Halo is important

[Music] oh [Music] slayer halo is good and i like it a lot thank you for watching uh listen i don't usually do this kind of thing but i feel like i gotta say right off the bat halo means a lot to me like it's hard for me to even discuss because of how highly i value uh you know keeping one's feelings and biases and nostalgia and check when thinking critically you have to understand that this is a game that i picked up when i was like six up until that point my experience with gaming was a couple hot wheels flash games and knee for speed porsche unleashed all running on my dad's work issued 2001 think pad you know honestly porsche only still kind of slaps but this was different okay this this was special i first played it around 2004 and it was instantly my favorite game ever and now it's 20 20. and it's still my favorite game ever i i can't even come close to objectivity we're discussing it critically but fuck it man i don't care anymore if i don't talk about this game soon i'm going to scream in real life also before we begin we are going to be discussing the campaign not the multiplayer the campaign i have nothing to say about the multiplayer because as a child i was lonely i also don't think it aged very well and i'm not very good at it okay so we've got ourselves up to a respectable 10 kills we're not we're not in first place but we're certainly we're certainly above noodle here i hope you wake up crucified dude i'll also be avoiding any major spoilers since an upsetting amount of people have yet to play this game and i'm here to change that so if you're gonna talk spoilers do me a favor leave a spoiler warning in the comments for your fellow gamer one more thing i have a contractual obligation so look at this shirt i'm wearing do you like it it's okay i guess thanks i made it and got free shipping by using honey a free shopping tool that finds promo codes and smears it all over your cart the concept is so simple that even a soft-headed man like yourself could understand it you're about to spend precious resources on something you don't need honey slides on in take a bite here wait a few seconds and there you go wow look at brayden notice his many faults now look at him but with honey he is the same but now he has honey by using honey you can get free shipping on anything everything on my shit over a teespring it's that easy i'm actually moving merch from teespring to crowdmade in the near future and i know i've been saying this a lot but all these designs are going away so if you want them now is your chance honey supports more than 30 000 stores online and those of y'all have already succumbed to capitalism and use my link have saved over 4 400 dollars what the fuck honey save you money it's pretty straightforward it's free works one click they don't sell your data and they're part of paypal and venmo now so that means you can trust them i i think get it for free joinhoney.com noodle what is it brayden that's right it's joinhoney.com noodle honey is paying me thank you to honey okay flashback to 1997. titanic just came out a sheep has just been cloned and i am a seaman the beautiful boys of bungie now three studios strong find themselves very busy marathons popping off smith is about to come out and if you guys over in one side little corner are talking about this uh this weird new game idea it's a dinky ass pre-alpha basically a bunch of ideas duct taped together into something half playable and as the weeks of development turn into months it would go through a number of iterations an rts called blam a shooter called the armor an rpg called monkey nuts that's that is not a joke and while the team struggled throughout the next few years to figure out what this funky little halo game is supposed to be the rest of bungie went from fine to not fine the studio had just put out their latest title myth 2. now now myth 2 had this really quirky funny feature where uh if you asked it to uninstall from the computer it would delete the game it would do that but it would also delete every other file on your hard drive oh you don't like our game guess what fucker they were called all 50 000 printed copies and created a bunch of new ones losing about a million dollars in the process this mixed with a couple other things men bungie just kind of ran out of money so one thing led to another eventually they got bought by microsoft and a deal was struck bungie was to make halo within a year and it had to ship alongside the launch of microsims new box thing as an exclusive and seeing as how the game was first shown off a year ago at mac world steve jobs probably thought this was this was really cool imagine if you will you are an entire game studio in this case bungie right you've never made anything for a console before you don't even know how this thing works and you have about 10 months to turn your sloppy proof of concept into a shippable product for a console nobody owned when nobody ever made shooters for the console unless their name was rare and at this point the game was still a third person shooter things were fuck they started cutting features left and right no more open world no more day night cycle the campaign went from 25 missions to 10 and that still wasn't enough remember those other two studios remember the other games they were working on yeah fuck those everyone's making halo now four months before the game was supposed to come out they decided the multiplayer wasn't fun so they scrapped everything and started from scratch it wasn't working until five weeks before launch day team members were sleeping in the building for months they literally did not have time to go home so it's 2001 a a really cool year where where nothing bad happened xbox finally launches and with it shrek and mad dash and halo as i understand it the general public really didn't care all that much about halo at first you know i mean i was kind of looking forward to more uh dead or alive three uh you know because there's titties in that game but i mean you know whatever i'll try it holy shit game is so good the shooting and the graphics and the multiplayer the music is also good and there's titty what the fuck the story is sick the sounds are powerful the music is the gameplay you shouldn't have clicked on this video dude now you only started considering the aforementioned development hell the game went through you wouldn't expect the end result to be that good and it's not good it's fucking great it seems so simple it's like any other boring quake club you think to yourself stupidly with your dumb pants and your head fuck you when halo came out it completely shattered people's expectations of what an fps could even be if doom was like when movies first had sound then halo was when we moved to color for the first time ever we have a game that asks you to use the thumbstick to aim yeah up until that point we've been using the the d-pad the controls were so intuitive so effortless that everyone started copying them but here's the thing it's not just the way john chief controls though it's the way the ai responds like i don't know whether halo was so ahead of its time that we're still catching up or the industry has collectively done a backwards double somersault into the dumpster but you'd be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of games that can even compete when ubisoft or treyarch or dice sits down to make a campaign shooter they'll craft a challenge through scripted sequences or in the case of an open world game this time instead of three people who act with the tactical finesse of a frog now there's like maybe seven wow that's amazing amazing i feel like this is probably one of the biggest reasons shooter campaigns often feel so forgettable it didn't challenge you in an interesting way i went into forge and tried to recreate the geometry of that last game and the experience was totally different not just because the guys had more health but because the ai didn't stand in place waiting to get shot in any halo game the experience will be very different depending on your guns the bad guys and the map layout enemies are placed almost like chess pieces on a board the shootout that looks like this triple kill is gonna play out completely different from say this double kill triple kill every alien has different strengths and weaknesses they interact with the player and each other in subtle but different ways here's an example grunts are super easy to kill and grenades are a powerful weapon so you probably wouldn't use a grenade on a grunt you