That was a great experience. The Arbitor, the Brutes, the Flood…I enjoyed every minute of it. Its been a day since I "finished the fight" and I’m still sitting here thinking about how much fun I had playing Halo 3. The funny thing is that I haven’t even finished Bioshock. When Halo 3 released and I got a copy in my hand, I couldn’t wait. Now that I’m finished, what do I think?

Halo 3 was a great game!

Halo 3 has been one of the highlights of my Xbox 360’s life. The one thing that I now know is even though I have had so much fun playing Halo 3, I was having more fun playing Bioshock. Thats not to take away from what I think about Halo 3, both are excellent games.

Speaking of Halo 3, there were a few things that I found quite annoying, some I find annoying about the series all together.

Weapons

The one problem that I had with the Halo franchise since the very first Halo was the fact that you can only carry 2 weapons. I come from old school FPS gaming where you had a ton of weapons, and carried them all as you got them. Being able to switch to what you have at will (as long as you have ammo). I admit, thinking a person can carry 9 or 10 different guns is a bit much, even if it is Master Chief, but only 2? After I finished playing the game, I went online to check out some Halo 3 videos and I saw someone using a weapon that I didn’t even know was in the game, and that was because I was so busy trying to keep up with the 2 or 3 different weapon types that I liked that I didn’t try too many different ones lying around unless they were the only ones there.
The way Gears of  War did things I think is about perfect, you can carry up to 3 different weapons, but only 1 in each category. Id go so far as to say that 4 weapons is really ideal.

Dual Wielding

I like the idea of being able to dual wield different weapons (was introduced in Halo 2). I think the balancing of dual wielding is dead on. When I had 2 weapons, I felt improvement over using one, but didn’t feel overpowered. My problem came with the whole mechanism of switching through weapons once you started dual wielding. Why is it that when you switch weapons, you drop one of your dual wielded weapons. I don’t like that if your dual wielding, and want to use your rocket launcher for one second, you’ve now lost your second weapon. I understand why its done the way its done, but it is quite annoying. About half way through the game, I just stopped using dual weapons.

Re-using maps

I absolutely hate spending 20 minutes navigating through a portion of a level, get to the end, only to have to go right back through the area I just cleared, that now has all new baddies. Why not create a new section to get you out of areas instead of the back tracking.

All of these things are really things that are quickly overlooked by the rest of the goodness in the game. My biggest problem now is if I want to play through Halo 3 again, or go back and finish Bioshock.