Halo Waypoint was released in the past week. You’ll find it in the Game Marketplace on Xbox Live, but it’s not so much a game as it is a service. From one place, you can track your progress on Halo series achievements, see how many of your friends are playing a Halo game, and view all kinds of interviews, including full episodes from the upcoming Halo Legends DVD.
People love to pick on the Halo franchise, and admittedly, for good reason. The games come across as mindless bullet slingers, and with Halo merchandise available in all forms from action figures to WETA statues to Mega Blocks to men’s underwear, it can be easy to get sick of the franchise. Unfortunately for those who don’t delve into the games and the fiction surrounding them, there is a wealth of complexity in the Halo universe. The games have surprising complexity in their mechanics, the multiplayer is active and intense (it’s easy to see why so many gamers picked up Halo 3 just for multiplayer), and–in the novels and comic books–one finds deep examinations of the nature of heroism and a gut-checking view of warfare from a grunt’s point-of-view. It’s deep stuff, really; you just have to give it a chance.
After all, Halo is not the first franchise to be everywhere at all times. You might recall a huge entertainment franchise that was kind of a big deal for thirty years, until its creator all but destroyed it for some untold reason: Star Wars. At the height of its popularity (meaning: before it became a kids franchise–not that that’s a bad thing, just saying), Star Wars was everywhere. Toys, video games, approximately 1 bazillion books and comics, and oh yeah–the movies. There were those as well; let’s not forget about those. Nobody seemed to care though. There were those who liked Star Wars and those who didn’t, but nobody really complained about the omnipresence of the franchise. People who didn’t like Star Wars knew that it was popular and just kind of lived with it.
Yet, Halo having the same amount of exposure and influence seem to be a problem with people; enough that the overexposure of the franchise is a common topic on the blogs and forums I frequent. It’s not an invalid complaint: Halo is everywhere nowadays, and there is a great deal of risk in that. It could get watered down and stretched thin. But is it really there yet? Is it really worth complaining about it being milked?
After all, gamers should be excited about the popularity and fandom of Halo. After all, it is quite an achivement. Most of the major entertainment franchises out there were kicked off by a big, splashy movie or a long-running TV or comic book series. Halo is only eight years old and has yet to see the silver screen. Bungie and Microsoft gave birth to a consistent fictional universe that people love to explore, and they did it with a video game. Halo is indeed the new Star Wars, in more ways than one. It’s the big sci-fi franchise for the nerds who think they’re cool and it was launched with this great new media called video games. It’s going to be here for a long, long time. Big fan or not, if you’re a video gamer you should be happy about that.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to welding my handmade replica of a BR55HB SR Battle Rifle to go with my Master Chief costume.
November 8, 2009 at 11:52 am |
Question, are the guys in babbysitter, the same ones from ODST game? end of line.
November 8, 2009 at 1:35 pm |
I don’t think so. I haven’t seen The Babysitter. I was kind of busy downloading Mass Effect from Steam yesterday, and that took up a whole lot of bandwidth. I tried to watch it, but it kept buffering every few seconds.
I do know that at least two of the ODST from the game are in the comic Helljumper: Dutch and Romeo. I don’t think the squad in the game have a great deal of history other than that; Dare does call them “replacements” early on the in story, implying that they’re not Buck’s normal squad. Given the involvement of ONI in the squad’s mission, I wouldn’t be surprised if they scrambled the troops up a little bit. ONI doesn’t exactly have a record of playing it straight.
Anybody that can shed some light on this, I’d appreciate it.