Poll: Halo: Did anyone actually enjoy fighting the flood?

[gamefreakbsp]

I loved the Flood from the first game. I was scared out of my mind the first time i had encountered them. I actually had to work up the courage to explore the room you first find them in. Thats when my pulse shot up and stayed there for the entire level.

 

[Aphex Demon]

I didnt enjoy it on Halo 3. Little eggs of multifuck need to gtfo.

 

[Austichar]

I actually rly enjoyed them. Was scared shitless when they were first introduced and the Arbiter levels with them I really enjoyed in Halo 2. Weren't as fun in Halo3, but still pretty entertaining. I dunno why, but I love the Cortana level.

 

[J-Alfred]

Actually, one of my fondest childhood memories was when my friend and I co-oped all the way through the Library in halo 1 on the highest difficulty in one playthrough. sure, one of us was dying all the time, but we never had to restart from a checkpoint ever. so yes, i liked the flood, for what little halo i played.

 

[spartandude]

i liked fighting them in Halo CE and to a lesser extent in Halo 2, but in 3 the were boring

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

They either died or left when they fired the Halos. The reason the Halos existed was to preserve the galaxy by eliminating the flood. The whole point was that, if the flood couldn't be annhilated conventionally, they would kill everything and then reseed the galaxy with life specimens that they had preserved prior to the rings firing.

In the course of studies, the Forerunner AI's presumably fed their test subjects.

Okay you know what? Let me RP it for you: The Forerunners lose a lot of people to the flood. They build the Halo network, as a last ditch effort; and to make sure it will work or whatever, they confine a small controlled Flood population on board the Halo from the 1st game, keeping it alive by manually feeding it. Once they have the kinks ironed out, They preserve samples of all life forms on board and fire the Halos, wiping out all sentient life in the galaxy. when the smoke clears they "re-seed".

Then what? then they die off? why? and If they died off: who kept feeding the flood in the Vault for the 100,000 Years between then and Halo:CE?
Or did they Leave? forget where and why....if they left: who kept Fucking feeding the flood in the Vault for the 100,000 Years between then and Halo:CE?

may i predict the future here and say, you or someone else will say something like "The Flood could survive without food in a dormant state for millenia, which has been biologically proven to be possible." It has and that's true.

But then WHY DIDN'T THE DESTROY THE SAMPLES!? If they went through THAT much trouble to stop them then why leave ANY chance whatsoever of the same shit happening again? Why not direct a thousand degrees of Hot Plasma into the Flood storage vault and wipe it out of existence once and for all? It doesn't make SENSE. you can RetCon all you want. but the logic doesn't add up.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Asking people if they liked fighting the flood is like asking people if they want to be lit on fire. Yes, most of them are going to say no that would be stupid, but you'll always get that one idiot who cant wait to get started...

I liked fighting the flood. People who didn't enjoy that but love shooting zombies in Left 4 Dead are strange as it was fundamentally the same thing.

I should note that I liked the flood in the first Halo game. The last two introduced various changes that made it more annoying than anything.

 

[Lt. Vinciti]

The Flood were a very annoying enemy that did not give me a challenge, but rather a nuisance.
I liked how it was displayed in the first Halo game as a mysterious plauge of the galaxy, but in the second game they got ridiculously overpowered.

Didnt the Flood have some sorta wall walking bug tank in Halo 2...

The Flood had its cool moments...like Marines and Elites but they were kind of annoying and the fact the lil balloons ate your shields and the magical "upgraded armor" in 2 didnt have such a great shield....

 

[Ampersand]

Yeah i thought the flood were great. I felt like it really helped the atmosphere of the game when you had to hover over a body you'd just downed with you shot gun poised to make sure it didn't get back up. Also there was loads of fun to be had in halo 2 when you shoot the combat forms arms off and watch them stumble around like bumper cars. = D

 

[LawlessSquirrel]

They were great enemies at first. In Combat Evolved, they served as a major plot device and ended up a major part of the story. They were appropriately difficult to fight in huge swarms and suited their role perfectly. They were hard in the Library, yes, but they were necessary.

As for Halo 2 and 3...well, I think Bungie really struggled to keep the Flood going. They just weren't the same, and I'm not sure why. They just became a nuisance, and were much too fast run-and-gun styled to maintain their old feel. They seemed better in Halo 3, but still not the same as Combat Evolved.

