Never Too Old To Play™

I remember being blown away when I first turned on my Xbox and started up Halo: Combat Evolved on November 18, 2001.

I had just returned home to Hoboken, New Jersey from the then brand new flagship Toys R Us store in Times Square, where I had travelled early that morning to get on line for the launch of the Nintendo GameCube and found, to my pleasant surprise, plenty of Microsoft’s black box, which had launched three days earlier and was completely sold out everywhere else in the country.

I lugged an Xbox, a GameCube, an extra controller for each, a memory unit for each, and three games for each from the train station all the way back to my house. Of the three Xbox games I purchased, Halo (Dead or Alive 3 and Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee were the other two) was the one I was most eager to play, being an avid fan of first-person shooter games on the PC at the time.

That opening level with your character, the Master Chief, fighting the Covenant forces invading the Pillar of Autumn starship, left me giddy with excitement – truly immersive first-person shooter gaming had finally arrived on consoles thanks to high production values, impressive graphics and a quality of artificial intelligence that was at the time often compared to that found in Valve Corporation’s Half-Life.

The story, involving the discovery of a ring-shaped space station with the ability to wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy and your race to prevent the Covenant from activating it, captivated millions of gamers who made the game a financial success at the blockbuster level (over five million copies worldwide as of November 2005).

Halo 2, released almost three years later on the same console, continued that story with Master Chief and his allies defending Earth from an invading Covenant force (teased in the commercial that featured Master Chief launching himself out of a starship towards a Covenant ship orbiting Earth) and eventually discovering another “halo” installation that the Covenant are trying to activate.

During the events of that game, we learn that the Covenant have a zealous religious belief that activation of the space stations will initiate a “Great Journey” that will lead all loyal Covenant members to salvation and that there is growing dissension amongst the various Covenant races, particularly between the skilled Elites and the savage ape-like Brutes, who are vying for the former’s position in the Covenant hierarchy.

One Elite in particular, granted the honorable title of The Arbiter by the Covenant High Council, eventually joins forces with the Master Chief when he learns of the Council’s desire to wipe out all Elites as punishment for their failure to prevent the humans from destroying the first halo installation and of what will actually happen when the installation is activated.

One of the most memorable aspects of Halo 2 is the ability to play the Arbiter during specific missions that are interspersed with the Master Chief’s, providing a whole different perspective on the unfolding events as well as a distinctly different gameplay style (the Arbiter notably wields an energy blade that has devastating effects on enemies).

The evolution of the plot is also worthy of praise as the second game’s story takes the basic premise established in the first game and expands it to a whole new level, much like James Cameron did to the world of Alien with his superior follow-up Aliens.

Despite the rather abrupt and widely panned ending, Halo 2 is what every sequel should be: a much improved gaming experience that better does everything the first game did.

Fans eagerly anticipating the third game in the series and unfairly expecting it as a launch title for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which launched only a year after the release of Halo 2, were chomping at the bit when Halo 3 was announced at the 2006 E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) convention.

With the release of each new teaser trailer featuring Master Chief in high-definition glory, rendered impressively by the actual game engine, the hype just kept building as fans looked to the release of the game much like the next coming of Christ.

As a fan of the series, I bought into the hype, of course, utterly amazed at the level of detail in the characters being displayed to me through my television or computer screen. I never once thought to consider that trailers rendered by the game engine but not containing actual gameplay footage would of course be of very high quality since the hardware didn’t have to worry about so many different factors existent within actual gaming sessions (or that the game engine could actually be running on more sophisticated hardware than was actually present in the console).

You can imagine my dismay when negative comments about the quality of the graphics surfaced from people who had played the much-hyped Halo 3 multiplayer beta included with Crackdown. I myself had chosen not to participate despite having received a code with my copy of Crackdown mainly because I had already begun to lose interest in competitive multiplayer, but I was, of course, eager to hear any news or opinions stemming from the wide scale test run.

When the game finally arrived in stores in September 2007, I was not surprised by the graphical faults of the game but nevertheless very disappointed. Unfortunately, the game’s shortcomings didn’t stop there.

So what exactly did I think was so wrong with Halo 3? Why do I frequently cite it as the most disappointing game of this generation in online gaming forums and message boards?

It boils down to what I perceive as a rather lackadaisical effort on the part of a developer who seemed in a rush to end a series they had been working on for the better part of a decade and move on to something else (even if that something else was a pair of games that take place in the same game universe). There was clearly nothing coincidental about Bungie announcing a split from Microsoft mere days after the release of Halo 3.

It seemed as if years of Microsoft slave driving the company into working exclusively on the Xbox brand’s flagship series had finally taken its toll, and many aspects of the game had suffered because of it.

