We Are ODST

Wow.

As if the Halo 3 commercials (especially the one with the old soldier talking about how Master Chief gave the UNSC marines hope as he gazes tearfully at the now-famous diorama) weren’t enough to get you right there, Bungie/Microsoft go and pull this on us.

The academic in me also sees how this ad is a great way to reflect on the life of a real-world soldier. The first third of this ad, you would think you were watching a documentary about real-life special forces.  The second act might be fictional soldiers fighting aliens, but it is no less intense of a battle–and not that dissimilar from the kind of confusion and danger experienced in an actual combat scenario.  And the final third of the ad–well, the tone that a funeral scene conveys is never anything less than humbling and bleak, when said scene is done well.

And then at the end, the ODST put their helmets back on and run off to battle, ever-vigilant even in the face of grief.

So come on, college professors, let’s get Halo in the class room and get students talking about how it’s an examination of duty, courage, and sacrifice!

Halo: Reach in the works?

So some Internet treasure hunter unearthed shaky proof that Bungie is working on a game called Halo: Reach.

Right now, it’s purely conjecture.  After all, Bungie has said that Halo 3: ODST will be the last Halo game, but if there is anything that George Lucas has taught us it’s that there is no such thing as a dead horse.  Case in point: old school Star Wars fans facepalm over this new…thing…masquerading as Star Wars (the Clone Wars animated series), but eight-year-olds the world over are eating it up.  The core base of a franchise might get burned out from over-saturation and relentless marketing, but there will always be a new fan base.  In other words, Halo 3: ODST is far from the final Halo game.

So if Halo: Reach is to see the light of day, what kind of game could it be?  I’m rooting for something similar to ODST, a game in which the Master Chief is not the main character.  Don’t get me wrong: I love this character, and find him much more iconic and interesting than Gordon “Determind Silence” Freeman, but his story has been told.  True, the original Halo trilogy only told of his involvement in the later stages of the Human-Covenant War, but the novel The Fall of Reach (really good by the way; give it a read) told his entire origin, detailing every major event in his life up until that fateful moment when the Pillar of Autumn exits slipspace right in front of Installation 04.

I would find Halo: Reach a far more interesting game if it told the story of what happened on the ground in the Battle of Reach.  This would be a perfect set-up for a squad-based shooter where you play as a UNSC Marine.  Imagine Call of Duty 4 set in the Halo universe and you’ve got an idea of what I am speaking.

No matter what Bungie does, I’m sure it will be pretty cool.  The Halo trilogy was very well executed, even if the developers did work largely under the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality.

The Halo Trilogy is Complete!

Of course, it was complete two years ago, but for me it has only ended recently.  I never gave the single-player campaigns of the Halo games a fair shake: I always just rolled with multiplayer.  I traded up when the new entry in the series came out and had a vague understanding that the narrative involved aliens that wanted to kill us, more aliens that wanted to kill us, and giant hula-hoops in space that would kill everything–and I mean EVERYTHING.

However, after playing Halo Wars, I found myself interested in the game’s fiction more so than ever.  I don’t know if it was because it served as a prequel/spin-off (after all, some people didn’t get into Star Wars until the release of Episode 1, and some people like CSI: Miami or CSI: New York but don’t like the original series) or because I was genuinely interested in Halo 3: ODST from the moment it was announced (A Halo game without Master Chief?  Stealthier game play?  Open world?   I’m interested.), but I suddenly has this urge to wrap myself up in the Halo Universe, to know the series’ narrative from start to finish.  Halopedia and Halo.Bungie.Org helped, but if I were to be a true fan–and I really wanted to be a true fan–then I needed to go to ground and experience this story and universe the way it was meant to be experienced: as a game.

So a download of Halo: Combat Evolved from the Xbox Live Marketplace, finding a brand new collector’s edition of Halo 2 on Amazon, and my already-owned copy of Halo 3 (remember: multiplayer was always fun!) helped bring me up to speed.  By the way, just in case you’re wondering, I did pick up the collector’s edition of Halo 3 along the way: the town Wal-Mart still had some brand new ones.  The little bro now has my old standard edition.

Having played the whole trilogy over a few days, I can see both why people love these games and why people hate them.

Why the love?

It made fast-paced tactical shooters work. Before Halo, you either played fast-paced, intense shooters such as Doom, Quake, and Unreal, or you played tactical shooters such as Rainbow Six.  One had twitch game play, one had plan-and-execute mechanics.  With the release of Halo: Combat Evolved, you had to have a quick trigger finger and brains.  Granted, most of  the time the ol’ “run forward and shoot things” worked, but when it didn’t work–my oh my how it didn’t work.  Heavily armored enemies call for flanking maneuvers; packs of shielded enemies call for coordinated grenade strikes; sometimes sniping away the “leader” enemies to send the underlings into a panic is the only way to advance.  Finding and using cover is key to success, and it feels more organic than in the Gears of War series.  Couple this with the fact that you can only carry two weapons at once and everything you do is a tactical decision.