So to answer your question, yes I did like the Flood. They strike me in restrospect as Alien vs Half Life style characters, but oh well.

This may be slightly off topic, but can any of the Halo lore-buffs out there remind me what the purpose was behind the Gravemind? I remember seeing it in Halo 2 and expecting it to be a major player in the story, but I don't recall any significance coming from it.

 

[Don't taze me bro]

The flood stages in Halo1 were actually some of my favourite. I liked the small bulbous enemies that would swarm and would pop when sprayed with the assault rifle. Then there were the large outdoor areas where the covenant were fighting the flood. Ah, good memories.

 

[Hexenwolf]

Asking people if they liked fighting the flood is like asking people if they want to be lit on fire. Yes, most of them are going to say no that would be stupid, but you'll always get that one idiot who cant wait to get started...

Ahem! I take that as a challenge!

I enjoyed fighting the flood!

Now, to be fair, my only real experience with Halo is ODST (in which there are no flood), and the original Combat Evolved (which I only play with my brother). So I cannot comment on any of the other games in the series, (played, but never owned, so no single player), nor even on fighting them solo.

Still, as a cooperative venture, I actually had a LOT of fun fighting the flood. They were annoying, certainly, but they really gave you a chance to put that wonderful shotgun to use, and really, that's all it takes to make me happy.

 

[Tupolev]

Then what? then they die off? why? and If they died off: who kept feeding the flood in the Vault for the 100,000 Years between then and Halo:CE?
Or did they Leave? forget where and why....if they left: who kept Fucking feeding the flood in the Vault for the 100,000 Years between then and Halo:CE?

I already answered the feeding part in the very quote you quoted; the Forerunner AI studying the flood would presumably feed their test subjects.

As far as the other stuff, about why the Forerunner dissapeared, that has long been the subject of some very interesting speculation. I don't have a definite answer; it could be something extremely complicated, or it could be something as simple as shame.

But then WHY DIDN'T THE DESTROY THE SAMPLES!? If they went through THAT much trouble to stop them then why leave ANY chance whatsoever of the same shit happening again? Why not direct a thousand degrees of Hot Plasma into the Flood storage vault and wipe it out of existence once and for all? It doesn't make SENSE. you can RetCon all you want. but the logic doesn't add up.

Because, as the Halo 3 terminals and other media explain, the flood's are sort of extragalacticish and of fuzzy origin and could show up again. It would make sense to continue research in the hope that, if a solution WAS found, they wouldn't have to fire the rings again in the event of a flood return. As 343GS says in Halo CE, the installations were "built to study and contain the flood." It's reasonable to suggest that these two functions are not completely separate.
(The Forerunner also probably didn't expect that events would occur in such a way that a group of bumbling morons would go digging deep into Halo Array structures for no reason; 343GS does agree in The Library post-flood-release that maintaining the flood labs was perhaps a mistake.)

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

Because, as the Halo 3 terminals and other media explain, the flood's are sort of extragalacticish and of fuzzy origin and could show up again. It would make sense to continue research in the hope that, if a solution WAS found, they wouldn't have to fire the rings again in the event of a flood return. As 343GS says in Halo CE, the installations were "built to study and contain the flood." It's reasonable to suggest that these two functions are not completely separate.
(The Forerunner also probably didn't expect that events would occur in such a way that a group of bumbling morons would go digging deep into Halo Array structures for no reason; 343GS does agree in The Library post-flood-release that maintaining the flood labs was perhaps a mistake.)

Okay i get your side of the argument. Here are my two phrases that reply to this and settle my half of the argument:

1)firstly.....RET-CON! (if you don't know what Retroactive Continuity is, it's basically when Fans change details or arbitrarily add "hidden/secondary meanings" to simple past statements to build a base for their argument of why a loop hole/flaw, actually isn't. See The infamous Han Solo Parsecs debacle for the paradigm)

2) Plot device (AI kept maintaining Lab for no apparent reason, Forerunners left for only speculated reasons.etc.)

I'm not saying what you say doesn't make sense. I'm just saying that, you have to understand that, HALF of what you're saying is Retcon and explanations of plot-devices with very little solid meaning.