The (somewhat understandable) need for Microsoft to have a Halo game ready for the early part of the Xbox 360′s life left little time for Bungie to invest a truly appropriate amount of time in improving the game to a degree appropriate for the generational transition that occurred between 2004 and 2007.

Were the graphics better in Halo 3 than in Halo 2? Of course they were. Were they improved enough such that they could be perceived as “next generation” quality visuals? Absolutely not. Sure, there were some notable improvements to lighting and water effects, draw distance, animation, etc., and all of these improvements were important ones, but the core models and structures – the things that players focus most on in an action-driven first-person shooter game – really were not that much better than they were in Halo 2.

If Halo 3 had been a sequel for the original Xbox system, the degree of graphical improvements would have been admirable. In fact, the game looks like it could have been done with just a slightly advanced version of the original Xbox hardware (yes, many of the “background” effects I listed above require the advanced hardware in the Xbox 360 but perception is everything).

The problem was that gamers had moved on to the brand spanking new Xbox 360 with significantly more powerful hardware and the newest entry in Microsoft’s flagship franchise should have been mind-blowing, should have looked revolutionary, should have been a shining example of how games in the new generation looked and a standard bearer for what gamers could expect for the next half-dozen years.

Yet Gears of War, a game released almost a year earlier, was far more impressive and much more indicative of how games would look going forward thanks to the developer, Epic Games, having actually devoted significant resources to creating a brand new iteration of the Unreal Engine instead of recycling the same game engine in use since the beginning of the previous console generation.

Many gamers will, of course, challenge my opinion with the mantra that “graphics aren’t everything.” This is a viewpoint that I myself hold in high regards. In general, I don’t need the latest and greatest graphics technology in order to enjoy a game. In this case, however, we’re talking about the flagship series for the Xbox brand – this is the U.S.S. Enterprise of Microsoft’s “fleet” so to speak and they couldn’t give us a game worthy of that status? They couldn’t even give us a game that was truly high definition – Halo 3 runs at only 640p, significantly below the 720p “high definition” threshold.

However, despite wondering at first whether there was something wrong with my copy of the game after seeing the rather primitive model for Sergeant Major Johnson appear on screen the first time, I was willing to look beyond the substandard graphics if the game were to deliver a substantially improved gaming experience and an engrossing new story that appropriately advanced the overall Halo plot to its “finish the fight” end.

Unfortunately, the game did neither.

With each new area I discovered (and I use the word “new” loosely as many of the environments seemed much too reminiscent of previous Halo games) and each new battle I played, I felt a growing sense of having played all of this before. Indeed, there is very little “new” about Halo 3. There are only marginal changes to the gameplay and artificial intelligence, and with few exceptions the set pieces are rehashes of those seen in Halo and, more obviously, Halo 2.

You know things are bad when the concept behind the game’s finale is transplanted entirely from the finale of the first Halo. And you know things have really hit the fan when this new finale, while reminiscent of that first one, is far less gripping and nowhere near as fun to play.

The story fares no better – it’s simply a regurgitation of the same narratives and plot from the first two games. Master Chief and his merry men need to stop the Covenant from activating halos and deal with the Flood along the way. Sound familiar?

I’ll go with the rather negative popular opinion of the third Star Wars movie in saying that Halo 3 is most definitely the Return of the Jedi of the franchise except that such a statement would be insulting to Return of the Jedi.

Having said all of this, I don’t actually think that Halo 3 is a bad game. It’s a decent game with decent graphics, decent production values and a decent storyline. It’s simply a subpar entry in a revered gaming franchise and not up to the standards set by its predecessors, resulting in a huge disappointment for a Halo fan such as myself.

I will end this on a positive note, though. The Forge feature that Bungie introduced in Halo 3 that allows gamers to edit multiplayer maps and upload them for others to enjoy is probably the most revolutionary thing about the game. The ability to dynamically modify levels as you were actually playing them (sort of a real-time, in-world editing mode) was far ahead of the PlayStation 3′s critically acclaimed LittleBigPlanet, which featured the same concept. Kudos to Bungie for that.

Final score: 3 out of 5

Parent to parent

Halo 3 is not outright bloody like other gun violence centric games such as Call of Duty or Gears of War but there is still a lot of gunplay going on. In the single player campaign, the violence is entirely directed at obviously evil aliens, but the multiplayer games often have human characters killing other human characters. The game is decidedly less realistic than other first-person shooters, but nevertheless a ten-year-old, for example, shouldn’t be playing it.

Experience this for yourself!

• Halo 3 (Amazon)
• Halo 2 (Amazon)
• Halo: Combat Evolved (Amazon)