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i think a better word to describe halo 2 is ‘rushed’. i feel like i did when i stopped playing the riddick game; what was there was really really good, but there wasn’t nearly enough of it. they put you into some really cool situations, then rush you through them so fast you don’t have time to savor the taste of it.

and it’s not like i’m playing on easy, either. if it feels rushed on heroic, someone needs to write a longer game. i shouldn’t have to go to the hardest difficulty setting, the one i could barely handle on halo 1, just to get a more satisfying experience out of the game.

in any case, halo 2 is significantly, proveably shorter than halo 1. if you count each 2 level sequence in a different environment in h2(re cairo station, old/new mombassa, etc) as equivelant to a single chapter in h1, then h2’s 14 levels are equivelant to seven of h1’s ten chapters. no wonder they broke them up. this is akin to when toys r us, realizing they were getting their asses kicked by walmart’s shitty toy section, cut their inventory in half, then reorganized the store layout hoping nobody would notice.

i watched the bonus dvd, and it was an annoying mix of bad documentary footage, cool moments, cool insights, and literally half the dev team saying ‘more time to finish the game properly’ would have been nice.’ and at no point do they bother to explain WHY exactly the game was a rush job. you get the impression that the suits wouldn’t budge on the release date, but i have to hope bungie doesn’t let this shit happen again.

frankly, i think the fans would have been, if not happy, at least willing to wait an extra 3-6 months if bungie had put out a press release listing all the features that would not be in the game if they didn’t take more time. most notably, the ending and the mongoose, aka the human atv. there’s footage of people driving it around on the dvd and i want to drive it more NOW than i did before the game came out and i still thought i’d be able to.

‘oh, we couldn’t get it to work with the game! we couldn’t figure if it should be mounted guns, held guns, or no guns! the designers couldn’t fit it in with the ghost and the warthog!’

let US make the call on whether it’s worth using or not. i was seriously SERIOUSLY looking forward to tooling around the levels in a mini-warthog, guns or no guns. that and the covenant bus would be great patches to release over live, even if just for multiplayer use. and a playable version of the e3 demo level. and sprinting. and melee combos.