RedStarRocket91

Snape kills Dumbledore.

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Just to expand on these three points in particular: Even when you have an Energy Sword, try to avoid melee. On Legendary, an Energy Sword hit doesn't even guarantee that you're going to drop an Elite's shields, let alone kill it outright, and if you don't at least stagger them with the hit then they'll just immediately melee you right back and it will kill you. Use melee to pick off single grunts or Jackals, or as a desperation move if you have an Energy Sword and you're about to be killed anyway, but otherwise the only time you want to actively be choosing to get in to close range is when you're dealing with the Flood. As soon as the enemies are dead, advance forward and then immediately fall back, because Halo 2 just loves to spawn enemies behind you, or on top of you, or somewhere that you're not expecting, and the simple act of moving forward will get you killed as often as not. The noob combo is a dangerous thing, and in Halo 2 it's at its most powerful. Put simply, the only times where you won't want to be using it is if there's a Rocket Launcher or a Sniper Rifle available (or the racial equivalent), or if you're fighting the Flood, where you'll want to go with a headshot/close range weapon combo. Good tips though, Caboose!

Just an example! You're absolutely free to choose more or less if you'd like!

So, Caboose made this thread in Offbeat earlier today, and while his suggestions were very funny, I think it's actually a really interesting topic, and one which could provoke a lot of discussion. Therefore, let's have one! For the sake of convenience, '20 years' is sort of a soft limit - if you really want to say Sonic the Hedgehog 2, for example, then that would be okay even though it actually came a little earlier. You also don't need to feel beholden to just choose a single 'best' game if you'd prefer not to, so feel free to tell us your favourite games from different genres, or even just a 'top 5' list of the things you consider to be the greatest titles from the past two decades. Above all, make sure to let us know why you consider these games to be the best, whether it's because they're mechanically perfect, because they're graphically beautiful and emotionally engaging, or even just because you played them during a rough time and so have a lot of personal affection for them. Once we get a few replies, I might even open up about a few of my own So, what are your 'Best Games'?

Came in expecting an actual discussion. Disappointed.

This is a test post, please ignore it.

You could always do it the easy way.

...what? That is not 'outright telling you how to beat it', that would be something like 'You can do literally nothing to hurt him until I take his shields down, so wait for my beam rifle shot' or whatever. Just yelling that Tartarus' shield is down is completely unhelpful, because; Johnson talks a lot in combat anyway, so there's nothing to distinguish this as a specific trigger rather than just generic combat reaction dialogue; he takes so long to say it and Tartarus' shields go down for such a short period that unless you're actively looking at Tartarus at that exact moment, and choose that point to damage him, it's going to seem even more like generic dialogue; and at no point does he make clear that it's his beam rifle shooting that's dropping the shields rather than your own attacks. And even if it did, it would still be a crap boss fight. It's entirely possible to have a beam rifle of your own during this fight, and no matter how many times you hit Tartarus, you can't drop his shield, so you have to wait for Johnson. There's no in-game reason for this other than 'because boss', and it's a mechanic which is introduced without any warning or explanation, which flies against the core gameplay you've been practising up until that point, and which doesn't show up even once anywhere else in the entire series. The fact that Johnson will occasionally yell that Tartarus' shields are down is at best inadequate, and at worst downright misleading, as his failure to state why those shields are down is quite capable of leading the player to believe that they're capable of damaging Tartarus if they can just apply enough firepower. The only halfway-decent boss fight in Halo 2 is the battle with the Prophet of Regret, because at least there are some nice visual cues in there: you can clearly see that your weapons fire isn't hurting him, and he actually reacts to being boarded and punched. It also uses an existing mechanic in a new and interesting way, which is how a good boss is done: however, even then it loses marks because until you actually rush up and attempt to board him, there's nothing in particular to indicate that you need to do so, as all you'll know up until that point is that your projectile weapons aren't working. You also can't just hit him with conventional melees, for reasons which aren't explained, so marks off for that, too.

Your example is terrible, Caboose. In a good boss fight, the game should provide the player with clear information about how it's going to operate mechanically, a chance to practice that kind of gameplay, and a thorough understanding of exactly how to win it - and all of this before the fight starts. The only reasons you should fail a boss fight, beyond player error, are either because you haven't made an effort to to understand the game's mechanics, or because you haven't been paying attention to the clues about how to beat the boss given in the build-up to the fight. A good boss fight is a 'final exam' of sorts - a test to see whether you've gotten the hang of the gameplay up until that point. By all means it should be hard, and it should most certainly punish any errors made by the player. One of the absolute best examples is the Mr. Freeze fight in Arkham City, because you have to use every single trick and gadget you've learned up to that point in the fight - you can't just rely on one or two of your abilities. If you've taken the time to learn how to use those abilities, and understand the stealth mechanics, then it's an extremely difficult but very fun fight, and one which, barring a mistake on your own part, is something which can be beaten on the first try. It also includes plenty of audio and visual cues which not only give a sense of progress, but help indicate what to do next. A bad boss fight is one which doesn't give you any hints in the build-up as to how to beat it, involves just repeating exactly the same actions over and over again over such a long period that it's basically just a test of how long it takes to make a mistake, or which introduces completely new mechanics, so that no matter how much effort you've put into understanding the gameplay up until that point, and how much attention you've been paying, it's not obvious what you're supposed to do. You know what a great example of this is? The Tartarus fight at the end of Halo 2. It's an absolutely terrible battle, because not only is it extremely long and drawn out so that even once you figure out how to do it all you're doing is repeating exactly the same thing over and over until you avoid getting unlucky for a suitable length of time, but the way you win it uses a mechanic which literally doesn't appear anywhere else in the entire series. Literally every other enemy you meet can be damaged by shooting them - but in this fight, you have to wait for Johnson to fire his Beam Rifle before you can do it. Worse, the game doesn't even hint at this mechanic beforehand, and then doesn't actually provide any explanation or visual hints in the fight itself. Everything you've learned up to this point has nothing to do with how to win the fight - and no, this is not good gameplay. Trial-and-error is fine when you're first figuring out how a mechanic works. It is not acceptable as an excuse for poor design.

