Yesterday 3 new maps for Halo 3 went on sale on the Xbox 360 marketplace, bundled together and dubbed "The Heroic Pack". The official line:
"Standoff’s symmetrical valley, with its entrenched bases and fields of boulders is ideal for mid-sized objective and Slayer game types, while Rat’s Nest’s vast, labyrinthine passages bring something new to the “Halo” multiplayer experience: an indoor vehicle paradise, strongly influenced by the Campaign mode, ideal for big team battles. Finally, Foundry is the ultimate Forge map – players can edit every single object in this voluminous industrial warehouse, place stairways, walls, bridges and tunnels to create an entirely new play space and build almost any kind of map they can think of."
If I were any kind of journalist I’d have downloaded them and tried them out already to tell you how they are, but guess what? Those suckers are 10 bucks.
3 levels. For 10 dollars. I could get a blowjob for cheaper (Hunt’s Point, here I come!)
Yeah, fuck that. I’ll wait along with most sane people for spring, when they’ll be available for free. Course, they become free just as the next round of maps becomes available for overpriced download.
Not that I’ve been playing Halo 3 online much, anyway. In fact, most of the fine folks I play games with have moved on. Halo 3 is awesome for multiplayer, and we all had a great time the first few months playing online, even if the 4 player co-op ended up being a crock because no one wanted to play through the horrible campaign again. But with The Orange Box and Call of Duty 4 out, both of which offer more impressive online multiplayer, Halo‘s looking like the underdog.
Course, I say this just as the game crossed the 5 million copies sold mark. Christ!
Still, more discriminating gamers have found Team Fortress 2 the more solid game, one free of whiny underage screamers. People have fallen into this game and never gotten out, like a good friend of mine who recently got a Xbox and went on a 30 (that’s 3-0… thirty) hour binge of multiplayer goodness, as his girlfriend no doubt looked on and regretted his birthday gift….
Team Fortress 2 is just made for tactics, and it’s great to see how patches keep coming fast and furious to fix the problems gamers have had with it, like the horrible lag when it was first released.
Kotaku recently got word that yet another update is in the works, one which "fixes several game-play exploits, improves bandwidth usage, improves stats reporting, and fixes some menu bugs".
They will also be releasing a bunch of new maps for the game on the PC side of things starting next year, which console gamers we only can pray make it over to our side. Hopefully they won’t go the Microsoft route of charging gamers for things that should be free.