I finished playing Halo 4 today. Overall, it took me about 12-14 hours or so. I’m not a very competitive person, so I played it on the ‘easy’ level. That was hard enough, thanks.

And what did I think of it?

Pros:

Lots of action

Great art

The mantis robot is fun to drive

Lots of the gameplay is similar to the other Halo’s in the series

Cons:

Can’t save as you go without quitting too; I find that frustrating in long sequences

Missions were not always clear, which may have been related to the fact that:

Cortina is often hard to hear

Some messages were hard to see on the background because of the colours matching, or close

No introductory manual – I had to go online to find a wiki page to figure some things out, like the controls

Crawlers are the new flood; they don’t add much and they are just plain irritating.

In the end, it was fun, action packed and familiar. Pretty much what you’d want from the next in a series.

Now, back to regular programming.

A couple of months ago, I was in a gym getting some exercise on a stationary bike. Next to me there was a treadmill of sorts and this was the control panel. It seemed funny that they would define a user as a WUS right on the machine 😉 

Over the last 10 days, I’ve spent a good part of each day re-playing the Halo series of XBox games. That’s a strange thing to do, but I’ve never done anything like it before, and because I had all the games, I thought it would be interesting to try.

And interesting it was! It was like a great, absorbing movie that you often wish would never end, combined with the ability to take a direct part in the action yourself. Playing them all through, back to back at the easy level, made it easier to see the story, rather than just be consumed by the action. It was seldom boring and a lot of fun. Nothing else got done, but it was fun 😉

Halo is a series of 5  games (or chapters in the same game?): 

• Halo – Combat Evolved
• Halo 2
• Halo 3
• Halo 3 – ODST
• Halo – Reach 

Reach seem like kind of prequel for all the others, but it came last. Rumour has it that Halo 4 is on the way, but there is no sign of it yet.

So, what did I learn from this little experiment? 

Well, it sure takes a long time to play an XBox game. Even on the ‘easy’ level, I played for 10 days and 6-7 hours a day. That didn’t leave much time for anything else. So, doing something like that is not for the faint of heart, or for those with a lot of commitments.

There is more of a story in the game than I thought, and it’s clearer to me now that I’ve done each chapter back to back. The first time through, the chapters were released months, if not years apart, so the story got lost. It almost seemed that action was the priority, and the overall story was not all that important.

Not so, as I found out in this latest round, but I guess ‘different strokes for different folks’. Some would like the game more for a lot of action than for story. I mean, I like action, but one of the best games I’ve ever played was Myst – and there wasn’t a lot of ‘action’ in that. Just a story that you had to figure out. Then again, Halo is a first person shooter style game, so what do I expect, eh?

The magic in a console game is dependent on the controller. Near the end of Halo Reach, my controller kept losing it’s connection with the console. That doesn’t help when you are up against some of the toughest enemies in the game. That was frustrating, but at least the game carried on once the connection was restored.

Actually, I think it may have been something to do with the game itself. I had the same issue with two different controllers at the same place, and I vaguely remember having the same issue the first time I played it. Otherwise, the controller stayed connected before and after that.

I’m still unsure about buying the new XBox 360. It may be a little faster and work with the ‘Connect’ controller, but my gut is telling me the console I have now is fine until a real XBox hardware upgrade comes out. They’ve just done the software, and it’s been a couple of years now with the current console. Seems like things are ripe for something new. Guess we’ll see.

In my last post, I described how playing Quake 4 was wasting so much time. The playing was fine. It was challenging, fun and there was a reasonable story. It’s just that loading saved games when you’re killed by the opponent took so much time, the game got boring.

Well, I gave up on that and moved on to another game: Halo, Combat Evolved. They are like night and day in the loading saved games department. When you die in Halo, you immediately spawn back to life at the last automatic checkpoint that was made – and those are made frequently. Bottom line? Today and yesterday were a lot of fun.

That got me thinking. Some of us are very tenacious (read stubborn) and tend to keep trying to finish things until we do – no matter how much frustration, or irritation, or wasted time it takes. While that can lead to a certain feeling of accomplishment, you have to wonder if it’s really worth the effort and frustration. In the end, you are usually just left with a bad taste in your mouth about the activity itself.

There is another approach. Give activities a real chance, and if they are uninteresting, boring or other wise a seemingly waste of time, drop them and move on to something else. That’s not an original thought. I’ve heard of people doing it with books. They might read the first 2-5 chapters, and it the author hasn’t caught their imagination by then, they put the book down and move on to the next one.

I did the same with Quake 4. I played here and there during the day for about 3 days, and gave it a good try. It was just plain frustrating waiting for those saves to load, so I dropped it and started Halo. Now I know I can play a whole series of games and enjoy them, rather than doggedly try to finish them, just to finish them.

That’ s probably not a bad model for business either. If, after giving an activity a good, honest shot, you are just getting frustrated – move on to something else, or if it is something that has to get done, outsource it to someone else. Life is too short to waste time getting frustrated, when we could be having a lot of fun making progress towards our goals.

So yes, I think you can learn from gaming. What do you think?

Yep, today was a flashback. What do you do on a day where the wind is howling and the rain in pounding on the skylight?

I spent pretty much the entire day playing Quake 4. Well, playing Quake and waiting for saved games to load after the bad guys got me. On the XBox, the saved Quake 4 games take about 40s each time they load. If you get terminated a lot like I do, you play for 10s and then wait for 40s to play again. Perhaps I need a new strategy? Heh.

It all reminded me of real life. Your time to shine is usually pretty short, compared to the time it takes in preparation. That’s just the way it is.