I actually happen to agree with Twin on the weight of the armour, because the problem is that while it may well be powered, insofar as it's visually depicted it isn't self-supporting - which means that the wearer has to absorb its full weight on their shoulders, spine, and legs. I guess we can handwave this a bit by saying that the undersuit is actually self-supporting and capable of holding the weight of the armour, meanings the Spartan inside just needs to 'drive' the thing rather than actually holding it up and pushing it around with their own muscles, but even then, it would be nice if there were some visual elements which actually demonstrate this. Put bluntly, unless it contains its own synthetic muscles, any clothing or armour is going to have a negative impact on the strength and agility of the wearer, and Spartans are no different. In terms of the medical stuff? I can accept it because it's the future. We have medicines and procedures today which scientists even a hundred years ago would have dismissed as completely ridiculous (pacemakers, organ transplants, vaccines, etc), so while it may seem impractical or impossible to us today, it's reasonable enough to believe we'll be able to do it in 500 years. As for the heat resistance - your physics is flawed, Twin, we have stuff that can do that today. And given that current Mjolnir was specifically built to resist plasma attacks - which are even hotter - the only issue with falling from space would be the force of impact, not heat. I also think you're probably overestimating the amount of armour which is dedicated to stopping projectiles - remember, as we saw with Kat, Mjolnir armour can be quite easily pierced once the energy shielding is down, so it's probably safe to assume that the majority of the armour we see is there to help give the shield its shape or absorb heat, rather than resist bullets. Taking that as true, and assuming the undersuit is in fact essentially a self-supporting synthetic muscle which interfaces directly with a Spartan's nervous system rather than just to cover their modesty, I think Mjolnir as a concept is perfectly within the bounds of realism, even if it is centuries ahead of where we are technologically. OT: I don't know nearly enough about metallurgy to even begin to speculate.

I actually agree with XBF4N on this one. The thing with Halo 2 is that, while there's no denying that it's unrelentingly brutal and unforgiving, there's an awful lot of 'fake' difficulty - the gameplay isn't challenging so much as trial and error, or outright luck-based. There are more than a few sections where enemies are spawned right on top of you, or behind you, or respawn infinitely, or are placed in such a way that you have to start reacting to them before you're even aware of them if you're going to get past them: their presence isn't even telegraphed or hinted at beforehand most of the time. The last of these is completely against the idea of difficulty as ideally anyone sufficiently skilled, aware of their surroundings, and understanding of how best to use the game's mechanics and the tools which they have at their disposal should be able to complete a section on their first attempt. On Halo 2, this is often literally impossible, as without knowing exactly how, when, and where certain AI triggers operate, you will be killed simply because there are only one or two very specific courses of actions which result in success, and you're not likely to be following those on the first attempt because there's no reason to take them. As for Knights? I like them. And I don't really get what people mean when they say they fight Elites with 'tactics', when really what they mean is they jump and strafe side to side while tapping at the Elite with a mid-range headshot weapon until it dies, or using the noob combo. Those are both very sensible ways to fight an Elite, but as tactics go they're fairly straightforward and simple. And the thing is, Halo players have gotten really complacent over the years, which is one of the reasons I hate the BR so much: it's our solution to everything. Squad of Grunts? Strafe with the BR. Pair of Elites? Strafe with the BR. Group of Jackals? Strafe with the BR. It's not uncommon to see players refusing to pick up something as powerful as a Shotgun or a Sniper Rifle or even a Rocket Launcher because they don't want to lose their BR, and that should tell you everything about how much of a crutch it is for us. Very large portions of the playerbase even insist on starting multiplayer games with the BR, because they're so dependant on it that they don't actually know how to use the other basic weapons! I think this is why so many players hate Knights. It's because they're one of the few enemies that you can't just kill by strafing with the BR. You're forced to actually do something different to the usual, lazy and repetitive approach to combat - in fact, they're one of the only enemies in the whole series who're more vulnerable to automatics than precision weapons. Even higher-ranked Knights can be taken down with a single magazine's worth of fire from the Suppressor, and provided your aim and awareness are good, assaulting them directly is actually a very effective tactic even on Legendary. But because we're so hopelessly addicted to the idea of strafing with the BR, when we come up against an enemy who that doesn't work against and we have to actually play with a tactic that's from outside our comfort zone, we accuse the enemy of being unfair and bullet spongey when in fact, they're just resistant to one particular tactic.

Oh that's it, you are SO fired

I actually thought I'd done this - must have forgotten to save the edit! It's fixed now, you can view the updated reputation ranks at the bottom of the post here.