I absolutely
hate the Halo series. I admit they aren't
terrible games but I despise what they represent. Hear me out here please. I am not a jealous fan of another FPS or an anti Microsoft revolutionary, My disdain for Halo comes from my love of video games.
Back in 1998, I had just switched from an old PowerMac to a buggy PC running on Windows 98 after I became addicted to the game Half-Life. It seemed Apple was giving up on the gaming computer war with Microsoft as they started offering less and less support for game developers. At one time they dominated Windows on the gaming market, then Win95 was released and the playing field was changed. I was dreaming of the day when my preferred Operating System would return to it's glory days of being the computer of choice for everybody and not just elitists and graphic artists who wanted a trendy looking computer. (Keep in mind the Imac was still pretty recent around this time.) My hope and faith was restored when I found out that Bungie one of my favorite game developers at the time was developing a revolutionary game that was EXCLUSIVE to the Macintosh computer.
One of the earliest computer games I played as a child was a title known as
Minotaur: Labyrinth of Crete, that Bungie made. Those developers went on to make the amazing Marathon series of games. Marathon introduced some great multiplayer gameplay features such as the King of the Hill style match and VOIP (Only recently did I discover this. NOBODY used that feature back in the 90's considering most players were stuck with dial up and even streaming sound was quite bandwidth intensive.) Later Bungie made one of the greatest strategy games of all time:
Myth the Fallen Lords. It had gameplay styles and strategies that were unlike the other RTS games that Westwood, Blizzard and Cavedog would just continually churn out. Myth became a successful franchise and with every release under it belt being a hit, it appeared as if Bungie could do no wrong.
Fast forward to MacWorld 1999. After rousing speeches by Noah Wylie and Steve Jobs, Bungie was introduced as a guest of honor to debut an innovative third person shooting that was in the works. He then took to a computer and began showing their work in progress...not in a video but as it was rendered in
real time! The audience's jaw dropped upon the sight of seeing that tiny PowerBook generate gorgeous settings of a spacecraft's bridge: full of specular lights and particle effects. An armored solider who then appeared to me as the offspring of the
Doomguy and a
Cybrid from Tribes armed himself and took to an open enviroment where he exposed himself to and harassed some aliens who gave chase to him. He then got into an all terrain vehicle we now know as the Warthog with some buddies and blew off socks off as we witnessed the fluidity and realism of the bouncing tire physics. Pilotable vehicles in shooters were nothing new at the time, but that demonstration blew the socks out of the time's standard: Tribes with it's physics. The good guys then pulled a stick up on some aliens much like in
Metal Gear Solid and one went inside their craft and flew over a beautiful landscape while dodging anti-aircraft fire. Everyone was amazed by how large the terrain was and how far it allowed you to fly. While watching the footage my mouth was wide open with flecks of runny drool dripping by the second.
Two years passed and it still wasn't out. Instead Bungie released a game called
Oni that merged brawler-style martial arts combat with a shooter, something that was unheard of at the time. It also utilized Cel graphics, something that has been attempted many times but almost guaranteed failure in trying to look right. It was a highly ambitious project that was considered a commercial and design failure, but had its merits and is still a guilty pleasure of mine to this day. A year or two later, Halo still hadn't come out and I got word that Bungie abandoned the Mac. I was disappointed, but hey I had long abandoned the Mac! I then hear that Bill Gates got his grimy hands on the game and was going to make it an exclusive title for Microsoft's entry into the Console market: The Xbox. It was not going to come to the PC until much later. I was pissed because I was really looking forward to that game.
The game was finally released alongside the Xbox launch. By that time the graphics were quite outdated to the standards of the day and nearly everything it was going to pioneer such as wireframe animation had already been done. I eagerly went home to my Xbox owner friend and tested it out. After the lengthy and well directed introduction, I fought myself out of the
Pillar of Autumn and found myself carving a path through the ringworld. The experience was not mindblowing, there was nothing new that I could see, yet I admit it was great fun. Then 15 or so minutes passed and I realized I was playing the
SAME THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN. I would enter a tunnel, climb up a slope, transverse a canyon, pass a bridge and enter a tunnel. They were the
SAME TUNNEL, SLOPE, CANYON AND BRIDGE! Even the enemies spawned at the same places! I had enough! I decided to take the low approach and just skip a few levels.
