Never Too Old To Play™

The highly anticipated Halo: Reach raked in $200 million in sales after just one day on retail shelves, outshining Halo 3’s first day take of $170 million on September 25, 2007. That impressive total generated on Tuesday’s launch is far short of the current single day record of $310 million posted by Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which debuted on November 10, 2009 on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

It’s a rather auspicious start for the new first-person shooter game that chronicles the actions of the doomed Noble Team, a squadron of Spartan super soldiers stationed on human colony Reach during the massacre Halo fans know as “The Fall of Reach.”

I’m personally happy that Halo: Reach has done so well in just this short window of time as it proves that gamers can embrace a Halo game that isn’t just more repetitive schlock involving Master Chief. After the massive disappointment of Halo 3, Halo: Reach seems to be another breath of fresh air (Halo 3: ODST was a nice appetizer) that can put Halo back on my personal list of great gaming franchises.

Halo 3: ODST is hands down the best Halo experience on the Xbox 360. After the massive disappointment that was Halo 3 - in case you haven’t read my take on that game, you can read it here – ODST feels like a breath of fresh air from the reeking stagnation of the Halo franchise, a chance for a development team that was creatively lobotomized by having to slog through a decade of focusing on the same character, the same gameplay style, the same scenario, and the same story under Microsoft’s stinging lash to actually do something new.

Gone is the neanderthal love child of the T-800 and Superman (with just about the emotional range of either) and the “run buck wild into enemy forces and shoot everything that moves” tactics afforded by his “unstoppable force” persona. Gone are the frequent flyer miles racked up from jumping from this planet to that ship to this giant ring to that Flood-infested station. For that matter, gone are the Flood themselves, those clichéd Borg-like (at least in purpose) creatures who long overstayed their welcome (psst – it wasn’t even scary anymore in the second game).

Instead, Halo 3: ODST focuses on one squad of very human soldiers who are dropped into the African city of New Mombasa during the events of Halo 2. The focal character of the game is a new soldier referred to only as “the Rookie” who is separated from the rest of his squad after a mishap during the drop. He awakens many hours later and must make his way through the Covenant-laden streets of the destroyed city, often severely outnumbered. In many instances, the smarter tactic is to try to sneak past patrols, which is a nice change of pace from the constant (and sometimes monotonous) barrage of gunfire experienced in other Halo games.

As the Rookie makes his way through the city following the homing beacons of his squad mates, he slowly begins to piece together what happened to the rest of his team, manifested in the game as levels in which you take control of the various ODST units (voiced by members of the Firefly cast as well as the actor who portrayed the modern day protagonist in Assassin’s Creed). This is a nice vehicle to deliver some notably different gameplay experiences – instead of getting away from the noir theme of the Rookie’s storyline by having him jump into a Scorpion tank, fly one of the Covenant’s Banshees or play sniper tag with enemy troopers, the developers allowed you to do all these things with the members of the team that specialize in those abilities through the sort-of flashbacks. And there’s a sense that you’re part of a team as opposed to a one man superhero show.

Another notable difference between ODST and the proper Halo games is the vastly superior design. While the game still uses the same antiquated engine as its predecessors, the designers had a much more colorful palette afforded them by the “city at night” setting in which most of the game takes place. Instead of strange, unbelievable alien landscapes with bright purples and oranges or drab, boring grey technologically advanced installations, the designers present the destroyed beauty (to steal a phrase from Epic Games) of New Mombasa – at least what’s left of it – at night. Neon lights, burning wreckages, street lamps, and the reflection of all that off the twisted but shiny metal buildings that used to contain bustling human life evokes a more viable immersion and a more personal hook for the player – this is your culture and your world that the Covenant have demolished, not some arbitrary metal ring floating in space. Add to that the incredible score which at times is as haunting and desolate as the scope of the destruction you witness, and you end up with an emotional experience that is far more real than anything Halo 3 delivered.

As a bonus, the game includes a disc dedicated to Halo 3’s multiplayer mode. All of the maps are there including a few new ones to entice online gamers. If you never plan on playing Halo 3’s campaign again and are just holding onto the game for the multiplayer modes, you can get rid of that old disc because everything you need to play online – plus a new mode called “Firefight” which I did not get into and so cannot talk about – is stored on this second disc.

If you’re like me and want to see what else is left for this franchise now that we’ve “finished the fight,” give Halo 3: ODST a try to find out what a more focused, more creative and more human Halo game looks like.

