Yeah okay, but... The pacing is still a little off. If there's only one point of a game which drags, that part is a problem.
Speaking of Left 4 Dead, I think it might be cool if someone ported over the Library into Left 4 Dead 2 as a playable campaign.
This article is great, and I wholeheartedly agree.
Most of my Halo experience was co-op (played through many times on Legendary). I wouldn't say that this level is uniquely excellent for co-op (the whole game was amazing), but it did mark a clear shift towards being overwhelmed by hordes in melee range (and I still remember the "oh shit" feeling when we realized that our rifle-butt coups de grace moves, which we'd honed against the covenant, weren't so deadly vs. the zombies). Tom caught all the highlights: the will'o'wisp droid, the glorious shotgun, timing reloads, and the great story reveal.
I especially loved the arrival of the Sentinels. First you feel glorious and start to think this scourge can be purged via force of arms, but then you see the zombies leaping into the air and pulling the robots down. That was really brilliant stuff, both because it illustrated the unstoppable nature of the flood (explaining why this doomsday device may've been necessary), and it foreshadowed the great 3-way battles that would follow through the rest of the game. I'm not sure if any previous FPS had the great AI and scripted set pieces that thrust the player into so much chaos as the Flood vs. Covenant vs. Sentinels vs. Marines scenes near the end of the game.
Arise!
So I’m currently playing through Halo: Combat Evolved for the first time. I started with the enhanced visuals but quickly realised they’re just horrible so I’m now rocking pure vanilla, baby. I never owned an Xbox, have no nostalgia for the Halo series, but, damn, I’m having a great time with this. Anyway, one of the things I’ve been most excited about is finally encountering the infamous ‘Flood’ and ‘Library’ uh, ‘things’. I literally had no idea what they were… until yesterday! I had this article knocking around in the back of my head for years so it was great to finally be able to read it.
I loved the audacity of creating an incredible slog of a level, one you would feel in your bones. This kind of design I just can’t really imagine in modern games now. It must be fun at all times! The scale, length, deliberate monotony, intensity. I quickly worked out that enemies don’t respawn forever so I was able to turn the Flood tap on and off. I’m playing on Heroic so it was still overwhelming at times (seriously, shotgun I <3 you) but it certainly didn’t feel like one long continuous fight to the bottom–I can certainly appreciate how that would hugely impact your view of the experience, hoo boy. I can’t imagine the horror of trying to dash through.
It reminded me a lot of Half-Life’s long underground segment before Surface Tension, trying to find the nosferatu warrens in Vampire: Bloodlines, and particularly Thief’s Down in the Bonehoard where you felt like a trespasser going deep down into the bowels of some huge structure. Often all I could hear was the steady hum of The Library and the murmurings of 343 Guilty Spark which made the place feel even bigger and imposing.
I’m also glad you noticed the way The Library teases you with alternative passages and halls. I’m quite thorough when it comes to exploring but this place felt too vast and dangerous to be exploring every nook so I just kept winding my way through it. Amid a big firefight I lost my bearings once and got turned around.
The exchange between 343 Guilty Spark, Cortana and Master Chief was great exactly because it showed MC as fallible. I watched Glass Onion the other day and one of the reasons I love Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc character is because of his earnestness compared to Bond. He has flaws and that makes him a lot more relatable. I’m not saying it made MC more relatable because I have no idea what he is, but I was totally expecting him to be some infallible badass super soldier so to see him ‘oops I nearly the whole galaxy’ and get told off by Cortana was so refreshing.
All in all, the arrival of the Flood and then the descent into The Library has been such an unexpected and welcome change of pace and tone for the game. Looking forward to playing more.