save it for the elites who are bastards that is until you realize that sticking a grenade to a grunt will cause him to panic he'll probably run towards the group for help doing more damage to everyone he was near try that on an elite he'll more likely realize his time has come fucking kamikaze style to take you out with him in the control room mission you're given a tank but personally i hate the tank i i don't like it's bad i don't like it i'd rather just stay in the warthog which is a completely viable option when i reached a big tank sized bridge a little bit of exploration revealed a convenient group of dead guys full of sniper ammo i wasn't just allowed to do things my own way i was encouraged and the game is full of little details like this there's no single strategy that'll work well for every encounter at any given time the player is making dozens of subconscious split-second decisions that drastically impact the course of battle and because of that your solution might look entirely different from somebody else's it's so fucking good this you can replay this bit as many times as you like it doesn't matter what gun you use it's always going to play out the same way because there's only one viable option even destiny 2 a game made by bungie struggles to understand what makes difficulty fun if someone says a fight was really hard on halo they probably got careless or outmaneuvered but they met one of these fucking guys the ai outsmarted them it forced them to think outside the box to overcome a genuine challenge when someone says a fight is really hard in destiny they mean the one guy had a big health bar okay so the master chef is really good at emerging gameplay that's that's the point cool as for the other aspects of the game i'll be the first to admit that halo's moment-to-moment story isn't anything to write home about but what it lacks narratively it makes up for an atmosphere you see what i did there i changed the color and the music i've changed the atmosphere when your game consists of six triangles one would assume it's very difficult to establish any kind of tone music alone can't do all the heavy lifting which is why when the game begins you're surrounded by narrow corridors and friends every which way that help you out the music and narrative work together to build this sense of heroism drive determination next thing you know your life pod crash lands on an unknown alien ring world as you the only survivor step outside of the life pod this uncharted world opens up [Music] the strings fade in and you get this real sense of unease and mystery besides the covenant the ring is a dead quiet which is weird i mean the ring shirts out doesn't look natural well there are large metallic structures all over the place built into the mountain sticking out of the ground shit's older than you can even imagine but there are no hints of life [Music] environmental storytelling there's barely any cutscene no fucking alpha squad come in this world's scary i don't like it you don't need that you feel it because you're there and without spoiling anything the game manages to do this again and again and again bungie excels in its ability to use conventional storytelling in conjunction with the kind of environmental cues that only a video game is capable of the world is used to convey information and to establish moods and tones of saber interactive decided to honor if if of course by honor you mean completely fucking ignore i will never forgive them look what they did look what they've done to my boy for every sunny island and frozen ravine there's a bright purple hallway or dark tunnel firefights obliterate these cold sterile corridors that have otherwise remained untouched for god knows how long and you know for a game about inserting lead into living things there's a surprising amount of smaller moments too a while ago i was playing halo in a discord call and a friend asked me whether the game was often so laid back in his mind the series like any other shooter seems like it'd be all about but like no not at all combat isn't always adrenaline-fueled [Music] mayhem long stretches of time are dedicated to building atmosphere entire firefights can be bypassed using stealth the marines talk like the boys playing co-op they actually get more vulgar the higher the difficulty there's so much character and for all its flaws the overarching story is pretty engaging too starts out as a simple case of us versus them but it quickly turns into this story of four opposing forces each faction sporting their own distinct appearance personality and goals things that at one point seemed insignificant are recontextualized into inter fucking galactic importance the entire ending level is so fucking weird the graphics are dumb and ugly and i don't like that yeah i can see where you're coming from game's like 20 years old but here's the thing the graphics might look old and lame but the sound hasn't aged a day [Music] yeah we all saw it coming your friend's sister's neighbor's dog probably knows that halo's got good music but that's my point you don't have to know anything about halo you've definitely heard the theme if you live uh you know uh here and if that's not a testament to how memorable and iconic the music is then i don't know i'll be a little mad for a while it's kind of ridiculous how much mileage marty gets out of the main theme but what's even more insane is how different it hits depending on when and how it's played from dramatic [Music] tension [Music] [Music] to like a delicate sense of desperation with all due respect sir this war has enough dead heroes and even a hint of guilt i don't know i'm kind of conflicted on this one that's it just a gregorian chant can probably be traced back to more than half the ost a melody which by the way marty wrote while on his way to work three days before it played live at mac world i guess i'll just quit everything yeah i find it interesting how a game based entirely around ensuring that every alien is cranium it can so effectively elicit feelings that have very little to do with the action seriously i mean what the fuck kind of game has music like this gameplay like this and and it works it just works it's effortless how they do that how am i vibing how am i so relaxed while simultaneously taking life i i guess a lot of it has to do with how tightly music is wrapped around the levels how efficiently it adapts and changes to tones and scenery one thing i thought was pretty funny was that marty always included what he called the uh i'm bored now switch which would trigger no matter what if a song had in his opinion just kind of gone on for too long my first approach was music shouldn't be playing all the time no matter how random and how cool is being played back after three four minutes it starts to just become background wallpaper sometimes subtle ambience tells a story better than any music ever could as mcdonald once said if music is what makes you feel as sound is what makes it real because the music is used sparingly and with intent it becomes more of a noticeable highlight it's like swearing if you're like me and say fuck all the time nobody's gonna be surprised when you call someone a fucking asshole but if a quiet shy reserved dude out of nowhere was like that guy's a fucking asshole you'd be like oh my god who hurt you it's this consistent sense of direction that propels halo to the top it just wouldn't have worked if the people behind it didn't share such a strong passion for story atmosphere and just having fun halo's a lot like bungie in that it can be serious when it wants to be but at the end of the day it's really just here to have a good time and nowadays i can really appreciate that it's so easy to love you know for a long time i thought this game was made for me it has just about everything i like in a video game until about a year ago when i realized it was the game that almost single-handedly defined what i enjoy today it's not perfect it can be slow to get going the library sucks the multiplayer aged pretty badly the graphics are either dated or just inappropriate and the story can sometimes fall short we cut the level where we in a more elegant way described this here it comes what do they call it they call it halo well of course they do chief takes it in stride come on yeah chief knows exposition when he hears it he's good it's really fucking good it's it's ten dollars come on it's not it's it's okay it's partially nostalgic it's not all nostalgia i promise go go play it fuck unsubscribe [Music] you

