Halo: putting Anger Management Counselor's Children through college

Penny Arcade is evidence that not everyone has a sense of humor or an understanding of what makes something funny.
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Exactly. For example: people that don't find Penny Arcade funny or humorous obviously lack in that department, just as you mentioned.
 
Ricochet said:
Exactly. For example: people that don't find Penny Arcade funny or humorous obviously lack in that department, just as you mentioned.
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Funny OR humorous? Well, I guess you just trumped me on both accounts! ;)
 
Look I'm not saying that there aren't halo fans that are like this. Plus if they are a Halo fan boy as you say they aren't the casual person playing it. They are most likely a hardcore gamer. I don't like to think of my self as a hardcore halo fan but I am one. The only reason that i didn't get the legendary edition or the Halo 3 360 is that I don't have the money for it. Plus I got the Elite for a birthday present and that is still better then the Halo version. I really like the universe and I have most likely put 40 hours or more on Halo 3 already. For me thats a lot with classes and such. Maybe its just me and my group of people that play it aren't bad.I run LAN parties once a month for halo if possible. We get angry at each other, its a competitive game.We are known to hit each other on occasion. Its all in fun. I know the people you are talking about but every online game has these people. The people that your thinking of aren't fan boys but people that have no lives. We all here are fan boys of WC. We aren't jerks and we don't play Wing Commander 24/7.

Look at it this way. In a sea of blue a red ship is going to stand out. You have all these people that play halo. Millions of them. Just because the big mouth pricks that play it stand out doesn't mean that most of them are that way.
 
Obviously, LAN parties are usually better than random public servers, but the issue here is that people confessed suffering from Halo Rage even while playing with friends :S

And Halo Fanboys do not necessarily fit in the usual "hardcore"/"casual" gamer categories, because there are people who play hundreds of hours of Halo and nothing else. So he is hardcore in the depth he dives into Halo, but casual because he has no interest, knowledge or experience with any other game.
 
Kilrathikiller said:
We don't play Wing Commander 24/7.
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Speak for yourself. I own Starlancer and Freelancer, and the entire suite of Star Wars simulator games. I've played and beaten them all (Except Freelancer, I always get distracted in that game looking for wrecks!) and the only one that I keep coming back to is the Wing Commander series. There's just no substitute on the market today.

Now, I'm not saying that the people around here play WC 24/7, I certainly don't. But to be fair, even the live-in-the-basement stereotype Halo Gamer doesn't play Halo for 24/7, unless they've built a port-a-potty into their chair (And if they have, I'd like schematics, please!).

But I do, however, think that people here spend the equivalent amount of time, researching, writing, editing or playing Wing Commander material. And if you read through some of the threads that talk about the Multiplayer gaming experiances (I've never tried it - but mine drops sound particularly annoying) there are similar incidents to all of the problems with MP gaming listed in this thread...with none of the hostility.

I have a hard time with wingnuts not being classified as "hardcore" games just because we're only "hardcore" about one series, instead of a whole genre, or god forbid - another generically over hyped FPS.

Clearly, since none of us have broken into fist fights after a session of Arena, Armada or Prophecy there is something wrong with the people who play Halo, and not just "hardcore" gamers.
 
Canaris said:
On a side note, when playing a shooter, people dont care about your feelings, they care about winning. Yeah, it sucks to lose. Yeah, your gonna get your feelings hurt when you get someone spawn camping and murdering you as soon as you apear on the map. Just try to remember at the end of the day it is a GAME. If your not enjoying playing it, dont go crying about how bad and evil the people dominating the games are, just play something else that you enjoy.

