Halo 2
They clearly learned from Halo CE. The design of Halo 2 improves in every way over the first game. Better actors, better art, better level design, better gameplay. Fantastic soundtrack. I loved the fact that you could see the same story from two perspectives. MC and The Arbiter. I loved the characters. I felt deep sadness for Thel Vadamee. He is ashamed and then goes on a suicidal quest that will end with redemption and revenge in Halo 3.
In Halo CE they clearly didn't had experience with designing levels. For example: the beginning of Halo CE is a labyrinth of corridors, rooms, doors and barriers to protect you from incoming fire. The covenant ship follows the same pattern of corridors and rooms. It's very much the same type of design from old FPS when 3D graphics were still in their initial steps. The vehicle parts in Halo 2 re much better than in CE. Now they made levels with roads and just some random track filled with obstacles to showcase driving.
Dual yielding the pink needles gun was extremely fun, albeit overpowered too. My only nitpick with dual yielding is that in this game you have to fire using both mouse's buttons. Most games use the second button for a secondary fire, not right button for right weapon and left button for left weapon.
In multiple encounters I've noticed that you could just run past it and ignore the enemies. This is why many games force you to defeat the enemies by blocking the path with a closed door for instance.
The design is good but fails sometimes. There are some things that must have had been left in paper manuals and without it you don't know it. The terminals that you activate to watch some cinematic telling about the story were placed in huge flat walls. They are hard to spot. The developers must have had suffered from trying to make a game that was just too ambitious for their own size. The forerunner architecture suggests grandiose structures that were out of reach of the xbox's and even the xbox 360's hardware.
The PC port was really poorly done. I've found that to fix the missing dialogues you have to go in windows settings and lower the playback quality to radio quality. The thing in, in modern windows systems the radio quality is not there to choose from.
I did notice how the characters don't talk to each other.
Friendly fire is on and cannot be turned off.
There is a level where you reach a courtyard and there is vehicle running in circles with an NPC. At first I thought it was a bug or a joke lol. Only when I reached the vehicle the NPC said "I could use you on the gun, Chief!".
Only after beating the game I came to learn that the green plasma cannot take down white elites and that the blue plasma could disrupt the enemies' shield.