I skipped to THE LIBRARY!. My friends told me to try out the deathmatch feature thinking it will be better. But the awkward analog controls that I hadn't been accustomed to since
Perfect Dark and the poor resolution of the old TVs they used displaying the split screen made the experience just a joyous romp of repetitively dying. Every week I would be a a friend's place engaged in a "Halo party" and sadly my skills never improved.
As you may or may not have read. I was extremely disappointed. For years my heart banked on this game becoming a success and a good experience. Shockingly it gained quite a following both on the internet and around my school with Xbox fans. Some even went on the make the ludicrous statement that it was the best game ever. Heated arguments would erupt between Xbox owners and Gamecube and PS2 owners when one stated that
Devil May Cry or
GTA were better titles. I thought this would pass and that when higher quality games would come for the Xbox people would forget. But the rabid fanboyism grew...and grew. Suddenly the forums and sites I frequent were bombarded by preteens and adolescents who were until then casual gamers spouting in poor grammar that Halo beats Doom, Quake, Duke 3d, Tribes, Unreal, Half-Life, Deus Ex and so forth. Forums are randomly trolled by these kids just because they belong to a game that's not Halo. The worse of it comes when Gamespy held a tournament for the greatest games ever made and every time Halo was pitted against something, the opposition's forum was mercilessly trolled and ridiculous statements such as "
quake has crapy graphix and did
nothing new for gaming" were made. When Half-Life 2 was announced somehow it became the main competitor and mortal enemy for the upcoming Halo 2. The trolls bombed their boards mercilessly and even accused the Combine of being a ripoff of the Covenant and that
headcraps were just the Flood. (Like alien empires and mind controlling parasites were something completely original that Bungie produced.) That's when I had enough. The fanboys had hit a new low and I began to denounce Halo everywhere I went.
Upon Halo 2's release I sat down with the same friends who I played the first with. They convinced me to give it a try despite my hatred to its fanbase and my disappointment in CE, a game I anxiously waited over four years for. The graphics were bland and completely inferior to the current generation of shooters that were led by Doom 3, FarCry and Half-Life 2. I was pissed that they brought back the cut and paste mapping that drove me off the wall about the previous game. Again I tried some multiplayer and tried was all I got through. Then I decided to simply watch my friends play.
They booted up Xbox Live. Now I had been playing multiplayer games online since 1995 or so. In all my years playing competetively over the internet I had run into possibly thousands of assholes. Until that time I though Counter-Strike players were probably the worse, but at least not everyone there was a racist and anti-semetic preteen who was speaking like a robot while playing rap music.
So to sum it up the combined aspects of:
-Huge dissapointment in a highly anticipated game from a developer I respected.
-Outdated graphics and gameplay capabilites upon release.
-A complete absence of innovation.
-The poor game design and lazy cut and paste mapping.
-Mediocre gameplay.
-Rabid fanbase that developed into a cult upon fear that they wasted hundreds of dollars on a gaming machine that had only a few decent games.
-It's role in being a Microsoft propaganda tool. (You need
VISTA to play a
FOUR YEAR OLD GAME?)
-My own inadequacy in playing a FPS on console that is of no fault to either Microsoft, Bungie or the pissant fanboys.
-Its generic storyline and protagonist that somehow spawned an entire franchise of novels, comics, toys, and possibly film over characters way more worthwhile.
-One of the most rude, obsessed, obnoxious and least informed fanbases out there.
-How it turned the ambitious and innovative Bungie studio into a developer that churns out souless games.
-The thrid installment's eclipsement of better games such as Bioshock and Assassin's Creed.
-How it undeservingly somehow gained more money in a single day than any entertainment production.
-How it became a pop culture icon to people who don't even play video games.
-Sigh...once again: The fanbase.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TPANByjqh8
This all really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I admit I enjoyed Halo 3 though. It was good but not GREAT.
This title perplexed me. In my opinion the game was down from the beginning and began to crawl it's way into the status it has today.