Final score: 4 out of 5

Parent to parent

I don’t think there’s any difference in the recommendation for appropriateness for children I would give to this game versus Halo 3. You don’t see quite as many humans biting the bullet in ODST but the violence aspect is still there. There’s one particular cutscene in which one of the characters you control gets a nice giant ax blade in his chest – probably not a great visual for Junior. Older teens should be able to handle this just fine, though.

Experience this for yourself!

• Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360) (Amazon)

Just about two weeks ago, IGN editor Ryan Geddes wrote a piece for the site’s PlayStation 3 channel titled “Editorial: Why I Bought a PS3 – How Sony (and Microsoft) finally pushed an Xbox gamer back into the PlayStation fold.” The title of the article should have been “Editorial: Why My Inner Sony Fanboy Finally Resurfaced.”

Mr. Geddes starts out by cleverly painting himself as some sort of diehard Xbox 360 gamer so that his “conversion” to the PlayStation 3 has much more impact, as if his buying a PlayStation 3 for himself – a gaming journalist who no doubt has near unlimited access to more than one of them at his workplace – was testament to some sort of dramatic victory for Sony: If even a hardcore Xbox 360 gamer like me jumps ship, the PlayStation 3 must really be the superior console!

Of course, he drops subtle hints at his past life as a PlayStation 2 owner but spends far more time explicitly bashing the Xbox 360 than actually delivering solid arguments as to why the PlayStation 3 is a good system. The best he can do is offer the vague opinion that “it’s cool and Japanese” – with no elaboration on why the console is cool and what being of Japanese design has to do with that – and recycle the tired hardware diatribe while ignoring how much better Microsoft was – and still is – than Sony at dealing with those problems: Microsoft replaced my launch Xbox 360, which lasted just shy of three years of generally heavy gaming usage, for free whereas Sony asked for (but didn’t receive) $150 to repair my 40GB PlayStation 3, whose touted Blu-ray drive died after about sixteen months of infrequent gaming (with the rest of the console following suit a week later).

“It recalls a time when Japan was the center of the hardcore gaming universe, before it ceded that mantle to the West.” Is that like at all like how the Xbox 360 and its predecessor recalled a time when the West was the center of the gaming universe with systems like the Atari 2600, the Intellivision and the ColecoVision before the video game market crash and the emergence of the Nintendo Entertainment System as the new go-to home entertainment device for video games?

Sony’s PlayStation and PlayStation 2 systems ruled their respective generations because the games, and not the systems themselves, were cooler than what was available for the competition, and games are inherently platform-neutral pieces of intellectual property: technically there wasn’t any reason why Super Mario Bros. couldn’t appear on the Sega Master System, Final Fantasy VII couldn’t appear on the Saturn, God of War couldn’t appear on the Xbox, and Halo 3 couldn’t appear on the PlayStation 3. Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360 is going to be no “less Final Fantasy” than Final Fantasy XIII on the PlayStation 3 unless you’re one of the few who think that watching hours upon hours of drawn out, self-congratulatory and pretentious pre-rendered cutscenes is an admirable trait of the series.

The Xbox 360 succeeded – and continues to succeed – this generation for the same reason. Microsoft recognized the potential appeal of previously PC-only genres like FPS and “western” (i.e. computer) RPG to console gamers and built the right system for developers to most easily bring games of such genres to the modern console gaming market. If you build it, they will come: Microsoft built it, and gamers came by the millions.

Engrossed in his fanboy-fueled “epiphany,” Mr. Geddes seems to instead think that Microsoft forced the Xbox 360 on gamers by “hijack(ing) the game industry… (and) beat(ing) Sony at its own game” – Microsoft did in 2005 what Sony did a decade earlier so why all the bitterness? What he doesn’t realize is that gamers didn’t buy the Xbox 360 because they had to but because they wanted to. The excitement and fervor surrounding the Xbox 360 was far greater than any shown for the PlayStation 3 a year later for a variety of reasons, including a significant shift in the types of games the majority of the market wanted and a conspicuous ambivalence by most gamers towards the overhyped new technologies Sony wanted them to pay an extra $200 for.

With last year’s PlayStation 3 price cuts, the playing field is more level now yet the consumers still want the Xbox 360 because that’s where the best overall gaming experience is. “Cool” isn’t defined by a glossy black exterior (and all the lovely fingerprints that go with it), high-definition movies (which most people don’t actually care much about) or a Cell processor that nobody cares to work with (unless they’re owned by Sony).

