LGC Pominator said:
bigass well written rant about Halo.
whilst i have nowhere near your list of academic qualifications, at 24 years of age i do have half a decade of perspective on the matter, and i'll try to illuminate you on the Halo backlash you find so uncalled for and perplexing.
firstly, to reiterate what Captain Crunch and i have said already in this thread, Halo was indeed revolutionary for being the first legitimate FPS to hit the console market. it was the first time that a console FPS had graphics, AI, and gameplay on a level approximating that of the FPS's those of us in the PC gaming community had been enjoying since the late nineties. remember that upon the release of Halo, those of us with gaming PCs were enjoying Battlefield 1942, Half Life's mod community(with Counter-Strike suddenly challenged by Day of Defeat as the new mod on the block), Unreal Tournament, Deux Ex, the Thief series, and countless other classic first person shooters. whilst Halo was a remarkably successful experiment in making the FPS function with a gamepad instead of the traditional mouse and keyboard, it's reception amongst then prevalent FPS fans ranged from "it's pretty fun" to "this will be awesome once it hits PC and we get a mod community behind it." but to your age group, it was the first time you'd played a real first person shooter(the closest prior being Goldeneye and Perfect Dark). as the PC market started dying out and first person shooters moved en masse to consoles, a schism not unlike that of the SNES Final Fantasy fandom v. folks who started out with FFVII started, and has only grown over the years. as the XBox slowly replaced the PC as the preeminent FPS platform, a not inconsiderable amount of resentment has been leveled at Halo for spearheading this movement. whilst this is largely unfair to the Halo franchise, it should be understood that no small amount of the hyperbole leveled at Halo comes from this resentment.
as for the story itself, i remember playing Combat Evolved and being largely unimpressed, but not completely turned off. it certainly didn't hold a candle to the likes of Thief, Half-Life, or Deux Ex. it was, unsurprisingly, the same Space Marine v. Aliens deal we'd seen countless times since the release of Doom. Halo was, however, a fun game, and far more conducive to basement LAN parties if only because it required four X-Boxes and 16 controllers rather than 16 PCs to get going. but i do remember the pre-release hype for Halo 2. i remember waiting forever to download new trailers on our blazing 56k modems. and what we saw was amazing. we were being promised massive scale warfare on Earth. literally every single tidbit of news was about Earth, and the large-scale warfare we'd be engaging in with the Covenant there. we were promised a game whose sheer scope and scale was unlike anything we'd ever seen.
i also remember the day Halo 2 launched. i remember going to my friends house, all of us psyched to see this promised new era in gameplay. we were ready to boot up the co-op and defend the earth. an hour and a half later we were on another fucking Halo doing the exact same shit we did in the last game, only now the cutscene engine and shotgun didn't work worth a damn. that was when I stopped giving a shit entirely. oh i played my share of deathmatches, captured my share of flags, and enjoyed myself with my friends on the multiplayer, but to this day i've never played past the fourth mission of Halo 2. i've never seen the end of that game, and i feel no worse for it. it was, and remains, a boilerplate FPS notable only for pioneering a new platform for the genre(which remains an incredible feat, and a distinct turning point for video games as a medium). i understand that for you it was likely a revelation, the first success in a long line of failures, ambitious or otherwise. i appreciate that this colors your perception of the game, and seeing as your(and that of most of your age group's) idea of what an FPS should be was shaped almost entirely by Halo. but the fact is that the Halo series has been outclassed in almost every way by better franchises, many of which were around long before Microsoft bought out Bungie.
