The first week of Backlogtober has come to an end, and I'm really happy with the progress I've been making so far. Since my last update posted on Sunday, I've managed to put another pair of big dents in my challenge for this month. The first of these was reaching the end of Chapter 1 in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. I must have put over eighty hours into this thing by now, and thankfully I still haven't hit burnout point yet. I've now started gradually picking my way through the remaining missions and side-ops, and hopefully I'll continue to make decent progress and wrap up the whole story by the month's end. I'll refrain from posting anything more substantial about the game right now, as I'd like to save that for a dedicated blog post in the future.

What I've mainly come here to talk about is the other big Backlogtober achievement from this week - the fact I beat the campaign in Halo 4 last night. I was in two minds about playing through Master Chief's most recent adventure solo, given I'm supposed to be working through the entire franchise co-operatively with my good friend Duncan. However, that endeavour has been punctuated with a joint playthrough of the original Borderlands, which itself has been on hiatus for quite some time, so I decided to bite the bullet and go it alone for now. I also figured that playing through a game one of Microsoft's flagship series might help me finally make a decision as to which current-gen console I'll be opting to pick up next month (in the interest of fairness, Sony will be getting a chance to shine later this month with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves).

From a campaign perspective, I genuinely think Halo 4 might have the best single-player component of all the numbered entries in the series. The action flows brilliantly, providing an expertly-paced blend of standard FPS combat with tense exploration and the series' hallmark vehicle sequences. It even throws in a Star Fox-esque on-rails fighter jet section near its end which I thought I'd hate but ended up really enjoying. I still don't believe it attains the lofty heights of Reach, although it does come pretty close in spots. It offers up a pretty strong story, too, accompanying the expected epic space-opera trappings of an interstellar threat to the future of Earth and humanity with a much more personal story strand centred on the relationship between Master Chief and Cortana that ended up hitting me a little harder than I was expecting it to. Everything I saw through the game's story missions led me to believe that the Halo series is in very safe hands at 343 Industries.

While the overall experience was a very positive one, there were some particulars that bothered me a little. The new Promethean enemy types, for instance, were a bit of a mixed bag for me. I enjoyed fighting the dog-like Crawlers with their skittish movements and clear weak points, but the humanoid Knights frustrated me greatly. I'm not even sure why, because conceptually they're no different to the CovenantElites - wear down their shields, then aim for the head. Maybe it's because of their ability to revive thanks to the assistance of another new enemy type, the Sentinel-esque Watchers, or perhaps it's because they seem even more bullet-spongey than their Covenant counterparts. Their associated weaponry was also a point of conflict for me, as conceptually I loved the weapons' aesthetic design, but in practice found them to feel a little too much like re-skinned versions of already-existing weapons. Some, like the rapid-fire Suppressor and powerful Lightrifle, were incredibly useful whereas others, such as the pistol-like Boltshot and Promethean grenades, left me underwhelmed. Most tellingly, nothing that I picked up prompted me to try and alter my play-style or deviate from my standard loadout of an automatic weapon and something with accuracy and power at a distance. There's not even a Promethean equivalent to the Energy Sword or the Gravity Hammer to encourage you to get in close and partake in some melee combat.

It feels lazy to describe Halo 4 as 'more Halo', especially when various sources have been using that phrase to describe every game in the series since Halo 3, with both positive and negative connotations. Having said that, it feels like the best way to sum up the experience for both better and worse. The quintessential Halo 'feel', the nebulous quality of how every aspect of the game is balanced, is intact. The new enemies and weapons fit comfortably into that balance, although I suspect that's more down to how closely they mimic the established enemies and weapons than anything else. Halo 4 doesn't re-invent the wheel, it doesn't do anything too far out of the series' comfort zone, it doesn't push boundaries. What it does do is deliver a fun, tight, challenging eight-level campaign that I enjoyed from start to finish. For me, that was literally enough - it didn't leave me dissatisfied, but it didn't particularly leave me wanting more either.

So that's where we're at - seven full days into this crazy challenge and I've already managed to burn through three games and make significant progress in a fourth in the background. Next up on the list of games to get through is indie puzzle-platformer And Yet It Moves. I've got it installed and ready to run on my laptop, although it's unlikely I'll get to start it today - I'll be heading off to work after posting this, and then I'm straight back out tonight for band practice. Still, it's something to look forward to for tomorrow night, when I'm hoping its ambient soundtrack and charming aesthetics will prove a decent remedy for a long day at work. If all goes to plan and I manage to beat And Yet It Moves in the handful of hours projected, I'd say to expect the next Backlogtober blog at some point this weekend. Until then, thanks very much for reading. Take care duders, and I'll see you around.

