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.

Halo Wars: an RTSFPS

I was loving Halo Wars until I got to the fourth mission, which is one of those annoying “protect the stupid, slow-moving civilian” missions you find in just about every game that involves warfare or espionage.  You know: you have to watch the back of some dolt that moves 3/4 slower than you do from countless waves of enemies while they move from point A to point B only to have the bad guys press their freakin’ “I Win” button when you are *this* close to finishing the task.

These missions make sense in a narrative context, especially in Halo Wars.  Civilians need evacuating from war zones, so in  a game in which warfare is the narrative backdrop it doesn’t hurt to save a few lives here and there.  What bothers me the most is the aforementioned stupidity of the AI.  I don’t know about you, but if I’m escaping a war zone I’m going to run with the urgency that such an event demands, not plod along as if it’s a nice Sunday stroll wherein I just happen to be shot upon.  I also hate that–twice–with only five minutes left until the civilians were nice and comfy and on their way to safety, I was soundly handed my butt on a platter by an enemy force that materialized out of nowhere.

I’m not sure when I’ll be getting back to Halo Wars single-player campaign.  The first three levels were immensely fun.  I applaud Ensemble Studios for figuring out how to make an RTS work on consoles: strip down the tech-tree and resource building, ramp up the combat, and give us lots of “get-on-the-ground-and-make-things-go-BOOM!” missions.  They really did take the visceral action of the best parts of the Halo series and make it work as a strategy game.

This is another reason I don’t like this mission.  It kills the flow.  Call me cold, but I don’t want to save innocent lives.  I want to blow stuff up.  I want to build an awesome army and rip apart the Covenant.  I want to leave the burnings corpses and crumpled structures of enemies in my wake.  So yes, this mission does add something to the game, but don’t Zerg-rush me out of nowhere when victory is in sight, or at least make it possible for me to prepare for said Zerg-rush.

I can’t wait to give multiplayer a try though, and I’m sure once I get past this grating mission I’ll enjoy the rest of the game.  Like that one passage in a book that just doesn’t make sense, maybe this mission is just one blunder on an otherwise smooth road.