Halo 3 First Impressions

[Anton P. Nym]

I see Halo as an Armageddon-type experience.

You realise, of course, that this means war. *grin*

Though I certainly don't regard Halo as "Mission of Gravity" reincarnated, it's at least a decently fun story as far as I've gotten and its back story is huge. Armageddon was beyond even pulp and into "slurry" range; I was rooting for the asteroid before the second reel ended.

As to the game being too short and the dialog too shallow, I do wonder at what difficulty you played through. I've played three or so hours now myself and only gotten most of the way through the Jungle level... on Heroic. Then again, I am a slow and methodical player.

And if Master Chief's augmentic antics are beyond believeable for you, then you probably should've also been kicked out by "BioShock"'s multiply-resurrected hero... to spoil no spoilers, I'll have to put this obliquely, but put together the first name of "BioShock"'s protagonist with the name of his biological father and wonder if Tom Clancy should get a license fee.

-- Steve

 

[Lex Darko]

I see Halo as an Armageddon-type experience.

You realise, of course, that this means war. *grin*

As to the game being too short and the dialog too shallow, I do wonder at what difficulty you played through...

That first line made me remember one of the cheesiest of the cheesiest lines I have ever heard in a video game. It comes from the start of chapter 2 "Holdout" it went something like this...

Random soldier, "Commander the soldiers are asking for a rally point where should they go?"

Keyes' replies saying, "Tell them to go to war."

I swear right then some of my brain cells just went to sleep saying, wake us when we start reading Rand's book again, until then we are taking a break don't bother us.

So, I guess I'll go get on that now.

 

[Ajar]

We could consider Halo a soft sci-fi universe because it doesn't delve into engineering or the traditionally hard sciences, but then we'd be ignoring the vast wealth of hard sci-fi that focuses on things like alien biology or psychology.

Halo doesn't delve into any of those things either. It doesn't particularly delve into any sciences, hard or soft. It makes no attempt to make any of its science-fictiony elements seem remotely plausible. So yes, Halo is clearly an example of soft SF. As soft SF, it doesn't need to do those things. And as pulp, it has no need for the kind of moral questions about freedom and power that BioShock asks you.

This is not a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with pulp. I'm playing and enjoying Halo 3 right now, just like I played the hell out of (and enjoyed) the similarly pulpy and even less story-laden Gears of War.

 

[Russ Pitts]

Random soldier, "Commander the soldiers are asking for a rally point where should they go?"

Keyes' replies saying, "Tell them to go to war."

Yeah that one killed a few of my favorite brain cells, too. I was like "um ... but aren't they ... already ... um ... at war ... ?" And how does that help? Dude needed information not a one-liner. Anyway, I digress.

Alex, I think you're misreading me. I am certainly not using the word pulp in a derogatory fashion. I like pulp. I also like Halo 3. And you.

As far as the super soldier thing, I'm not criticizing, just pointing out that as soon as we walk through that door we're in shaky territory as far as considering Halo 3 "hard" SF.

Also: see the opening cinematic for a clear example of over-the-top pulpiness (see, you really do need to play the game before you get all up in my grille about it). I'm not going to spoil anything, but I want you to remember the phrase "The gel layer absorbed the impact." Remember it, and get back to me ... ahem .. after you've played the game.

 

[Russ Pitts]

And if Master Chief's augmentic antics are beyond believeable for you, then you probably should've also been kicked out by "BioShock"'s multiply-resurrected hero...

I totally agree that there was a lot about BioShock that was hard to swallow. But nobody here called it hard SF. I mean, the whole premise of a city built under the ocean in the 1950s itself is a bit beyond the pale but it's fantasy. If you think I have a problem with Halo 3 because it's implausible, then you're misreading me. My point is that it would have to be plausible to consider it hard SF, which it isn't, so I don't.

 

[imcaseyimhott [deprecated]]

Halo is a horribly simplistic FPS that should have never blown up, but it was easy for 12 year olds to play so parents fell in love with it, throwing out the money for their kids to yell racist names and internet speak over a microphone.

Enjoying Halo has to be up there with sticking vegetables in your rear, and as hard as 1st grade math.

 

[John Funk]

Halo is a horribly simplistic FPS that should have never blown up, but it was easy for 12 year olds to play so parents fell in love with it, throwing out the money for their kids to yell racist names and internet speak over a microphone.

Enjoying Halo has to be up there with sticking vegetables in your rear, and as hard as 1st grade math.

Yeah, as someone who's seriously enjoyed FPS games since the days of Wolfenstein 3D, and who's finding Halo 3 (Heroic difficulty) to be both challenging and an absolute BLAST, I'm gonna have to disagree with you on this one.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

Enjoying Halo has to be up there with sticking vegetables in your rear, and as hard as 1st grade math.