Dan

---

Currently playing - Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (PS3)

You're making great progress on this initiative Dan! I also thought Halo 4's campaign compared favorably to the rest of the series, even if I'm but a modest Halo fan in general. I did really miss the Firefight mode from Reach though, which I thought was a much better alternate co-op mode to whatever Halo 4 offered (don't remember the name now). You're also right about dubbing it as "more Halo" feeling lazy... but this is a case where I actually had trouble describing it differently myself. That's kind of what it is, which I don't think is necessarily "good" or "bad." Depends on what you're looking for.

I've been catching up on all your progress over the week, as I've had a busy week myself and haven't had much time. But man, Pokemon Snap is a blast from the past. I played when it first came out, and haven't touched it since, so I don't remember much other than I had fun with it and found it charming. About the only other thing I remember was it being pretty short and simple, and that there should be more room to expand on the concept. It's a really neat way to experience the always lovable Pokemon universe, and I'm glad you got around to it!

Good luck moving forward; I'll be curious what you think of And Yet It Moves. That's a game I felt I should have liked a lot, but it never grabbed me. Maybe you'll fare better than I did!

For a first time out, 343 did a hell of a job. I felt they achieved a distinct new atmosphere, while playing to the strengths of the series. Infinity is one of the most perfectly-paced campaign missions I've ever played.

There were some stumbles with the enemy/level/weapon design, Spartan Ops didn't do it for me, and it wasn't some bold new direction as far as gameplay. But Halo 4 kicked a whole lot of ass so I'm very, very excited for 5.

I thought Halo 4's campaign was a huge bummer. The story fell completely flat for me. The core Master Chief/Cortana conflict is alright, but everything around it is crap. All the new characters - irrational angry military captain dude, good guy military captain guy, lady spartan whatshername, all terrible. No interesting moments from any of them, banter, believable emotions or goals, just terrible. Halo wasn't Tolstoy but for a scifi shooter it had some pretty decent character moments. Captain Keyes being a badass, Sergeant Johnson's great quotes and banter, The Arbiter's stoic fury, Cortana being snarky and crazy, Jorge sacrificing himself for nothing... And then they added the whole "chosen one" thing to master chief when he met the Librarian. What a bunch of crap. Oh and the best line at the beginning "why are the covenant fighting us?" "I don't know Cortana, but these ones are more fanatical!" And no more is said of this. What? More fanatical than the suicide bombing, bonsai charging, planet burning, flesh eating, monsters you were fighting before? And you figured this out in like a minute of fighting them. If you read the book you know who they are, but they sure don't tell you in the campaign.

From a gameplay perspective they made the graphics better than reach in some ways (though I think Reach has much much better art direction), and made the levels all corridor crawls and wrecked the framerate. A bunch of sections barely work in coop, the ghost sprint scene to get out the collapsing... wherever that was... is fucked in coop. One partner will just die over and over because they will be out of the scripted "just made it!" moments. Another one is the pelican section near the end. One partner literally does fuck all, just sits on a useless side mounted turret with like a 10 degree arc of fire, and waits around for like 10 minutes while the other player flies around blasting stuff with lasers and missiles.

Halo 4 is an entirely decent Halo game. The campaign is solid, and the way the game feels and flows is is spot-on, but... I think I like that game less in retrospect than I did when it came out. Part of that has to do with what they did to the multiplayer (loadouts and perks make the principles of power weapons and map control less important, since everyone already has a DMR), though there are some other niggling things I'm not a big fan of either. A lot of the promethean weapons feel a little extraneous, though I do really, really like how the Suppressor sounds.

The original trilogy is hardly Shakespeare, but Halo 4 puts some of the more important details of its plot in tie-ins which leads to it being a little disjointed and sloppy (I'm still not entirely sure who the Diadach actually is). It's also part of the reason 2012 was the year of "Ancient Aliens as lazy plot device" alongside Assassin's Creed III and Mass Effect 3, which led to some rather amusing bombcast discussions if nothing else. I'm interested to see how Halo 5 turns out, but as one of the (seemingly many) turncoats who got a PS4 instead of a Xbox One, I'm going to have to do so at a distance.