With all this talk about 343 and Halo and whether they can do anything good, I went out and played Fireteam Raven. 343 is listed as a developer alongside Play Mechanix. I have no idea how the workload was divided, but I gotta say:

It was pretty fun.

The game is an on rails shooter. The cabinet is made up of 4 force feedback guns beside two booth style seats, and 2 screens put together so you have an ultrawide view. 4 people can play, and you're a team of ODSTs playing during the events of Halo CE. You start on the Autumn, crash land on a different spot from the MC, fight covenant and hold off the flood on the ring, and end by protecting the Master Chief's Banshee as he flies from Keyes to the Maw (spoilers: you all die when the ring explodes). It's like a greatest hits mashup of Halo. You're fighting flood on Silent Cartographer, using Falcons on AotCR, and even fighting that big ass flood juggernaut that was cut from the game.

You get to use pretty much every weapon from the game from the Pistol to the Shotgun to Rocket Launchers to Shade and Warthog Turrets to Falcon Grenade Launchers. You also get grenades every now and then as a secondary attack. There's a part where you have to kill swarms of popcorn flood with the needler haha. My only ding is that you can't charge the plasma pistol!

It was also surprisingly fair. As an arcade game you'd think it would suck money and kill you often, but the rate at which we died was shockingly reasonable. There's 6 missions, an I probably continued once per mission. You never ever feel like some bullshit happened, it's all totally based in how well you can shoot. Gun tracking was always spot on.

So yeah. 343 did a good thing with Halo. Fireteam Raven is easily better than Halo 5.

I played it at 343 several years back (thanks, kornman!) and really enjoyed it, but I don't think I got to play the full story arc. I looked it up and apparently, a Dave & Buster's nearby has one! Thanks for the reminder.

343 wasn't afraid to take Halo to new arenas, and I think FR paid off hugely. They had some machines set up in the VIP lounge during Outpost Discovery, and they were set to free play(NOICE). So I got to play the whole thing. What I thought was super cool was that you could use your phone to save your progress and stats and stuff! Unfortunately, the reader on that machine wasn't working, so I don't have a record. ;-(

Pretty much agreeing with everyone here, the game was fun, challenging but not ridiculous, and a surprisingly well executed gamble. I couldn't help but roll my eyes at one thing though, even though I understand why they did it. At least once in each level, there's a cutscene segment in between rooms where continuity is ripped to shreds and the Chief shows up on the screen doing something heroic right in front of this fireteam; and it was sadly obvious that they put those in so that you could go "OH MY GAWL, ITZ CHEEF JUS LIEK THE HALOZ, FANGASM!", as if Halo fans wouldn't touch it without John's green butt print all over it.

That game was a blast to play though, and it used a great deal of Halo lore for the veterans, but made it accessible to newbies as well. I'd love to find a machine with a working scanner, so I can upload some stats to my Waypoint page. ;-)