To conclude, powergamers are a pain in the ass, but they'll be around no matter what game you play. It's not worth beating someone down in real life because you lose a game. Try setting up games with like-minded individuals, who will play with a little sportsmanship. Or, try growing up a little bit.
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I totally agree with this. And I am not complaining becuase it sucks to lose or get fragged in Halo 2. I know that I suck at the game and am not a power gamer. I don't play multiplayer that often and I don't have the maps memorized in my head. I'm not really sure where I'm supposed to go on the map to find the enemy flag or base and stumble around until I do. I'm complaining that people take advantage of the game and camp the spawn points picking you off before you can move or do anything. I'm ok with getting fragged or losing a match. But I'd like to at least be able to move.
 
In my broad experiences - Halo and Wing Commander fans are two polar opposites.

With exception, Wing Commander fans are largely intelligent people who are interested in the details of the universe they enjoy. They like discussions - sometimes arguements - over the where and whys that make Wing Commander what it is. They're interested in keeping a community whole and making friends and talking about all sorts of things that they may (or may not) have in common.

With exception, Halo fans are largely unintelligable people who swear and curse over XBLA and come across as socially inept dullards who couldn't read a Cliffnotes version of a "...For Dummies" book. They don't care about the game they play past the most basic story (and more than one fan has admitted that Halo has the thinnest of narratives). They don't like discussing things about the game unless it involves swearing, trash talking or screaming at their television. Their community is based on negative renforcement - getting better at the game for bragging rights - while ours is based on a more positive spin - enjoying it with more people.

This isn't to say that all Wing Commander fans are great or that all Halo fans are terrible - but majority does rule.
 
I think you can only come to that conclusion about WC fans after years of basically being on our own. I find plenty of people on the halo.bungie.org forums to be just as intelligent as any WC fan. There are plenty of fans over there who spend large amounts of time discussing the story of the games and novels. The Halo Story page is a testament to some of their dedication to the storyline and exploring it.

Generically labeling the majority Halo fans as swearing idiots is unfair. WC had a time when our chat rooms and forums were also filled with such idiots. Time has passed and thinned the ranks where those who are left are for the most part the best of fans. Halo also has a core group like this (I also consider myself to be part of it) and I think that in a few years I'll still be visiting HBO and posting on their forums. Not for bragging rights or to show how great I am, but because I love the series. I don't think the Halo community is based on negative reinforcement, judging the fan base merely by matchmaking encounters is insane. Check out the HBO forums, or even better look at the ARG Iris forums here. I think you'll find the opposite to be true.

I've been a fan of Bungie games and WC for about the same amount of time. I've long been active in both communities and while I do agree that the lifeforms you meet on matchmaking are often 12 year olds looking for jollies, I think Halo has just as dedicated and intelligent community as WC.
 
I have to agree that there are a lot of assholes that do play halo(especially Multiplayer).It does have a thin storyline when it comes just to the games. When it comes to a multiplayer game though, i have never played one online that there wasn't assholes. That is why I say its unfair to criticize Halo in this manner. All online Multiplayer games do this. Arena doesn't count as much because it isn't as successful, it hurts me to say this but there is hardly anyone on it. Even then when I played it on its first days out there,there were assholes on that too.

Us Wingnuts on the other hand are older and are holding on to our games and universe. For us to love something this long is because of that. Its not competition anymore its just to play it. We are more intelligent I would say because of a few reasons.

1. Wing Commander is a game that hasn't seen a full release game in almost 10 years.(sorry to say for Arena but its a strickly multiplayer game on Xbox live for 10 bucks. Not to many people care and the time as for a 60dollar game wasn't put into it.)(I still love it though)

2.Wing Commander isn't very easy to pick up(Wing 1 is hard. The others are easier but still the few missiles and joystick controls aren't what people are used to now a days.)

3.Mainly a PC game(Though other versions were released the comp versions were the ones that shined the most. Seriously how many of us own super wing commander or the majority of our wing games are on console).

I love other games in our genre too. I have StarLancer and Freelancer. X-wing and many other flight sims, and space sims.

With Halo fans there are millions. With wing commander not so many. So of coarse there are going to be more jerks with that then WC.
 