Channel: Noodle

Views: 1,595,268

Rating: 4.9530144 out of 5

Keywords: halo, halo ce, combat evolved, bungie, halo 2, halo 3, master chief collection, mcc, marty o'donnell, martin o'donnell, noodle, video essay, game design, xbox, pc, masterpiece, act man, 343, infinite, 2020, development, jason jones, alex seropian, marathon, myth, mac world, theme, 360, series x, music, ost, master chief, jon, john, 117, hiddenXperia, the act man, elite, grunt, jackal, destiny, Ducain23, infernoplus, rocketsloth, rocket sloth, sametoken, same token, HaloFollower, chris ray gun, chrisraygun

Id: hwEYp8ZY3ak

Length: 20min 47sec (1247 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Austacker]

You son of a bitch.

Not ONLY was that video just fucking awesome, I HAD to sub AND go play Halo again.

.

.

.

The fucking feels of that Theme.... THE FEELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[u/life_49ers]

low chanting begins “Ahhhhhhh ah ah-ha ahhhhhhhhhh”

[u/BoBoBearDev]

For such a long video, I enjoyed every second of it, including the ads.

[u/giants888]

Captain Halo is my favorite video game character. His computer AI friend Siri is cool too.

[u/hgisudhviladshgjkld]

I truly hope this next halo is decent, I need something different to play online after playing a lot of call of duty over the last 5 years.

I have started playing more halo MCC halo 3 but it’s not the same as I remember it.

[u/DarkriserPE]

I saw this video a week or so ago, and I thought he's the weirdest guy to talk about Halo.

For starters, he says he doesn't like the multiplayer. Even though Halo's story is a big selling point, and many fans care deeply about it, you can't deny the multiplayer is the biggest draw. So for him to care so much about the series, and not like the multiplayer, it's a bit rare to see.

He says CE's gameplay, specifically multiplayer, is outdated. To each their own, but I feel like due to the fact he doesn't care about the multiplayer, for any of the Halos, he isn't really "qualified" to make that conclusion. But as I said, to each their own, and my own is that CE holds up pretty well.

He also says Halo's moment to moment story isn't the greatest, not sure what he means, as he later praises the story, but he seems to not like some aspect of the story.

So it's a dude who doesn't care about the multiplayer, and has some issue with the story. He's like the least qualified to make a video on the subject, and yet he still loves Halo. Not insulting him, but he does come from an interesting, and rare, point of view. He also only focuses on CE for some reason. I don't know. Weird video. Can't really recommend it to anyone due to its length, and odd perspective, but I don't have an issue with it, and don't feel like I wasted my time watching it.

[u/bubblebytes]

Oh yeah???

You're important.

*Drops mic*

[u/Bondrewd67]

halo

[u/Bondrewd67]

destiny