Why does everyone who has played Halo to death have such a need to disparage it? I'm not honestly sure. I, for one, was never very good at FPS games, I'd played Quake a few times, and I think DOOM once, but I was honestly awful. Embarrassingly so. What's a guy to do? Well, a friend of mine suggested that I play a game he bought along with his brand new, state-of-the-art Xbox. I was excite to try it, and I loved it, because it was accessible.
One thing I refuse to do, out of some twisted sense of pride, it play on the easy setting, in any game, ever. This was extremely detrimental to my attempts to become competent when I was thrown into pitched battles without knowing even which button was "fire". Alright, I'm more than happy to admit that Halo and its runty siblings are by no means a symbol of perfection in gameplay or storytelling, but it was extremely intuitive for me, and I was playing with those gigantic-monstrosity-style controllers that first came with the Xbox (I still say those thing were awesome).
That's what made Halo "All That" to me. It was a game in a genre I could barely play, but I found it extremely easy to master the aiming, strafing, grenade lobbing, even yelling "Frag Out!" when I did so. I'm not making any claim that I'm good in comparison to some people online, not a damn chance. It's the idea of "easy to learn, hard to master," that I think Bungie pulled off quite well.
Now, for games that I played based on the fevered reviews of friends and professional critics, Okami tops in disappointment. And I know why. Too much hype from people who had some misguided sense that the game was the "Epic next step" in the industry (Directly quoting a fevered friend here). While I really do enjoy the art style and I believe that it was a very inventive game, for reasons I can't explain, it had difficulty holding my interest for more than an hour at a time.
I think it's a tragedy that Clover Studios was closed down; I actually took some time to sit and reflect upon the implications when I heard the news. I loved the Viewtiful Joe games, and though Okami wasn't the masterpiece my friends promised, it was very inventive, steeped so deeply in Japanese mythology that it helpfully provides a "Stuff you white people can't possibly know" in the back of the manual. So am I saying Okami was a bad game? Of course not, but perhaps one needs to enjoy Japanese culture and be more involved in the research than I cared to be (Plus I was playing Psychonauts at the time, so Okami really took a back seat to that joyride).
