For people who have enjoyed the games, GTA has succeed as the sum of it's parts. Still, from a game play perspective none of the individual elements in the previous games would have been good enough for even budget titles (horrible shooting, horrible melee combat, mediocre driving, etc.). On top of that, you had a lot of dull missions that could sometimes be a pain to complete, dragging the game down even further.

Halo, on the other hand, got the core game play of shooting and piloting vehicles absolutely perfect. Rarely are you doing anything too annoying or too divergent from the core shooting elements.

The only reason I'm kind of excited about this one is that it seems like they may have fixed the gunplay and driving (although the hand to hand stuff from the video looks just as bad as before).

I don't think anybody is buying this "oscar worthy" story stuff and the fact that it's rated highly doesn't mean much considering the last three games all got glowing praise despite the shitty game play. I'm excited about getting this one but I can definitely see why somebody wouldn't be.
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Hey OKP, help me raise funds to fight MS!:
http://tinyurl.com/2n53wu

Philly, check this out:
http://livefromphiladelphia.blogspot.com/