Load Screen Review

It was only a matter of time before the Halo franchise branched out into entirely new directions;  with Halo series’s fantastic highly animated loading screens which catapulted the series into such success, someone was bound to wonder what they could do in a genre outside the first person shooter.

Now Ensemble Studios has brought the Halo world to the Real Time Strategy genre.  Of course, they’re not Bungie, and so one can only wonder how well they’ve managed to measure up against Bungie’s amazing efforts.

So let’s take a look:  how did they do?

Full review beneath the fold

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Street Fighter 4 is the 14th iteration of the Street Fighter series, and the fifth major new version of Street Fighter (the earlier 3D ‘Street Fighter EX’ series, oddly enough, was never given its own number).

Street Fighter 4 is a great new release to look at, as its roots are in the era where games were burnt into ROM chips, and data access times were so low that loading screens were never really necessary.  In the coin-op arcade versions, of course, there were short “Character vs. Character” splash screens to announce the fights, and as games have moved from fast chip storage to slow disc storage, these splash screens have typically become used as the load screens, and this is the case here.  Mostly.

Full review beneath the fold.

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