really damn good experience. It’s certainly paying much better attention to story. But it’s pretty obvious it’s not for me.