And don't get me wrong, or pen me as a hater: I LOVED some of the concepts of Halo. like the titular structure. I must have just stood there for 10 minutes staring at it curve up into space beyond the horizon. That was Breath-taking. Not even the Citadel from Mass Effect awed me as much.

It's just that the story has flaws, just like many better stories do. So i can't take it very seriously.

 

[TundraWolf]

I certainly didn't, and neither did anyone I knew who played the Halo games. The covenant AI was good for its day, but the flood were braindead. Like zombies. Why on... well, Earth, Reach, Harvest, whatever did Bungie insist on throwing the flood at you?

Halo Wars was the worst offender, I mean, they had to jump through so many hoops to make the flood fit into the game and that was the point at which the game fell apart. In my opinion, they all fell apart once the flood showed up.

I'm ranting, sorry about that. Well, my feelings on the subject are clear, what did you think? Did the flood make the Halo games better, did they make the series worse, or did they merely overstay their welcome?

Just out of curiosity, weren't the Flood supposed to be like zombies? I mean, all they are are a parasite that revives dead bodies. That sounds pretty zombie-like to me.

To be fair, though: I've never played Halo: Wars, but I do know the story, and even I think the way the Flood was included was idiotic. It just didn't make sense with the rest of the canon.

But the Flood made sense in the rest of the Halo canon. Except with how they could use weapons in Halo 3. That was just retarded. Just give me mindless zombies and I'd be a happy camper.

It's the same sort of thing that happened with the headcrab zombies in Half-Life. The headcrabs were okay, the zombies were okay, but then the zombines showed up. And then they could pull grenades for no reason. Seriously?

 

[Sonic Doctor]

I'm still mad ODST and Reach didn't have the flood.

: (

It would make no sense to have the Flood in Reach, they weren't even released yet. As it has been said in this thread, that didn't happen till the first Halo, so having them in any game that is set before the first Halo is just plain wrong and stupid.

ODST is perfect the way it is. There was no reason to have a token appearance of the Flood; it would have just cluttered up the game.

The Flood were in Halo wars, which takes place before ODST and Reach, some 20 years before Halo CE. It could fit if they wanted it to.

The time fits perfectly, I'm not sure why anyone would think differently. Unless they don't consider the best selling RTS on a console counts since it wasn't made by Bungie.

The point is that it is a really stupid mistake. If Bungie had made it, the Flood wouldn't have been in the game.

The people that made the game had a durp-dee-durp moment and thought, "Oh, if it's Halo we have to put in the Flood." Obviously nobody in the development team cared to even remember the history of Halo, so they broke canon and added the Flood even though there is absolutely no way they can be in it since they hadn't been released yet. The time doesn't "fit perfectly" as you said, it takes place 20 years before Halo CE, but the point is Halo CE is when and where they were released. Unless the Flood built a time machine and went back in time, they can't be there.

If anything the only way people can justify them in the game, is if they come up with the stance that it isn't the real Halo story line, it is an alternate universe where the Flood were encountered early.

That is the only way "it could if they wanted it to." It was pretty ignorant on their part to ignore the key historical events that took place within the canon of Halo.

It's people that do things like that, that are the reason I can't stand books made into movies. Follow the book to the letter or don't make the movie at all I say; if you remove stuff, remove stuff that isn't a key part of the main story. If I ever get a book/story published, I will never hand over the rights to make it into a movie if I am approached about it. They would have to give me full reign of what is put into the movie and what can be taken out for time constraints. But seeing as how many producers and directors are stupid when it comes to books to movies, they would refuse my terms.

 

[Spark Ignition]

Personally I thought the flood worked well as a story mechanic. The mere 'braindead' zombie aspect of them, to me, symbolised the breakdown of reason and showed just why all races were so terrified of a flood-controlled universe.

Meh I know Halo is NOT a game used to having a lot read into it, and is usually trashed for being dumbed down (there's no question that it's not very cerebrally involving) but I actually found the original series a lot of fun, and quite a well-written and involving storyline, as dull as Masterchief was.

Oh and FYI I liked the level Cortana. It was more challenging than the rest of the game put together.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

I loved it like the mutants in Far cry, beats fighting AI limited humans anytime!!