Kilrathikiller said:
3.Mainly a PC game
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I think this is a good point - LOAF mentioned this somewhat in the above posts in regards to specific types of games attracting specific crowds, and I think that PC vs. Console games are part of that equation.

By the very nature of the fact that you have a 50+ button keyboard and a mouse (not to mention ALL manners of USB peripherals you can hook into a PC) PC games have a nature of being more complicated. There are some games that transfer very well back and forth, like Republic Commando, and others that don't (I think the KOTOR interface was much easier to navigate with a mouse). That's not to say that console games are bad at all - but some sacrifices have to be made when all you have to control your ship is a twelve button controller and two little sticks.

In that regard, PC video games tend to be more complex, require more time to learn and master, and so attract a crowd that has a very differant manner of playing style.

To put it quite bluntly: Any moron can pick up an Xbox controller and snipe some idiot standing still across the map five seconds after he just died probably without knowing how.

On the other hand: It takes alot of skill to nurse a damaged Rapier back to carrier through flights of Darkets after blowing up a Fralthi cruiser. Which is not to mention blowing up the Fralthi cruiser in the first place.

Console games have done wonders to expand the number of people who play video games - but they've done it by putting out games any idiot can master in a five minute tutorial level, and so feel like they've 'earned' the right to show everyone up with their 'leet' skills.

I would go on to say that the difference between console gamers and pc gamers is the same as the commonly stated differance between men and women:

When women go shopping, they go shopping for the experience of traveling between different stores and finding that perfect bargin and bringing it home.

When men go shopping it's all about a quick hit and then back to the same-old same-old.
 
Dundradal said:
Generically labeling the majority Halo fans as swearing idiots is unfair.
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I don't see how. Halo fans are not labled or known as being fun, happy people. This very thread is (in mockery) pointing that out, isn't it? The joke is that they're all uptight internet jerks. Are they all? I can't say because I don't know all of them - but I'd say 9 out of 10 out of the hundred or so people I've met who really love the series are people I'd like to have hit in the back of the head with some type of industrial mining instrument.

To be perfectly honest, the only person I can think of that I know who really likes Halo enough that I'd call him a fan - but isn't intolerably annoying about it - is ChrisReid.

Dundradal said:
WC had a time when our chat rooms and forums were also filled with such idiots.
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But we're known for not tolerating their ranks - while Halo seems to thrive on those types.

Dundradal said:
I think you'll find the opposite to be true.
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I think you can always find something contradictory if you look hard enough. I'm not saying there aren't great human beings who enjoy Halo - I'm saying I want nothing to do with their general fanbase, game, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, etc. I've had a great deal of exposure to the foot soldiers who enjoy the game and I simply don't want to soil my hands with the likes of them and thats all there is to it.

(One need not wonder what the response would be to a Wing Commander thread on most Halo boards. Surely, something less civilized than all this.)

Dundradal said:
I think Halo has just as dedicated and intelligent community as WC.
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I have to disagree adamently simply because Wing Commander has been around longer and has had very few installments in Halo's very short lifespan - yet we're all still here. Halo will be remembered for years to come, I'm sure - but not by people I'd consider "dedicated" or "intelligent" in the real sense of the word.
 
LeHah said:
I have to disagree adamently simply because Wing Commander has been around longer and has had very few installments in Halo's very short lifespan - yet we're all still here. Halo will be remembered for years to come, I'm sure - but not by people I'd consider "dedicated" or "intelligent" in the real sense of the word.
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True, but can the same not be said of one of the previous Bungie trilogies Marathon? It still has a thriving community 11 years after the final game was released. If anything I see them as the community most like that of WC. They are a group of hardcore fans who love their series (although some of the harder of them absolutely hate Halo) just like we love WC. They continue to create maps, mods and campaigns for AlephOne and have an environment that is very much like the CIC.

