Halo 3: ODST–The game is good, the commercial is better.

I typed this up about a week ago or so, with the intent of editing it and publishing it soon after.  However, I had a presentation on gaming and libraries at the North Carolina Library Association Conference last Wednesday, and them immediately fell ill afterwards.  So, this review is no longer timely, but I hope you still value my opinion on the game.

I was going to wait until I gave Firefight mode a good try before I wrote about Halo 3: ODST, but you know what: the one thing that Bungie has always been spot-on with in the Halo series is multiplayer.  There is no real need to review Firefight mode, as far as I’m concerned.  You know it’s great, I know it’s great, we all know it’s great.  Multiplayer is always fun in Haloland.

So this review will only address the campaign.

Much has been said about the drastic new directions in which this new Halo campaign goes.  Instead of the all-powerful, nearly bulletproof SPARTAN-II Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, you are the Rookie: an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper.  The ODST are the elite of the UNSC armed forces.  They are specially trained for the most hostile combat situations, dropping in from orbit at breakneck speeds, right into the thick of the Hell that is combat or, sometimes, deep behind enemy lines for covert operations.

So why did Bungie decide to have you play junior detective in this game?  Sure, we all knew that this game was going to be a mystery story at heart, but in practice it just doesn’t work as well as the developers would have us believe.  Yes, New Mombasa at night is very cool.  Yes, there is real tension as you duck and dodge Covenant troops.  Yes, there is that really dreadful sense of being alone.  This doesn’t let up throughout the entire game; there are some moments that I felt really, really helpless.  Unlike playing as Master Chief, this time around I actually panicked when I ran out of ammo during a fight with Brute Chieftain, and I actually felt myself scrambling for a new weapon instead of just kind of casually walking over to pick up a new one.

And the way the storyline is delivered, through flashbacks uncovered by objects in the environment, which can be discovered in any order, as opposed to linear delivery, does offer up a few surprises.  You will likely not discover the items in order, so you piece details together as you go along, giving the whole narrative a feel not unlike a really good mystery novel; the whole thing unfolds in a very organic way, not rushing any major reveals.  The flashback missions, which allow you to play as other characters (all of them ODST), are exciting and appropriately epic; it’s like a greatest hits compilation of what made the great moments from the original Halo trilogy great.

So what makes the game not work?  Granted, this is something different from the traditional Halo experience, and there are plenty of incredible, dramatic moments to play through.  Everything should make this a great game, but there is just something missing.  There’s too much exploring between the breakneck action sequences; the final long stretch feels more like a test of patience than a test of skill; the whole thing just feels too short; I WANT TO PLAY THE LIVE ACTION ODST COMMERCIAL!

Bungie did a bit of wasting some potential here.  There are brief glimpses of  what this game could have been: a view of the Covenant War from the grunt’s eye-view.  In the original Halo trilogy, you were the guy who came in when the good guys needed a Big Damn Hero.  You took down big vehicles and went toe-to-toe with the most gruesome foes.  You punched enemy leaders in the face and made last-minute escapes.  You were an action hero.  But as an ODST, you’re just a normal guy.  You’re not a super soldier.  You’re maybe a little braver, a little more hardass than the other grunts, but you don’t have a reinforced skeleton or an energy shield or the ability to jump a quarter-mile in the air.  This could have showed the kind of high-tension, quick-burst kind of combat that we Halo fans are led to believe comprised most of the war with the Covenant–as opposed to the epic space opera of the original games.  Halo 3: ODST is indeed that, but it’s also too far in the other direction: it’s too different.  It’s too, dare I say, laid back.  Sure, the flashback levels are truly intense and chock-full of those in-the-thick moments I was hoping for, but most of the game is spent as one giant fetch quest.

So is this a good game?  Certainly.  It’s a great deal of fun and demands a bit more brain activity than the original Halo trilogy.  But is this truly an ODST game?  Does it convey that sense of intensity, loss, and drama that the awesome short film does?  Only at times.

