Halo Reach

Because Finals are so close, I'm taking a break from New Vegas. It's too hard to put that game down, so it's best not to pick it up. For now at least. Thus, I'm playing Halo Reach.

I'm not a huge Halo fan. That is to say I'm not a fanboy.I've always enjoyed Halo games, but I've never seen them as my favorite. Halo has however been the staple at any LAN party I've ever hosted or gone to. We may enjoy Call of Duty more as a group, but when you have 15 people and 7 systems, the only game everyone can play is Halo. So thank you Bungie for allowing Split screen and system link. The multiplayer is very well built (nothing feels too over powered. It's not as balanced as Team Fortress 2, but it's pretty damn close). The single player is enjoyable, but rarely does it feel "perfect." On a scale of 1 to Call of Duty 2. Halo Reach brings back everything I loved from Halo 1 (the pistol, the health, the shield recharge rate) and added many new things (the DMR being my favorite). The enemy A.I. is amazing. Elites will walk in front of another that has their shield depleted. Which gets very annoying. The Grunts will often flank. Which isn't too bad to deal with, but it's still impressive. The Hunters will hide behind things if you're taking pot shots at them.

Everything that's great about the enemy A.I. I swear is lost on the allies A.I.
I feel like I'm baby sitting. Now the normal Grunt A.I. [by which I mean your allies] is as good as it's ever been been. They shoot, they take cover, they rarely advance (but they rarely do enough damage to warrent advancing) and are fun to give fuel rod cannons to. The "bad" A.I. is the Noble Team. My word do they suck. I don't know why, they just feel beyond pathetic. You're leader tells you to "Leave the Lone Wolf stuff behind. We're a team." Perfect! I love squad based combat. But then the squad is all but useless. They can't die (which is good, because I don't want some escort mission type thing going on) but they do stuff that just doesn't make sense. I've seen them drive around in Warthogs getting blasted with enemy rounds while I take cover and shoot the enemy. They could get on the gun and shoot but no, they would rather just drive through the enemy. In multiplayer or if you catch the enemy off guard (or are a really good driver) you can kill a lot of guys doing this. Their A.I. is neither of these. And this always happens when I REALLY need their help. I've got two hunters I'm taking shots at. In Heroic I was able to get inside and kinda run around them. Took a long time but I was able to kill them. I really needed my A.I. to be smart enough to attack them from the other side. But she never really wanted to attack them. Just run around. In legendary, in the same area, she only shot at them once. Now this time I shot charged plasma pistol shots at them from a distance. Like hell I was going in there and engaging them, I'd get slaughtered. It would have been nice if she had at least taken some pot shots with me. Make me feel like she was there. But I'm constantly forgetting I ever have a team with me. The only advantage to them over normal grunts is that they don't die. Your team in Bad Company 2 was twice as useful. They felt like a team. I was reminded they weren't really people when they'd take a rocket round or something, but otherwise they felt real and I would worry about them getting killed even though I knew they couldn't. I would have thought that Bungie, who has really made some of the best A.I. I've ever seen for normal NPCs and enemies, would have made some decent team A.I.

In the "last" mission, you're helmet screen gets cracked at least twice. I don't know if it's scripted, I'm pretty sure it's done from "damage" you've been dealt. At any rate, I really wish they had done that for the whole game. Fighting through a cracked face plate made me feel like I was really there. And it is something I'd expect to happen in real combat.

I can't give Bungie too much flack on the A.I
I'm a Computer Science major because I want to make that A.I. as perfect as I can. So knowing it has room to improve means I'll still have a job when I get done with college. But also I don't know how to make it better at this point. I can't say that "They should have added *insert variable* into the A.I. loop so they would just know you were doing this." I wish I could, but I'd have to get a look at the source code. And even then, to think that I could do better than them is a bit too arrogant. I really want to look at the source code to fool around with the A.I. though. That would be far too much fun :P