I'm sorry to hear of your learning disability, but it's no excuse for bringing your personal fetishes into a discussion on video games.

-- Steve

 

[danimal1384]

Halo is a horribly simplistic FPS that should have never blown up, but it was easy for 12 year olds to play so parents fell in love with it, throwing out the money for their kids to yell racist names and internet speak over a microphone.

Enjoying Halo has to be up there with sticking vegetables in your rear, and as hard as 1st grade math.

indeed i'm going to have to agree with the others on this one. while halo isn't very deep or inspired by any strech of the imagination, it is still a very enjoyable game series. i PARTIALLY agree with your statement on mothers using games as a parental device instead of interaction with the child. while this seems to be an unfortunately growing trend in america today, this is by no means an indicator of the quality of the games that are used by sub-par parents. i certainly find killing elites on heroic and legendary mode alot harder than finding the answer to 2+3. and i don't stick veggies up my arse either, but i throughly enjoy halo. so i guess you are tired of being made inferior by 12 year olds on xbox live. don't project your personal grievances with the players of a game onto the game itself. i do feel that the series is a bit overrated, but that doesn't mean they aren't fun.

 

[Bongo Bill]

I want to like Halo. Really, I do. It controls nicely, it's slow-paced enough that I can accomplish something in it, it's got great production values, it's just plain fun.

I just think that they made a serious design flaw when they decided that it would be acceptable to rely on the Internet for multiplayer. Couldn't they have at least tried to find a group of humans who aren't so flagrantly idiotic? I know such groups exist. I'm among one now. I understand they're adding the option to mute specific idiots or every idiot as you please, but that's only half a solution - you still have to find some other way to communicate to teammates without interrupting your beautiful, perfect symphony of eternal silence. (Well, and in my case there's one other issue - since every game seems to have this exact problem, the first one that fixes it is going to cost me fifty bucks a year in addition to its retail price.)

I'm well aware that it's asking too much for a single game development studio to find a solution to the fundamental, systemic rudeness and stupidity that permeates any sufficiently large group of hairless apes, and that it's nothing short of sheer naïveté on my part to expect a business to attempt to deprive their target audience of their favored pastime. But I'm going to go on complaining about it anyway, in the hopes of contributing to a noise which the right ears hear and interpret to mean "You stand to make a lot of money if you can make an online game in which politeness is not an unrealistic expectation."

 

[switchblade327 [deprecated]]

As for the length of Halo 3 vs. Bioshock, in my review of BioShock I called it a 20+ hour game. Which it is. In fact, I spent over 30 playing through it, but that was mainly because I lollygaged. Halo 3, on the other hand, took me about 15 - with lollygagging. Way too short for the conslusion to a 10-year trilogy, in my opinion.

I'm not sure where you get the idea a "good" FPS takes about 10 hours, but the best I can recall were all 20+ affairs. Tomb Raider Legend is the shortest I can recall from recent memory (sub 10) and I would have expected Halo 3 to measure up better than that, considering.

But like I said, please play it and get back to me so that we can have a reasoned debate.

15 hours for a next gen game is "embarrassingly short?" Are you nuts or do you consider Oblivion an FPS and judge all games by that?

10-15 hours is bone standard for a shooter and has been for ages (Steam clocks my Bioshock time at 16.5 hours). It should be expected. Hell, I stopped playing Doom 3 because it was dragging on and I read it was a whopping 20 hours.

Many of the top AAA "next gen" games are only good for 7-8 hours! THAT is embarrassingly short. 15 hours for a shooter, no matter how hyped it is, is absolutely standard and shouldn't be held against it.

 

[fupjack]

I get the feeling that in terms of story, Halo is the same story from Bungie's Marathon games, repeated. I would imagine the creators are really, really ready to think of something else now.

 

[Geoffrey42]

Also: see the opening cinematic for a clear example of over-the-top pulpiness (see, you really do need to play the game before you get all up in my grille about it). I'm not going to spoil anything, but I want you to remember the phrase "The gel layer absorbed the impact." Remember it, and get back to me ... ahem .. after you've played the game.

Have you seen modern impact gels? Just in the last week, I've seen a Japanese man drop an egg from the top of a two story building only to have it land unbroken on a pad of inch thick impact gel, and watched a woman hit another woman on her gel-armored knee with a hammer (this was disappointing, she didn't swing nearly as hard as I would've liked).

But, then again, I know (or at least think I do) what you're referring to, and no, even then, no matter how good your impact gel is, it shouldn't save you from that.

 

[Alex Karls]

Also: see the opening cinematic for a clear example of over-the-top pulpiness (see, you really do need to play the game before you get all up in my grille about it). I'm not going to spoil anything, but I want you to remember the phrase "The gel layer absorbed the impact." Remember it, and get back to me ... ahem .. after you've played the game.