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!

We All Suck at Halo 3

Admit it: unless you are some kind of bizarro freak of nature that never sleeps, either doesn’t have to work for a living or is able to work from home, and can sustain yourself on a diet of beef jerky and Bawls, you are routinely, in the most pornographic way, beaten at Halo 3 on Xbox Live.  I know this because it’s true for myself: I might get a few kills, and I’ve been on a winning team a few times, but left to my own devices I get tea-bagged more than the first dude to pass out at a frat party.

So this video is for all of those people like me (meaning most of you).

Song by Palette-Swap Ninja, video by YouTube user usethefork.

Speaking of Halo, I finished Halo Wars and have found it awesome.  I do agree with L.B. Jeffries from Pop Matters in that Ensemble may have scaled back the RTS concept a bit too much, leaving out features that would have made the game play even smoother, cleaner, more lemony-fresh; features such as hot keys that allowed you to choose specific units and give you more elegant control over your offense.  Given that the game’s ad material hyped up being able to “choose a side,” I also would have loved to see a campaign for the Covenant and not had playing as them relegated to multiplayer.  Complaints aside, Halo Wars is a great game and proves that yes Virginia, you can play an RTS on a console: just a different kind of RTS than to which you are accustomed.

Dawn of War II for the PC is more action and tactics oriented, playing almost like a squad shooter.  Perhaps a console port of this game is in the works?  I wouldn’t mind one, though I have it for PC.

Halo Wars also succeeded in pulling me deeper into the Halo Universe than any other game in the franchise.  I have always appreciated the story behind the games and found Master Chief an endearing character, but as far as game play I valued the games more for multiplayer, never having finished a single Halo campaign.  Having played through Halo Wars however, I’m interested in how the whole thing pans out on a bigger scale, so I’ve re-purchased the first two Halo games and plan to play the trilogy straight through, guzzling the story down in one epic stretch.  It will also be interested to see how the game play evolves from one game to the next; it’s easy to look over finer details when the release cycle is once every three years.  I’ll be playing other games along the way, of course, but most of my time will be spent with the Halo series.

What to Play, What to Play?

I never thought I’d reached a point in my life where I said I had too many games to play.  Between my regular online activity in WoW, Halo 3, Left 4 Dead, Gears of War 2, and now Street Fighter IV, I have yet to finish BioShock and Half-Life 2.  Plus, reading comics again has got me wanting to play Marvel Ultimate Alliance so bad I can taste it (and it tastes like bacon) and there is always Conan, a game I bought for sentimental value and ended liking quite a bit.

I tell you, it’s like being in an arcade with unlimited quarters: both awesome and intimidating.

Let’s not forget that I like to do other stuff in my free time as well, such as write articles and short stories for (hopeful) publication, read, and listen to music.

I just need to quit my job.  Any rich girls want a husband? 

Your Head Will A-Splode with awesome

First, my most recent article for WomenGamers.com can be found here.  It’s an interview with some stand-out musicians from OverClocked Remix.  Check it out, and then drop by OCR’s site for some video game music goodness.

I picked this video up from Outer Heaven.  Not only is it pretty funny, but it’s rather thought-provoking: just how would competitive multiplayer using Fallout 3’s V.A.T.S. system play?  More like a traditional board game I’m sure.  I think it could work.  For now, we’ll just live with this pretty cool bit.

This video came to me courtesy of EXTRALIFE.  Funny stuff, and further proof that Batman is both the most awesome superhero ever and the easiest one to spoof, all at once.

I don’t know about you, but I actually kind of want to go out and get Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe right now because of that video.

Finally, speaking of Batman and video games, here’s the latest trailer for Batman: Arkham Asylum, one of the games I’m looking forward to the most.  Even if the game is half as good as it looks, it’s going to be pretty sweet; now, how about that sandbox Gotham City game, eh?