Halo is the New Star Wars

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.

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!