"Dangerous ground to be treading there, Shufflemonkey." you might have thought before bringing the cursor over the needlessly long thread title. And you're most likely right. I probably would have better chances treading on an un-detonated mine field left over from the Korean War than speaking of Halo to a community of gamers. However, I have had some luck in making Halo threads that did not descend to the 7th circle of gaming forum hell in a ball of fire fueled by the rage of rabid fanboys, and I intend to bypass that which ignites gruesome flame wars (the campaign) and focus on that which is 75% (or more) of the Halo playing experience (the multiplayer). Thus follows my most unbiased balance of satire and splendor for Halo on Xbox Live.
Before I begin, I'll let my readers know that I am very much a veteran of Halo. I've played the campaigns and multiplayers of all three games and have been subject to all that I speak of. So, I'm basically going to say it how it is. But I'll start with the bad. Halo fanboys, please don't burn me.
If there's one thing that can be agreed upon about Halo is that it's popular. Like massively popular. Like more American children and teens can recognize a picture of Master Chief than can recognize Barak Obama and Jesus of Nazereth combined popular. There's nothing inherently wrong with great popularity (except for the actualization of the recognition joke, which was totally made up in case you were wondering), but with great popularity comes and equally great volume of douchebags.
Douchebag. Such a word I have used many times in the online matchmaking. The evolution of this word into vulgar English was a gift orchestrated specifically for the cornucopia of opportunities to use it in Halo, for many douchebags there are. Halo's versatile and free multiplayer environment provides a vast breeding ground for a large variety of the aforementioned bags of douche such as...
Tea Baggers
-"What big testicles you have!"
"The better to teabag you with, my foe!" -
-
There are times when it is quite appropriate to sexually desecrate your fallen enemies' bodies (as well as times to defile children's stories, and that caption probably wasn't one of them). If an opposing team member were to ambush me from the side with an assault rifle when I'm in the middle of lining up a headshot with a sniper, and in a last desperate effort to save myself, I no scope a bullet right into his visor, I'm not going to be able to resist the urge to click that crouch button a few times knowing that he's forced to spend the next 5 seconds as an invisible spectator of his fresh corpse (which I did, and it's proudly displayed in my file share).
However, there are times that such actions will place you among the douchebags. It may be a video game, but the least that can be expected is some sportsmanship. But such things are trivial offenses compared to being one of the...
Squeakers
I like kids. I have a job looking after a whole bunch of them every summer, and running/talking/drawing and things with them is fun, but one thing that is not fun is to play Halo with them. The sounds of a loud, obnoxious 10 year old cuts into my soul with a rusty butter knife. The "mute" option becomes incredibly handy for these pests. Unfortunately, many of the female gamers share similar vocal qualities and distinction between the two make take some dialogue which may expose you to the horrible sound of a child's (or abnormally high pitched teen guy's) voice on Xbox live.
For all the uses of that wonderful "X to mute" button, they cannot stop...
Team Killers
-But, trying to fight people who want to kill me is so scary!-
-
Maybe it was an honest mistake, maybe they're colorblind or something, definitely I'll need to channel The Ninja so as to reach through the internet and strangle 14 year olds with my bare hands if another one of those pre-pubescent morons shout obscenities at me though a so-close-to-the-face-I-can-hear-the-single-functional-neuron-rattling-in-his-skull mic while desperately missing me with his assault rifle.
Comparing my experiences with Halo 2 and 3, it seems that the amount of team killing has noticeably diminished in the last game. But choosing between the two is akin to being offered a teaspoon or tablespoon of goat excrement in your coffee.
For such blatant douchebagery, Bungie gave us the "boot" option. But those team killers who can manage to fire up that single synapse may find that finishing off a team mate weakened in a fight allows them immunity from repercussions. With them we must live, but we can find satisfaction in that they apparently suck so much that they must resort to backstabbing to kill anything in Halo.
There are certainly more varieties of douchebags who seem defy Darwin's theory of natural selection and who not only persist today but grow greater in divisions of species, but for fear of becoming too rant-ish, I will let you and your Halo colleagues vent anger as you plan your lynch mobs for the preceding douchebags. There is another fault to be analyzed here.
That is the manner of "leveling". Most importantly, there is the numerical rank in a playlist which essentially measures the size of one's Halo playing balls. This allows certain people to compare their testicular fortitude with that of other players and be matched against others with similar measurements. This does make for theoretically fair matches, but a problem quickly arises with the fact that everyone suffers or benefits based on the entire team performance. No matter how much you rock that match, your personal performance does very little for you should your team mates not know which way their gun is supposed to point.
A valid argument could be made for the dynamic that presents with team work in that the personal performance falls to the side of team effort, but I can count on two hands the number of games in which my team really worked together to achieve victory. Perhaps that's my bad luck.
----------
Now that I've thoroughly roasted on and ranted about Halo's multiplayer, I will now redeem it with fond sentiment of those factors of excellence. Halo haters, please don't burn me.
My next door neighbors are a family of husband, wife, and four children. Somehow, that husband finds time to, at least once a week, fully wash, wax, and polish their van. As a result, the sun's reflection off the hood regularly blinds passing birds and sends them crashing into nearby solid objects. This is the intensity of polishing that Bungie went to in the creation of the multiplayer.
