Thanks for coming back for Part 2 of The Flickcast Presents The Bitcast Best of Gaming 2012. Click here to see yesterday’s part 1 and keep coming back the rest of the week for more awards including the Game of the Year being awarded on Friday.

Most Awkward Romance – Halo 4

So thankfully we got a year off from the awkward bromance of Gears of War between Dom and Marcus as well as a lack of fistbumping from Salem and Rios in Army of Two. What we did have was a love story between a stoic soldier and the lunatic AI woman living in his head. (I know, when I put it that way it makes it sound like I have no soul.)

In Halo 4, players were able to see a true evolution in the character of Master Chief, John 117, as he began showing actual human emotions due to his connection to the AI chip that had been living in his suit with him for the better part of a decade. Like most women that a guy has lived with for that long (while he spent most of his time asleep), Cortana has started to go a little crazy.

It’s been five years since Master Chief finished the fight and saved the earth in the events of Halo 3. Since, there have been an expansion turned spin-off, RTS, prequel and an HD remake of the original, but no proper sequel. As hyped as Black Ops II may be, no game’s fanbase may be clamoring more for a sequel than those of the XBox 360 exclusive Halo 4.

This is the first new proper Halo title made by 343 Industries and the start of a new trilogy for Master Chief called the Reclaimer trilogy. With the lofty task put on this new studio, the results so far have been amazing.

The Long

The biggest fear of Halo 4 was if the game was actually going to still feel like Halo. After all, it has been five years and a new studio working on the game. At the same time, the first person shooter genre has evolved by leaps and bounds since Halo broke open the floodgates of FPS shooting to consoles. Luckily, 343 Industries was able to take both into effect and comes up with a compromise that feels modern while not just trying to be another Call of Duty clone.

Halo 4 retains most of Halo’s signature control elements. Zooming in with a weapon comes from pressing down on the right stick. Melee comes from the right bumper. And the grenade toss happens from the left trigger. If you haven’t played a Halo since Reach, it will only take a few minutes to reacclimate yourself with the controls. There is a reason they have worked so well for the series in the past and continue to hold true to this version of the game as well.

Knowing full well that no matter what, when review season was going to come around Halo 4 would be on my list, I couldn’t bring myself to wait in the horde of players hoping to get a brief hands on in San Diego at Comic Con. With so much going on, it wasn’t worth missing an entire day’s worth of events just for ten minutes of multiplayer. But with preview night of NYCC being less crowded, the proposition of waiting less than an hour to get hands on with Halo 4’s multiplayer seemed much more reasonable.

In our game, we had the opportunity to play Team Slayer on Ragnarok. As the name would suggest, this map is the successor to Valhalla from Halo 3. Not much has changed about the physical layout of the map though. The same basic structures still exist as they did before but with higher res textures. The only major change to the level was the position of weapons, taking into effect weapons new to the game. We also had the mech walker in our level which when used properly was a beast on the battlefield. Unfortunately, everyone was rushing for it at most times so we didn’t get to spend too long with it.