Yea, the ability to record demos and take screenshots is really fantastic. It's a little surprising that it hasn't influenced other online console games.. but some people just think too few people appreciate it to bother.

This is true.. and while I agree that it's bullshit, I don't think it really has a giant impact on my experience. Firefight is the sort of thing best played with people you know, anyway.

It's getting 9's because it's a great game.

Campaign was good, story was bad, price was ridiculous. That sums up everything. Game definitely drove home how sick of Brutes I am. Reach better not figure out some retarded way to work Brutes into it, they weren't even discovered then mythos wise.

While I do think there's a lot of squandered potential with the series, I really couldn't dismiss the entire game. I do agree that New Mombasa was very boring, completely turned me off of the game to start there, the concept was a interesting one. I find it very hard to believe that they honestly couldn't think of anything more to do with the time they were given. Staten said they couldn't think of anything, I'm not on their payroll and quite a few things stick out. My biggest complaint was the lack of new game mechanics. It easily solidifies itself as an expansion. They needed to add some mechanics to define the ODST troopers rather than just weak Master Chiefs. I get the feeling they were trying less of alienating their fanbase than doing anything new.

Firefight is a great addition, but it really seems to have fallen flat overnight. Less friends are playing it, and with no matchmaking you're entirely dependent on friend lists. The Halo 3 MP disc is filled with content we either already had or were forced to buy previously, hence my thinking the price was absolutely ridiculous. The only thing that would make this a value is for someone who hasn't played Halo 3 since 2007.

It'll be a nice diversion for the main Halo games but that 'Halo 3' prefix sticks out more than the 'ODST'. It feels lazy, but I'm in no way factoring the price into this. It'd made more sense for its lack of content at a lower price but it wouldn't have been more eventful. Not saying I hate it or I think its horrible, but if I were going to list must play games for this year it'd be very low on that list.

Firefight fucking owns. Get friends!

As much as I love Firefight, they could have made it work. Firefight doesn't need to end when someone drops out. I've had people get disconnect against their will, and it's mighty frustrating to just have your Heroic run end when you've got nine lives left and you're half way through an attempt at the vidmaster achievement. I don't think that matchmaking would be significantly more enjoyable, but it could still work.. ultimately the biggest reason to play with your friends though is that communication and cooperation is key.. and you just can't count on random Xbox Live asshats to help you out.

ODST could have been much better and a much bigger value if:

1) They allowed you to install the MP disc, and play all of the content without swapping.
2) Firefight had matchmaking.
3) There was a real ODST MP playlist (there's already plenty of maps!)
4) There was more real MP content, period. Three new maps..... really?

The reason Firefight doesn't have match-making is likely the configuration of the team that produced ODST. It was largely made up of artists, designers and story people who were working on the Halo movie project. Whilst the majority of the Bungie engineering people have moved on to Reach and their other project, this lot has 12-14 months spare before they could be useful on Reach. Hence the game was born.

Bungie use their own match-making system as opposed to what the Xbox Live API offers. Without any significant engineering resource, implementing match-making in ODST was likely beyond what the team producing it were capable of.

What I think should have happened though would be for Microsoft to pony up and send some guys over from MGS to help them out, even if using the standard LIVE hooks which more than suffices for simple match-making. Then again on the other hand, Bungie are notoriously fiercely independent and could just have easily politely declined such an offer anyway.

It's a shame because despite what they say, it would help a lot. My friends list is not always happily divided into clumps of four people who want to play FireFight. I'd have played it a lot more already if I had more options to find a game.

It sorta reminds me of the missing custom games browser, and how they told us that we didn't need it and that they never said it would happen (but, they did).

But only sorta.