Near the end of the first playable H4 campaign level, Dawn, there are some hidden BRs that are very useful. Just before you head out the door to the space engagement, there are four BRs hidden behind wall panels. There's a BR rack outside as well, but not enough for multiple players.
Tuesday nights will be weighted towards Infinity War Games, typically in 4v4 Slayer or 8v8 Slayer, depending on our party size.
We will continue a secondary Thursday night clan night for as long as there is interest. Will typically be at 9pm PT, and will be weighted towards Spartan Ops, Campaign, achievement and challenge hunting, as long as party size allows.
The next episode of Spartan Ops released today.
Weekly challenges available:
So we've had a couple of days to play with Halo Combat Evolved: Anniversary edition. It does appear that you need to download the classic Halo 1 multi-player maps by using the code included in your game. Some thoughts:
Campaign: It's sad that this is 2 player only, but it's still a pretty fun campaign with great music. It's gorgeous compared to Halo 1, but I wouldn't say that it's quite "current gen." Hitting the Back button is neat to see the original graphics. The Grunt Funeral skull is a game changer, it basically makes killing Elites trivially easy. Headshot one grunt in the squad, and everyone goes boom. Also makes it dangerous to melee grunts now.
Firefight: This is satisfyingly fun to play on the Halo 1 campaign maps, and a nice alternative to campaign. It basically gives you a way to play snippets of the campaign as 4 player co-op, on XBL, with Challenges available.
Multiplayer: This is launched from the Halo CEA disc, but takes you into the Reach matchmaking engine. The game types and maps prefaced by "Anniversary" are the classic game types and maps. Beaver Creek was the most familiar, but Damnation and Prisoner showed up several times as well. Here are averaged clan stats from clan night, some things never change:
This week, Bungie is offering 10,000 cR for finishing 9 Campaign levels on Heroic. If you haven't finished the Campaign yet, 9 levels is exactly how many it takes to play the whole game through, so this week would be a good time to do so. If you've been paying attention to the blog, you'll already know the easiest way to get this done. I finished in about 30 minutes.
Today features another "Iron With Friends" challenging you to finish a campaign mission on co-op with the Iron skull turned on. I just discovered that you can actually do this yourself in split-screen with a guest on the second controller. If you sprint through Winter Contingency, the guest will just teleport forward as you make progress so you never have to touch the second controller. The only place you have to move player 2 is after the Falcon drops you off by the blast doors, where you'll have to move player 2 out of fire. I moved both players to the stairs, and then moved one at a time into the blast door area. For those who can't figure this out, I'll likely be on at 11pm tonight to work on the multiplayer challenges.
Sometimes there are challenges like Points Pyramid (score xx,000 points) that require you to turn on a bunch of skulls and try to rack up a high score in Campaign. The skulls do things like limit ammo, increase AI dodging of grenades, turn off the HUD, turn off radar, upgrade enemies, etc. The more skulls generally, the harder it is. But it's something you have to do in order to get a high enough score. The key here is that the flying levels are largely unaffected by skulls because you have infinite ammo and Banshees/Phantoms/Seraphs are mostly unaffected by skull upgrades.
There are lots of campaign challenges that simply require you to finish a level with some specific conditions. Challenges like Foggy Notion (Heroic, Cloud, Famine), Like a Glove (Heroic, Catch), Flawless Cowboy (Heroic, No Deaths) sound a lot harder than they actually are. Most of the time, you don't really have to "play" the level at all and can be done in about 5 minutes.
Nightfall has a path and a glitch that allows you to sprint through and finish the entire level in 5 minutes. You can have as many skulls as you like since you won't really run into any resistance. See here for a real example from my game history. Winter Contingency also has a path that allows you to sprint through and finish the entire level in under 15 minutes. No glitch required here, but takes a little longer because of the unskippable cutscenes. See game history example here. For most of the challenges, I prefer the Nightfall run because it's faster. Sometimes the Winter Contingency run is more appropriate though, especially if you have to not die for the challenge. On occasion, the Forklift Glitch takes more than one try and you can get killed trying.
One of the most difficult (or tedious) achievements to get in Halo Reach is "A Monument to All Your Sins," awarded for finishing the entire campaign on Legendary, solo. Congratulations to Octurian Poon and CoolerSopranos2 for accomplishing this impressive feat!
So I've now finished the campaign on Normal Co-op (4 players), Legendary Co-op (2-4 players) and Legendary Solo. Here's some tidbits that the data suggests:
On the eighth campaign mission, New Alexandria, you can effectively request a new Falcon at any time. If your plane has gotten shot up and is smoking, just set it down on any roof top or balcony and get out. You will see a prompt that says "Call for emergency evac." Hit down on your D-pad, and Kat will send up a brand new Falcon with two new gunners and you can continue right where you left off.
Starting now starring gtdroptop, OmniscientDeath, Fishbone10 and TimMAY 1023. We'll have an Xbox Live party running if you'd like to pop in to say hello.
Some more clips from the campaign with Bungie staff voiceovers. Note that there are major campaign spoilers in here, watch at your own risk.
Exactly one week to Reach. We have a full team signed up for a midnight campaign run: gtdroptop, OmniscientDeath, TimMAY 1023, Fishbone10. If there are others who want to commit to a 7 hour campaign run at midnight, have pre-ordered their game at a retailer open at midnight, and are looking for friends, I'm happy to help coordinate.
Noble 3 has the long gun, Noble 4 has the sweet helmet, Noble 5 has the chaingun, and Noble 6 is Hyper-Lethal. I can't decide.
For those that haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet, buy.com just dropped their price on Halo 3: ODST to $53.99 with free shipping.
A tip for all your working your way through the Campaign: The campaign missions do not have linear memory. What I mean by that is that if you go back and replay a mission somewhere in the beginning or middle of the game, you will LOSE ALL OF YOUR PROGRESS when you return to the mission you left off on. There are six sub-story lines to check off in your objectives. If you go back to replay a mission earlier than your current progress, it will clear your progress on all of those sub-story lines and you will have to do them over again. The final mission will not be available until all six are checked off at the same time.
Solo and co-op campaign progress is tracked separately, so you can replay solo missions without clearing your co-op progress.
36 hours after launch, I now have a better feel for Firefight and can provide some tips and tricks. First and foremost is how the mode is structured. The game sends enemies in groups: 5 waves per round, 3 rounds per set, and as many sets as you can survive. The picture on the left shows how the HUD displays your progress. Note that the game will go on forever until you spend all your lives...which is a LONG time on Easy. For some reason, we had a game on Crater end after 3 sets, but that may been a network glitch.
FishBone10 and Beer4Porter helped me to break in H3: ODST's new Firefight mode right after the midnight launch. And it is FUN! Even though I scored over half of our team's points, I do have to recommend their generous assistance in my "Invincible" medal (kill 100 enemies without dying). Some housekeeping items:
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