If it's what I'm thinking of, I think I've already seen it as it's part of the promotional media. IIRC, the same sort of thing, only with more padding, happened in Halo 2. And it makes me wonder something...you can deal with it if you're falling at terminal velocity. Could someone that size accelerate beyond terminal velocity when falling from space? Hmm....

 

[John Funk]

I want to like Halo. Really, I do. It controls nicely, it's slow-paced enough that I can accomplish something in it, it's got great production values, it's just plain fun.

I just think that they made a serious design flaw when they decided that it would be acceptable to rely on the Internet for multiplayer. Couldn't they have at least tried to find a group of humans who aren't so flagrantly idiotic? I know such groups exist. I'm among one now. I understand they're adding the option to mute specific idiots or every idiot as you please, but that's only half a solution - you still have to find some other way to communicate to teammates without interrupting your beautiful, perfect symphony of eternal silence. (Well, and in my case there's one other issue - since every game seems to have this exact problem, the first one that fixes it is going to cost me fifty bucks a year in addition to its retail price.)

I'm well aware that it's asking too much for a single game development studio to find a solution to the fundamental, systemic rudeness and stupidity that permeates any sufficiently large group of hairless apes, and that it's nothing short of sheer naïveté on my part to expect a business to attempt to deprive their target audience of their favored pastime. But I'm going to go on complaining about it anyway, in the hopes of contributing to a noise which the right ears hear and interpret to mean "You stand to make a lot of money if you can make an online game in which politeness is not an unrealistic expectation."

Bongo... how else would you have suggested they do multiplayer if not the Internet? >_> there's always split-screen and system link if you'd rather not deal with XBL.

 

[Kuzdu]

As far as I can tell, except for the little details, Halo's story is basically watered down from StarCraft, which in turn was watered from Warhammer 40,000. So I guess it's all fair in the end.

 

[Geoffrey42]

Having not followed Warhammer 40k much, I can't address that. But, I have played both Halo and Starcraft. I'm having trouble seeing the parallels which lead you to say this.

Yes, they both take place in space (but I don't see you using that to say its essentially Star Wars).
Yes, there are essentially 3 species/factions (Starcraft: Zerg, Protoss, and Human [ignoring various political splits within those species]/Halo: Flood, Covenant [consisting of 6 species, which I can think of], and Human). But, within that, the roles that each faction plays are quite different. I see strong parallels between the religious zealotry of the Covenant and the Protoss, and, gee, Humans are Humans, but I see very few parallels between the Zerg and the Flood, except that they were both drawn/designed to inspire a sense of disgust.

The STORY, as opposed to the SETTING, is different in more ways than I can enumerate. Lacking further defense of your statement from you, I don't know what else I can say.

 

[John Funk]

Well, the Zerg and the Flood both exist to consume and infest, so to speak. And from what I've seen, the Gravemind might = Overmind? >_>

 

[Bongo Bill]

Bongo... how else would you have suggested they do multiplayer if not the Internet? >_> there's always split-screen and system link if you'd rather not deal with XBL.

I was referring to the Internet as a social milieu, not the Internet as a technology or communications medium. It's the lowest-common-denominator problem.

 

[omnibus01]

I personally find the re-playablity of all the Halo series excellent. If you do something a bit differently in any level you will receive a somewhat different experience. I've done 'Assault on the Control Room' level in Halo 1 at least 50 times throughout the years, and they were each a separate gaming episode. No, they were not drastically different, but enough to encourage me try the level in a new way each time. And they were FUN! Halo is not Half-life....I love that game but it's a very diffrent kind of gaming experience. It's a lot more cerebral, and less twitchy, but not as much shear fun. All of the Halos are great FPS games, and let's not forget that Halo set the standard for console shooters. 10-15 hours is a bit short for me, but there are the almost endless possiblities of co-op campaign play.

However, it appears obvious to me that Halo 3 is essentially a multiplayer juggernaught. There is no game out now on PC or console which can match it, as the early and mind-boggling figures on Bungie prove. It will take over within the week [probably sooner] as the Xbox Live king of online games. And Xbox Live is where the Xbox clobbers the competition for online experiences. PS3 and Wii cannot begin to match the Live process.

I believe there is no such thing as a 'BEST' game. There are great games and lousy games, and a lot of games in between. What you like is based on your own preferences and experiences. I am a big fan of all of the Halos, but I love the Half-life series also, and just about anything from Bethesda [minus Star Trek--sorry]. Bioware produces top quality stuff just about every time...can't wait for Mass Effect.

It seems fashionable for some rather smug folks to bash Halo 3 for the sole purpose of establishing thermselves as superior to the spaz-fingered, brainless console fanboys. True, there are a lot of those types out there, but I feel they are not the majority any longer. I'll have great fun with Halo 3, as I have had with it's ancestors. It's what counts for me.