It’s narrative done right in a game. Say what you will about the odd turns that the Halo plot makes at times: this is how games should tell stories.  The game play is tight and engaging, securing this work as a true “game” first.  But the narrative is there, in the background, told through in-play lines of dialogue and often foregoing cut scenes to make the gamer really feel a part of the story.  When you see a Scarab tank blow up, it’s because you hopped on its back and found its power source and killed it yourself.  Rarely does a major plot point happen that the gamer didn’t have to do something: throw a lever, plant a bomb, whatever.  There are some moments that trick you into thinking that your running out of time when you never will, and Halo may not have the most well-developed plot in the world, but it’s on the right path of gaming narratives.

The cast of characters is great. Speaking of narrative: the Arbiter.  Sergeant Avery Johnson.  Commader Keyes (both father and daughter).  The slimy and scheming Propehts.  Tartarus.  Lord Admiral Hood.  All of these characters are unique; your allies are likable and your enemies disgusting.  As for Master Chief, I now understand why gamers love him so much.  He is a man of honor and quiet dignity, and is not emotionally unattached as you would believe (given he spends all of the games behind a mask).  He is a protector, and he takes that job seriously.

There are Biblical references in the game. The Bible is the easiest literary work to reference in the Western world, so this shouldn’t be a boon.  But I have this fascination with Biblical references in secular works of art, and they abound in Halo.  Did you know that Master Chief was a Christ figure?  Really; that’s a different post all-together, but trust me on this.  Ultimately, what I’m getting at is that this shows an attention to detail and narrative structure lacking in so many games.

The weapons are awesome, there are lots of explosions and Big Epic Moments to make you feel like a Big Damn Hero, and–this is every nerd’s dream–Master Chief has a girlfriend IMPLANTED IN HIS HEAD. Well, not implanted, but close enough.

Why the Hate

Stand here, shoot this guy, hope that your shields last longer than his. For all of the awesome firefights that all three games offer up, all too often you’ll find yourself at one end of a hallway with a ridiculously overpowered enemy at the other end of the hallway, and the only thing to do is just stand in place, maybe move around a bit, and dump bullets into him until he dies or you die or you just get bored.  This is about as fun as it sounds.

The vehicle handling in the first game sucks.  No really.  It sucks. It gets better in the second game and is actually pretty tight in the third, but in the first game I learned to dread seeing a Warthog.

It comes with two free metagames: “Halong” and “Halost.” I swear somebody at Bungie said “Wow, this game is short.  Let’s make it longer by adding in long stretches of a level where all a player is doing is moving from point A to point B, and let’s make it take forever for them to do it, even without the endless onslaught of enemies that pop up every ten seconds.  Now, to make sure that this game really does last at least six hours, let’s give them a horrible navigation system that rarely pops up and make everything on the map the same color!”  Again, by the third game this was abated, but in every single game I found myself saying–at least once–”WHERE DO I GO NOW AND HOW DO I GET THERE?”

The Flood is the most annoying, unrealistically difficult enemy in the history of first-person shooters. By the end of the third game, you’ll meet Flood variations that require two full clips of the Battle Rifle to drop.  They hop around like monkeys on crack, making them nearly impossible to get a bead on, and they swarm and push you into a corner whenever they get a chance, more often than not when you are actually making good progress through a level, which bring me to my final point…

The AI sits on their “I Win” button. From grenades that materialize out of nowhere and blow you into the Great Beyond to close-quarters-combat that leave you no choice but a leap into a bottomless pit to a lightly-armored vehicle barely clipping the heavily-armored Master Chief and killing him, the AI is more than willing to pick up its toys and go home if you make it sad.

With that being said:

All in all, I’m glad I played throug the trilogy.  It was a good time, despite the many faults of the game, and now I feel like I’m really up to speed for Halo 3: ODST.  I’ll also pick up a few of the novels I’m sure.  However, my overall opinion of the Halo games haven’t changed: mulitplayer is where it’s at when it comes to game play.  The single-player campaign, however, is just engaging enough to draw gamers in–if you’re willing to put up with some frustration.  In fact (and I know this label has been over-used in the past twenty years) I would even say that Halo is the new Star Wars: I can see  a fandom developing for it that rivals the house that Lucas built, as the universe expands and Bungie continues to build on the Halo mythologies.  If that is the case, then move over Hollywood: games are here to stay!