I consider myself a dedicated WC and Bungie fan (I prefer Marathon and Myth over Halo) and I know that I will be a member of both communities as long as it proves possible for me. I have no doubt that the Halo Story page will continue to be an active site long after the last Halo product is released. Just like when there were tons of WC sites, there were the jerk sites and then there was the CIC, which was where, obviously most of us decided to become regulars. I see the same thing happening over at HBO. I wouldn't touch the bungie.net forums with any implement as it is exactly the type of environment you are describing when you think of Halo. I see HBO as the CIC for the Halo community. Their forums have the occasional moron (as do we) but for the most part it is a great place to discuss Halo intelligently with people who share the passion for the game.

I also realize that I am one of the people you label as annoying as I'm sure many of the old timers can tell you I used to rage about Marathon all the time in #w-c and #wingnut back in 90s. On the same token I'm sure there are some Halo fans who would label me the same way for my feelings on WC. While I don't agree with the label I do understand it. I've always had a passion for WC and Bungie and any chance to talk about two of my favorite things I definitely will. If it comes off as annoying so be it, I'm sure our passion for WC would come off as annoying to many other groups, but that's because we are passionate fans and we love our series. The same holds true for Halo for a great number of fans.

There is a jerk factor involved when it comes to Halo fandom, but that's a result of it being so successful. The greater your population the greater the number of jerkoffs you'll have. The same could be said of the WC fandom during its heyday, but we've had a lot of time for those people to simply fall off the radar.

Hopefully the same can be said for Halo eventually, but for now that hardcore fan group is sort of buried underneath the matchmaking stereotype of a 12 year old with a mic telling you how to do "a certain anotomically impossible act." It's for that reason that Bungie made it so easy to mute morons during matchmaking in Halo 3. 2 quick moves and you never again have to listen to Johnny tell you how he's going to stick your mom after he kills you. I often only enter into matchmaking as part of a party that way my whole team is my friends and we don't have to deal with all the shit we've been talking about.
 
Dundradal, I agree very much with you and you seem to put it better then me. I still think that we have at least percentage wise a much more intelligent fan base then Halo but I'm sure there are just as many if not more so fan like us on the Halo side.I just find it funny how some of us are dissing halo so bad. Its a fun game to play. The jerk offs do not have to be tolerated on the mics any more and as far as i've noticed the spawn point in halo 3 are more random so you don't spawn in the same place to many time.

And Jason, you also cleared up what I was trying to say better too.
 
...unless they've built a port-a-potty into their chair (And if they have, I'd like schematics, please!)
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I'm not an engineer, but I'm pretty sure you cut a circle in the seat of the chair and then dig a hole underneath it.

Generically labeling the majority Halo fans as swearing idiots is unfair. WC had a time when our chat rooms and forums were also filled with such idiots. Time has passed and thinned the ranks where those who are left are for the most part the best of fans. Halo also has a core group like this (I also consider myself to be part of it) and I think that in a few years I'll still be visiting HBO and posting on their forums. Not for bragging rights or to show how great I am, but because I love the series. I don't think the Halo community is based on negative reinforcement, judging the fan base merely by matchmaking encounters is insane. Check out the HBO forums, or even better look at the ARG Iris forums here. I think you'll find the opposite to be true.
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What you just said doesn't make sense. He shouldn't label the *majority* of Halo fans as being like that... because there's a 'core' *minority* who aren't? Furthermore, you're trying too hard to be offended on behalf of a group of people who aren't the issue here. Are there Halo intelligent Halo fans who are well-rounded people with their own friends and credit cards and keys? Hey, it's possible - but if so then they aren't the people that the thread complaining about the millions and millions of angry hosebags is talking about.

On the other hand: It takes alot of skill to nurse a damaged Rapier back to carrier through flights of Darkets after blowing up a Fralthi cruiser. Which is not to mention blowing up the Fralthi cruiser in the first place.

