The Stupid Gamer

For the folks that ran out and picked up the Legendary Edition of Halo 3 that haven’t popped in the bonus discs yet, you’re in for a big surprise. The supposedly remastered discs look like garbage, especially the Halo 1 clips. Despite advertising that the package would contain re-mastered cutscenes in hi-def, the disc provides the cutscenes at a degraded level of quality. Complaints started popping up on message boards and some gaming site editors starting prodding Bungie for a response.

Hilary Goldstein of IGN Xbox asked forum users, “Anyone get the Legendary Edition and watch the second disc? The promised re-mastered cut-scenes are 4:3 and look like garbage. Anyone else seeing this?” After a little while he returned with this post: “The entire second disc is 4:3. First disc (that comes with special edition) is 16:9. But even the halo 1 cutscenes look worse than the original, like they were recorded on someone’s VCR.” In a final post, Hilary offers up an explanation of sorts. He said, “Just got the official response. Yes it’s going to look like ass. That really was the message. Will post one of the god-awful cut-scenes tonight in case you were contemplating the Legendary Edition.”

At this point everybody found out that the discs weren’t mistakenly bad, but that’s how they were approved and sent out. So gamers were left confused. What did the extra $70 go toward besides the MC helmet? Well, over at the NeoGAF forums we got the Bungie response:

“The cutscenes were remastered, the pop-in reduced and they were output as as high resolution TIFFs one frame at a time to improve the quality over the originals.

They were not, contrary to popular internets remastered in “HD” and this was always advertised as a DVD disc, which obviously can’t play HD content anyway.

Apologies to folks feeling ripped off, but the false advertising claims are well, false.

Watch the remastered ones side by side with the originals to see how much they’ve been improved.

And hopefully folks can see past our old school graphics and listen to the commentary, which is the important part of that content anyway.”

What a load of crap. Even Xbox.com was advertising these things as HD. Quote: “ …including remastered, high-res versions of the Halo and Halo 2 cinematics;”

So what’s going to happen? Nothing. We got shafted. Sure, the helmet is cool, but the real reason I went with the Legendary was to get the bonus content. I like the idea of being able to run through the Halo storyline quickly and easily as a refresher, but I can honestly get just as good quality by firing up YouTube. So what’s the point? The game is great, so I can eventually forget all of this, but I hate being taken for $70 due to false advertising.

Thanks for the blatant F*** you response, Bungie. Feels good to get screwed…

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under Editorials and Rants, Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.