So, Halo 3: ODST, the Total Pussy Edition, Part 1

Yup. I gave in to the Dark Side. Again. As noted in this AM's vent, it didn't really cost me anything. So, some observations:

Cut scene animations look dated. Yeah, when you're a captive observer of other people's lives, we usually call that TV. And some reviews have pointed out that Dare (or, is it DARE?), Buck's love interest, has a serious steroid jaw syndrome thing going on. It's weird, 'cuz her character model is based on major league cupcake Tricia Helfer. I think it's one of those real-to-art translation thingies gone bad. See this:

She does have a bit of a lantern jaw in real life. (And if you think I missed an opportunity to make an epicly filthy chin joke there, you're wrong. I just refrained.) But whatever the artists/animators did in ODST, Dare's jaw is cartoonishly huge in some scenes. In fact, Buck, based on the roguishly handsome Nathan Fillion, doesn't look so hot, either. It might be that the Halo 3 engine is simply showing its age. The cut scenes I've watched so far just look clunky and undetailed. I've recently played through CoD2, 3, & 4, and the cut scenes don't look dramatically better to me in Halo 3: ODST.

The dialogue in the cutscenes sounds stiff & forced. I expected better voice acting from Nathan Fillion, who played the immortal Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly & its movie offspring Serenity. But the script might be at fault. Tricia Helfer has a sexy voice, and she's a fine actress, but the faux romantic tension doesn't cut her any breaks. Overall, the dialogue and voice acting in all the cut scenes are, well, mediocre. At best.

And, speaking of dialogue, the once-funny "He's here!" and "Why is he chasing me?" Grunt dialogue needs to go. It was funny in Halo: Combat Evolved. It ain't funny any more. Besides, why should the Covenant be as intimidated by someone who isn't the Master Chief, anyway?

The music. Well. You'll either love it as atmospheric and dark, like something from film noir, or, like me, you'll detest it as cheesy and massively out of place. The saxophone and piano segments are sometimes really grating, in your face, and they negate the immersion for me. (Oh, I'm supposed to feel sad & misty here, huh? Thank you, intrusive music cue!) When the piano starts tinkling or the saxophone moaning, I'm suddenly back in front of my monitor, rather than in New Mobasa. I looked in vain for an option to turn the music off. Many other games have an option to turn off the ingame music. Bungie, you guys should really have a menu option to toggle the music off.

The weapons. The new suppressed Magnum is cool, cool, cool. The Magnum hits hard, and the zoom-aim feature that originated with the original Halo: Combat Evolved sidearm essentially turns it into a sniper rifle. Good luck finding ammo for it, though. I've hung onto mine with four rounds left. Four rounds.

And the suppressed submachine gun is very sexy, too. It also features a zoom-aim, and it's dandy for popping the pesky Covenant Grunts. But it suffers from the same ammunition-starvation as the Magnum. I had to ditch the SMG and pick up Covenant weapons unless I wanted to be killed a lot. Bungie has created some of the coolest weapons ever in the Halo universe, but the Halo tradition of ammo scarcity is esentially denying us the use of them in the single-player campaign.

It's funny, too, but the UNSC weapons don't seem to be as powerful as even the weakest Covenant weapons. (I've written before how much I hate those art deco Covenant pieces of shit.) Unfortunately, a lot of the Covenant enemies are shielded, and you need plasma weapons to weaken their protection. The larger enemies, the huge tank-like douchebags, need a grenade on their body before they can be killed by weaker weapons. Forget about going toe-to-toe with them. Plasma-grenade or sticky them & then hit them with multiple blasts from the plasma rifle.

The AI. The enemy AI seems a bit improved. On Normal difficulty, some of the larger enemies will flank you. If you duck into a building, they'll follow you occasionally or wait to ambush you outside. I think Bungie has gotten that right. They're challenging but not so overwhelming that you quit the game in frustration.

The friendly AI is another matter. AIs still can't drive. They beach the Warthog on the side of a hill & park there, letting every Covenant douchebag on the map shower you with plasma love. They crash the Warthog into trees and obstacles, occasionally stomping on the gas to ram the obstruction & jostle your aim.  Like many other SUV drivers, the AI seem unaware of the Warthog's high center of gravity and flip it on you at the most inopportune times... like under massed enemy fire.

On the plus side, the overall ODST campaign seems much better than Halo 3's. There's no Flood, no annoying Gravemind, and the back-tracking seems minimal, so far. I'm playing on Normal difficulty, which is a change for me. (Usually, I go for Easy on all games to compensate for segments in games which the game developers have stupidly made frustratingly hard or with obscure objectives. Plus, I'm old and slow.) The game seems well designed from that perspective. Though there have been a few points were I was moderately pissed, it never approached the legendary WTF proportions of any CoD game's stupidly hard or non-obvious sections. Given the weapons laying around, I've been able to scrape up some grenades, a plasma rifle, and eke my way through the level.

There are innovations which freshen up the feel of what might otherwise be just an emasculated Master Chief romp. Playing as the typically strong & silent space marine, the Rookie, your overall objective is to find out what happened in the six hours you were knocked out after your orbital drop and to learn the fate of the rest of your team. The Hub system disguises somewhat the extremely linear feel of the Halo series single player campaigns, giving it a quasi-open world flavor. The new VISR mode on the HUD gives you some night vision capability, and it outlines enemies in red and friendlies in green. (This might help the friendly fire challenged.) The VISR menu HUD lets you assign waypoints to navigate and it updates your mission objectives to guide you to the different beacons on the map. At the beacons you find objects related to your missing comrades, and interaction with the object triggers flashbacks where you play as Buck, Dutch, Mickey, etc., the rather bland & interchangeable ODST troopers in your squad.

The Sadie & Superintendent subplot, accessed through data terminals on different maps of the game's Hub, is kinda intriguing. You have to watch your ass, tho. I once accessed one of the terminals after sneaking by the Covenant enemies in the area. They killed me while I was in VISR mode watching the Sadie slideshow. I didn't notice getting shot until I saw the "Your health is dangerously low." message on my VISR HUD.

As I proceed through the campaign, I'll maybe edit this or add another part. So, it looks like ODST is at least as good as Halo 3, so it's worth the $60. Of course, since I think Halo 3's single player campaign was pretty weak, "as good as Halo 3" is faint praise, indeed.