Console games have done wonders to expand the number of people who play video games - but they've done it by putting out games any idiot can master in a five minute tutorial level, and so feel like they've 'earned' the right to show everyone up with their 'leet' skills.
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Before we get too full of ourselves, let me say: no, it doesn't. You are saying about Halo *exactly* what people said about Wing Commander in 1990 - that it was a cheap action game designed to bring their beloved format to the masses. If anything, Wing Commander *begat* Halo - it was the game that taught publishers that a flashy, big-budget experience could widen the market. Before Wing Commander the PC gaming market was hobbyists... hardcore pen and paper RPG transplants, serious turn based wargamers, ultra-accurate flight simulator pilots and the like. Our 'interactive movie' changed all that and earned exactly this kind of scorn from the first generation of gamers.

As great as we would like to feel about ourselves for being able to use a keyboard, there is nothing inherently complex about PC gaming. This is 2007: having Windows autorun my The Sims 2 disc and then clicking on 3D girls until they make out is not the ultimate in intellectual stimulation you suggest. It certainly requires no more brainpower than ordering soldiers around in Rainbow Six or stealthily delivering cheeseburgers in Sneak King. Configuring my NAT to use my yBox correctly online is just as difficult as updating my DirectX.

The vast majority of modern PC releases are second-thought ports of console products - and that amount will only increase. There's almost no profit in large scale development for the PC. Wing Commander 6 will be a console game. A PC isn't what makes us special.

As I said before, different console games have different groups of players - and it's noticable immediately. I played the new Tetris Splash today... everyone was incredibly friendly - from someone who wanted to talk about how he'd first played Tetris when it came out in Russia to a little girl who was telling me what she'd named all her Tetrish fish. When I was playing the Civil War FPS a while back I got messages from other people going through it all the time (it was single player only). They wanted to chat about history or ask me how I'd unlocked some achievement. When I play Carcasonne, it's all incredibly serious boardgamers - people who know exact terminology for all the game cards and the possible maneuvers and so forth. When I play Uno it's a lot of frat boys and others who want to flash various parts of their anatomies. When I play Rainbow and GRAW it's people who are serious but not frothing-at-the-mouth angry. There's no one group of 'stupid' console gamers.

At the same time, console gaming is incredibly fun. I grew up without it - I was a dyed-in-the-wool adventure game player, I grew up with Zorks and various Quests and felt myself better than my friends who were playing Mario. I missed out, and so are you if you're writing off game consoles for some misguided intellectual reason. We're talking about games, not literary analysis - they should be fun, not something to fight about. I have a heck of a lot of fun with my yBox every day for a variety of reasons that I can't even go into here - the whole system is just great, from the fantastic achievement system to the wonderful online network to the sheer cost of it compared to PC gaming.

(What was the last PC game I bought and played through? The 2005 PC game of ER.)

But I would be remiss in the be-critical-of-Halo thread without... being critical of Halo.

I'll put this simply: I think Halo is a game designed to appeal to idiots.

I don't like the setting. It has just enough 'story' to convince stupid people that it's really clever. The entire thing is a pastiche of dumbed-down placeholders from a variety of obvious sources - a space fleet, a ringworld, a holographic assistant, space marines, a masked space hero, etc. etc. I defy any educated science fiction fan previously unfamiliar with the game to play through the first part of the first game and not immediately complain that the guys at Bungie must have really liked Aliens... and Star Wars... and StarShip Troopers... and Larry Niven... and Metroid in very, very unsubtle ways.

This would be fine, in and of itself... after all, Wing Commander does exactly the same thing on exactly the same scale. In Halo, though, it became clear pretty quickly that the developers and the fan were taking it all incredibly seriously and believed it to be high art. Where Wing Commander went off to have some of the most enjoyably pulpy tie-in novels ever written, Halo went on to explain in an intricate fashion just how brilliant it was that the guy who wrote it saw a bunch of movies. I think it completely snapped for me when I saw elaborate official histories about how and why a girl Halo robot appeared in one of those girls-in-bikinis-beat-up-eachother fighting games (see, she's actually TK-422 and she's the friend of Halo Robot Alpha 5 who was mentioned in the pre-release fiction printed on the lanyards they gave out at E3...).

