Nice job. Good mix of single player / multi / firsts.
Halo is definitely deserving - it essentially changed shooters for the better by introducing limited weapons, easy grenades, and (thankfully) *healing* (in the form of the shield for the first Halo). And the Flood was an amazing twist.
Many credit Halo's "innovation" of regenerating health as the start of a downfall in gaming, where strategy was tossed aside in favor of duck & cover to wait for your life bar to fill up so you could go back to killing some foo's again. Sure, it kept you in the action, but I always preferred knowing that I had to get through the next section without taking much damage because there wasn't any health kits nearby. That's gone in new games. Just another WIN button for the new generation of games.
I gotta disagree.... first, the whole concept of healing is ridiculous to start with. Second, you could just as easily say that before regen healing the strategy was to make sure you were near health. In fact, regen healing leveled the playing field - previously, it was often more luck than not in who got health/etc. Now everyone gets it, and that's that. There's always the Rainbow six games if you want more of "one shot, one kill" gameplay.
Plus, for single player, I can't count how many times a game was somewhat ruined because I got stuck somewhere w/ a sliver of a life bar due to something stupid (like a grenade taking an odd bounce) / no healing nearby / tons of enemies, and my last save was 30 hard-fought minutes ago. Regen healing fixes that.
Allow me to rephrase. I do think that regenerating health is actually not a better way of dealing with health in games. I think it does have a place in games, but I think it's a cheap way of doing things. Let me give you a scenerio I've encountered in Half-Life 2: Episode 1:The elevator scene to be exact. For those of you who didn’t play it: you are waiting for the elevator (and it is taking its time), while you are being attacked by zombies. Oh and it’s completely dark, so you can’t see thing. And your flashlight can last only a short while, so you have to go dark couple times for couple seconds. There is a tiny bit of light in front the elevator shaft, so you stick around it.
Some zombies will drop grenades near you and one grenade did hurt me pretty bad - I was almost dead. Elevator was still on its way and zombies kept coming. I knew I just can’t survive much longer in front of the elevator shaft. So I had to sprint down into the darkness to look for some health packs. Now sprinting drains the same power that my flashlight uses, so I was either sprinting in complete darkness or I was using my flashlight. Using both at the same time would drain my suit’s power too fast and I would be dead.
So here came the frantic sprinting in the darkness with occasional uses of flashlight to reveal zombies and to search for health packs. I finally got it and I ran as fast as I can to the elevator with pack of zombies behind me. I just barely made it and my heart was racing.
Well, what’s the lesson? If I had regenerating health or shields, I would just sit tight in front of the elevator shaft, shooting zombies. No running in pitch black, no heart racing, no frantic searching for the little thing that can save you. If I had regenerating health, I simply wouldn’t experience that wonderfully intense gameplay moment. Absence of any kind of regeneration forced me to leave my cover”(shaft behind me and Alyx covering one side) and burst into the darkness to save myself.
Now, I can understand the frustration you mentioned with having a savepoint/checkpoint right when you've been tossed a grenade or been out in open fire and have no to low life. These are either cause by anomalies or by bad design, and yes, there have been many times I have gone back to an old save to prevent it. It happens, the same as other bugs do. I'd take these 1000X over rather than Half-Life given a make-over with regenerating health. And we also know that realistic, one-shot/one-kill games like Rainbow Six aren't what we're referring to here. I'm not playing a game made by Nintendo, I don't expect them to give me an option for
Super Guide to get me through the level if I can't make it through myself, which is where I'm afraid every game is heading.
Thanks for keeping the discussion going here.