Halo, Halo, Halo, How Low?
As Halo 3 has been released fairly recently, I thought I’d post my thoughts on, er, pretty much every other first person shooter instead.
Perhaps my main claim to nerdhood (at least, non-comic related nerdhood) is the summer I spent as a teenager playing almost nothing but Doom. The weird snorting, crunching noises the demons made and the distinctive clunk-swishes of the doors opening have actually been imprinted on my parents’ memories. Damn, I played that game a lot.
It was the first FPS I’d ever played, and nothing really came close afterwards, not Doom 2, nor Quake, nor any iteration of Unreal. In fact, I’m not even sure the later chapters of the first Doom came close to the atmosphere and mystery of the first, in the Martian base. Nothing, that is, until Halo.
My comrade Marcel is quick (and correct) to point out the subtext of American military supremacy in the series, but in all honest I don’t really care. Political nuances are frequently drowned out by the bloodthirsty adrenaline-enhanced laughter of doom (or, possibly, Doom). Even though the plot is cobbled together from elements of other things (Aliens being the most obvious, others including Starship Troopers and Babylon 5), it’s still easy to get drawn into it, to its grandeur and scale.
Single-player plot seemed less important in the era of Unreal Tournament and Quake III than a funky multiplayer, which made Halo’s scope for fantastic set-pieces and classic moments a strong selling point. It shares this with Half-Life, the Game of the Year edition of which reintroduced me to gaming only a couple of months before I bought an Xbox (and Marcel’s FPS of choice, as he prefers to empathise with the speccy scientist than the super-marine). On top of the single player campaign, the co-op and multiplayer was also brilliant.
I remember taking time off from work the day Halo 2 came out. It seems harsh to describe it as a disappointment as it’s still a game I love to play; but, perhaps unreasonably, I was expecting more. After a couple of weeks it was obvious that the weapons weren’t quite as well balanced as the first game, and while the plot itself was an excellent continuation of the original, the fact that every alternating level you played a character other than the Master Chief really took you out of the story. It felt disjointed, and I hadn’t put my cash down to play the Arbiter. That’s not to say the character wasn’t a great addition, allowing us to explore the Covenant’s culture, only that it wasn’t implemented as well as it could have been. Halo 2’s greatest achievement was its online multiplayer, and that type of gaming’s not really my cup of tea.
I think it’s still to early for me to deliver a verdict on the last of the trilogy. It’s certainly held up much better than the first sequel, and I thought the story wrapped perfectly. The weapons are certainly better balanced, and the Chief’s original rifle makes a welcome return (watch as my nerditude increases as sentences accumulate). But I think I’ll have a few more plays through before making a final judgement.