-Battle rifle and Giant Lemon Tube. The ultimate super weapon coming in Halo 4-
-
The weapons of Halo 3 are very arguably the best balanced weapons of any multiplayer game. In the right hands, any single weapon or two weapon combo can be very potent. Whereas, the same weapon in the hands of an inexperienced player could be quite useless. The plasma pistol, useless for everything but the Noob Combo in Halo 2, takes on new uses with it's anti-vehicular abilities, but receives new handicaps with less homing ability and a prolonged charge constantly using its battery. The weapons are designed so that each player can develop their own weapon carrying strategy, and the only thing that makes theirs worse than any other player's is their personal skill with those weapons.
The vehicles and anti-vehicle measures are also impeccably polished. In Halos 1 and 2, vehicles could dominate a map so long as they knew how to dodge the homing rockets in 2. In Halo 3, a vehicle's reign of terror can quickly end with an accurate laser, a well placed mine, a few homing missiles, a hijack, a power drain, a plasma pistol charge, a stick, or just a crap ton of bullets. If you like to stay on foot, that's fine. Keep any 1 or two of the preceding nearby, and you'll be set for vehicle slaying.
-I don't think he was counting on this-
-
The process of matchmaking itself is an issue that can stir mixed emotions (namely for me). It's refreshing to go and play CoD4 on live and rarely have to wait more than 30 seconds for a match to start, but this again speaks to Halo's rabidly zealous passion for fairness. After every match, you are pulled from the game lobby to spend another 1 to 3 minutes waiting for the system to place you with another batch of evenly matched players (consistently putting you on a team with the worst retards of the batch, presumably because Bungie decided to randomly pick your gamertag as a target for such intense frustration that you begin to gnaw your hands off from the wrists). The tediousness of such ritual becomes tiresome, but you can stick it to the man and abate the suckage of such things by either pulling friends into your party or grouping up with strangers who have proved both their skill and their mental capacity to not be insufferable duchebags.
-The party of clan Kickass. Don't mess-
If you aren't an online multiplayer person, then such things won't appeal or even matter to you, and that's understandable. But I'm going to finish with some things that are very prominent facts about Halo's multiplayer.
Halo multiplayer has done more to change the gaming community than any other game in history. WoW is very much a contender for such a statement considering that it has caused several deaths, but no other game can lay claim to the internet phenomenon of Red vs. Blue, the longest running and most popular machinima series of all time, and the catalyst for the development of contemporary machinima. On top of that, Halo 3 is the biggest game in MLG.
---
Wrapping it up: Halo has made a very excellent system of online gaming. There are many other games that have very well designed multiplayer, but if you're into online gaming, it's very likely that Halo 3 is for you.
-Would it be mongooses or mongeese? Mongooi?-
Before I begin, I'll let my readers know that I am very much a veteran of Halo. I've played the campaigns and multiplayers of all three games and have been subject to all that I speak of. So, I'm basically going to say it how it is. But I'll start with the bad. Halo fanboys, please don't burn me.
If there's one thing that can be agreed upon about Halo is that it's popular. Like massively popular. Like more American children and teens can recognize a picture of Master Chief than can recognize Barak Obama and Jesus of Nazereth combined popular. There's nothing inherently wrong with great popularity (except for the actualization of the recognition joke, which was totally made up in case you were wondering), but with great popularity comes and equally great volume of douchebags.
Douchebag. Such a word I have used many times in the online matchmaking. The evolution of this word into vulgar English was a gift orchestrated specifically for the cornucopia of opportunities to use it in Halo, for many douchebags there are. Halo's versatile and free multiplayer environment provides a vast breeding ground for a large variety of the aforementioned bags of douche such as...
Tea Baggers
-"What big testicles you have!"
"The better to teabag you with, my foe!" -
-
There are times when it is quite appropriate to sexually desecrate your fallen enemies' bodies (as well as times to defile children's stories, and that caption probably wasn't one of them). If an opposing team member were to ambush me from the side with an assault rifle when I'm in the middle of lining up a headshot with a sniper, and in a last desperate effort to save myself, I no scope a bullet right into his visor, I'm not going to be able to resist the urge to click that crouch button a few times knowing that he's forced to spend the next 5 seconds as an invisible spectator of his fresh corpse (which I did, and it's proudly displayed in my file share).
However, there are times that such actions will place you among the douchebags. It may be a video game, but the least that can be expected is some sportsmanship. But such things are trivial offenses compared to being one of the...
Squeakers
I like kids. I have a job looking after a whole bunch of them every summer, and running/talking/drawing and things with them is fun, but one thing that is not fun is to play Halo with them. The sounds of a loud, obnoxious 10 year old cuts into my soul with a rusty butter knife. The "mute" option becomes incredibly handy for these pests. Unfortunately, many of the female gamers share similar vocal qualities and distinction between the two make take some dialogue which may expose you to the horrible sound of a child's (or abnormally high pitched teen guy's) voice on Xbox live.