And speaking of terrible stories, remember the lauded 'ilovebees' ad campaign for Halo 2? Ugh, ugh, ugh - it was the most pretentious thing in the universe, with pointless nonsense websites being 'tracked down' to
'prepare' everyone for the epic story behind Halo 2. I wanted to strangle John Halo very, very hard every time I heard someone stupid enough to fall for that crap raging about how wonderful it was. It was a whole campaign designed to make stupid people feel smart about playing an arcade game.

(In that light, let me give a rare kudo to Halo 3 - the advertising has been truly magnificent. I'm the kind of guy who loves tie-ins and merchandising, and Halo 3 did that beautifully. Halo 3 Slurpees, Halo 3 action figures, Halo 3 Cars, disgusting Halo 3 flavored Mountain Dew, etc. I know it annoys some folks, but I wish to heck it was a game I didn't grit my teeth thinking about. And an unkudo - that terrible 'museum' advertisement is a brilliant concept that is done so poorly that it makes me angry beyond my ordinary angry-that-Halo-halos anger.)

Now, these pretenses and other nonsense weren't necessarily enough to turn off old LOAF - maybe the game itself was as brilliant as everyone insisted. Maybe it really would change the way we would play first person shooters and the way stories would be told in video games and so forth and so on.

Nope!

Halo is an ordinary game, simplified so that everyone can play. That would actually be an honorable design concept, mind you, if I believed for a minute that they went in thinking 'everyone' would mean mom and dad and little sis and Dusty the cat rather than as many teenage boys looking to scream 'cocksucker' at each other over and over as possible. But... I'm not anti-cynical enough to convince myself of that.

I was never one of those 'FPS games are destroying gaming!' cubes. I think they're fine, they're fun and there's a lot to be built on with them. Some special games, like the first Ghost Recon, take the basic concept in a new direction in exactly the way art builds upon itself. Others, even more rarely (like the original Half Life) are literally earth-shattering - they're games that change how things like narrative itself works. Still others are just DooM with a new hat, and they're usually just as fun as their august predecessor. Halo is that type of game wearing the rotting corpse of the previous two.

The big developments in Halo just aren't. Wow, you hold two guns at once - somebody call Lara Croft! Wow, you can drive a car - somebody call Cybermage! Wow, you can play it in split screen - somebody call every Nintendo 64 game ever made. Halo is a bunch of good ideas that already existed in a pleasant balanced package (literally a pleasant package - the art design works in exactly he same way as the other 'dumbed down' aspects of the game... maps and baddies and characters who are literally as inoffensive and designed not to have a particular style to them as possible.)

It really seems for all the world to me to be a game made to sucker idiots - the story, the gameplay, the art, the ease of the thing... so, I feel bad about it. Several of my friends - people I respect more than anyone on this Earth - love Halo 3. They were playing when I started writing this. I see that and it hits my gut - how do people I really love like something so stupid? Maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe I'm unable to have fun for some reason, maybe I want attention... but I just can't feel it. The franchise bothers me on a very personal level that I find myself completely unable to write off. I do feel somewhat bad being an asshole about Halo, in light of people having fun with it and people I believe in loving it, but it is how I feel regardless of anything else.

(Is Halo just plain fun? Maybe - but certainly not for me. I drove three meters in the stupid Halo car and got stuck in a hole... Cybermage's stupid box tank worked better and that game had strippers! I played multiplayer games that were exactly the same as CounterStrike fort-levels with a Star Wars Bounty Hunter skin. It just didn't do anything for me and occasionally veered into incredibly tedious territory.)

Now, all that said - I don't want to be the guy who goes around complaining about the game wherever possible. So, Chris, as you read this and start to ban me, remember that I didn't bother anyone in the Halo-is-great thread...
 
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