For all the uses of that wonderful "X to mute" button, they cannot stop...
Team Killers
-But, trying to fight people who want to kill me is so scary!-
-
Maybe it was an honest mistake, maybe they're colorblind or something, definitely I'll need to channel The Ninja so as to reach through the internet and strangle 14 year olds with my bare hands if another one of those pre-pubescent morons shout obscenities at me though a so-close-to-the-face-I-can-hear-the-single-functional-neuron-rattling-in-his-skull mic while desperately missing me with his assault rifle.
Comparing my experiences with Halo 2 and 3, it seems that the amount of team killing has noticeably diminished in the last game. But choosing between the two is akin to being offered a teaspoon or tablespoon of goat excrement in your coffee.
For such blatant douchebagery, Bungie gave us the "boot" option. But those team killers who can manage to fire up that single synapse may find that finishing off a team mate weakened in a fight allows them immunity from repercussions. With them we must live, but we can find satisfaction in that they apparently suck so much that they must resort to backstabbing to kill anything in Halo.
There are certainly more varieties of douchebags who seem defy Darwin's theory of natural selection and who not only persist today but grow greater in divisions of species, but for fear of becoming too rant-ish, I will let you and your Halo colleagues vent anger as you plan your lynch mobs for the preceding douchebags. There is another fault to be analyzed here.
That is the manner of "leveling". Most importantly, there is the numerical rank in a playlist which essentially measures the size of one's Halo playing balls. This allows certain people to compare their testicular fortitude with that of other players and be matched against others with similar measurements. This does make for theoretically fair matches, but a problem quickly arises with the fact that everyone suffers or benefits based on the entire team performance. No matter how much you rock that match, your personal performance does very little for you should your team mates not know which way their gun is supposed to point.
A valid argument could be made for the dynamic that presents with team work in that the personal performance falls to the side of team effort, but I can count on two hands the number of games in which my team really worked together to achieve victory. Perhaps that's my bad luck.
----------
Now that I've thoroughly roasted on and ranted about Halo's multiplayer, I will now redeem it with fond sentiment of those factors of excellence. Halo haters, please don't burn me.
My next door neighbors are a family of husband, wife, and four children. Somehow, that husband finds time to, at least once a week, fully wash, wax, and polish their van. As a result, the sun's reflection off the hood regularly blinds passing birds and sends them crashing into nearby solid objects. This is the intensity of polishing that Bungie went to in the creation of the multiplayer.
-Battle rifle and Giant Lemon Tube. The ultimate super weapon coming in Halo 4-
-
The weapons of Halo 3 are very arguably the best balanced weapons of any multiplayer game. In the right hands, any single weapon or two weapon combo can be very potent. Whereas, the same weapon in the hands of an inexperienced player could be quite useless. The plasma pistol, useless for everything but the Noob Combo in Halo 2, takes on new uses with it's anti-vehicular abilities, but receives new handicaps with less homing ability and a prolonged charge constantly using its battery. The weapons are designed so that each player can develop their own weapon carrying strategy, and the only thing that makes theirs worse than any other player's is their personal skill with those weapons.
The vehicles and anti-vehicle measures are also impeccably polished. In Halos 1 and 2, vehicles could dominate a map so long as they knew how to dodge the homing rockets in 2. In Halo 3, a vehicle's reign of terror can quickly end with an accurate laser, a well placed mine, a few homing missiles, a hijack, a power drain, a plasma pistol charge, a stick, or just a crap ton of bullets. If you like to stay on foot, that's fine. Keep any 1 or two of the preceding nearby, and you'll be set for vehicle slaying.
-I don't think he was counting on this-
-
The process of matchmaking itself is an issue that can stir mixed emotions (namely for me). It's refreshing to go and play CoD4 on live and rarely have to wait more than 30 seconds for a match to start, but this again speaks to Halo's rabidly zealous passion for fairness. After every match, you are pulled from the game lobby to spend another 1 to 3 minutes waiting for the system to place you with another batch of evenly matched players (consistently putting you on a team with the worst retards of the batch, presumably because Bungie decided to randomly pick your gamertag as a target for such intense frustration that you begin to gnaw your hands off from the wrists). The tediousness of such ritual becomes tiresome, but you can stick it to the man and abate the suckage of such things by either pulling friends into your party or grouping up with strangers who have proved both their skill and their mental capacity to not be insufferable duchebags.
-The party of clan Kickass. Don't mess-
If you aren't an online multiplayer person, then such things won't appeal or even matter to you, and that's understandable. But I'm going to finish with some things that are very prominent facts about Halo's multiplayer.
Halo multiplayer has done more to change the gaming community than any other game in history. WoW is very much a contender for such a statement considering that it has caused several deaths, but no other game can lay claim to the internet phenomenon of Red vs. Blue, the longest running and most popular machinima series of all time, and the catalyst for the development of contemporary machinima. On top of that, Halo 3 is the biggest game in MLG.
---
Wrapping it up: Halo has made a very excellent system of online gaming. There are many other games that have very well designed multiplayer, but if you're into online gaming, it's very likely that Halo 3 is for you.
-Would it be mongooses or mongeese? Mongooi?-