At the same time, “cool” isn’t eroded by a likely niche new technology (anyone who thinks Project Natal has a seriously deluded perception of market reality) or a middle-aged Xbox Live spokesperson whose “insecure awkwardness” only graces the eyes of the few who actually watch Major’s Minute instead of playing Modern Warfare 2.

I wonder if Mr. Geddes sees the irony in attacking the legitimacy of Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb as a viable console cheerleader when it’s because of the demands of gamers the same age as he was when the PlayStation brand first arrived that gave Sony an opportunity in the first place. As far as solid console spokespersons are concerned, I’m interested in hearing who Mr. Geddes thinks is even fit for that role on the PlayStation 3 side. Last I checked, Sony wasn’t even concerned enough about their community to have someone other than aged corporate executives like Jack Tretton, Ken Kutaragi and Kazuo Hirai toot their system’s horn.

And Jessica Chobot, host of IGN Strategize which is front and center on Xbox Live, isn’t too shabby a mouthpiece – just ask the PSP. Sure, she’s not actually an official Xbox 360 or Xbox Live spokesperson, but the average gamer, who doesn’t browse gaming websites or read gaming magazines wouldn’t know that – they just see her plastered on one frame of Xbox Live almost every day. Perception is everything as Sony found out when suddenly the Xbox 360 was the talk of the industry.

Well, everyone except closeted PlayStation 3 fanboys with press passes.

The IGN family of gaming websites is my general “go to” source for game reviews and game-related news, information and editorials. I’ve been an avid fan since the early 2000’s and visit their various websites on an almost daily basis.

Lately, IGN has been giving me a different reason to love them, though. Earlier this week, Rus McLaughlin told us readers why he doesn’t think Halo 3: ODST is Game of the Year material, citing issues he apparently doesn’t believe apply to the equally unimpressive but far less hyped Halo 3, which prompted me to point out how Halo 3 fails in the same ways. I’m thankful for this as there are only so many reviews one can write in a week.

A couple of days ago, Ryan Geddes opined that Epic Games needs to rip certain pages from Bungie’s Halo playbook in order for their blockbuster Gears of War franchise to thrive in the future. In addition to the rather unbelievable supposition that there’s any chance that future Gears of War games won’t be even more successful than the first two, Mr. Geddes both suggests things that are simply smart game development choices attributable to any number of studios and games and criticizes what he sees as faults with Gears of War that are every bit as applicable to Halo.

One of the most critical issues with both Gears of War and its sequel is the rather lackluster multiplayer experience that is at best a tepid, toned down version of classic PC multiplayer deathmatches with the exception of the second game’s compelling Horde mode (in which up to five players must work together to face increasingly difficult waves of Locust forces with the goal of surviving as long as possible).

One compelling multiplayer mode is not good enough, though. Multiplayer is a very important aspect of games, especially shooters, these days, and gamers need more than just standard deathmatches if a game is to have any longevity. However, improving the flaws in the multiplayer experience is not emulating Halo 3 - there are plenty of action games with great multiplayer components such as the Call of Duty and Left4Dead series – but just following common sense.

In fact, I hope that Epic doesn’t try to make Gears of War’s multiplayer mode a mirror image of Halo 3’s (and, yes, I recognize that Mr. Geddes also stated they shouldn’t) because with Halo 3, the Halo franchise’s multiplayer experience has degenerated into a bunch of ten-year-old kids running out of the gate for the most powerful weapon and then jumping up and down all over the map while spewing vulgarities that would make Eminem cringe. And, yes, I’m hyperbolizing.

It really just seems as if Epic Games has lost some of its identity with its transition to the console world. They really redefined the PC multiplayer gaming experience with their Unreal Tournament series of competitive multiplayer games whose single player campaigns were just the multiplayer mode with bots yet chose to focus on the single-player experience with Gears of War.

They, along with other PC-centric developers like Valve Corporation, also made extraordinary efforts to work with the fan communities for their games with design director Cliff “CliffyB” Bleszinski often interacting with gamers on the company’s online forums and the company including hardcore fans in public beta tests of upcoming games and modes. Mr. Geddes seems to have forgotten this (or maybe never knew it in the first place) in speaking about Bungie’s multiplayer beta of Halo 3 as if they were the only company that did this.

On the other hand, I don’t think “community building” is really all that central to the success of mainstream blockbuster games these days. The hardcore fans might spend their time posting comments in Bungie, Epic and Valve’s forums, but the more mainstream gamers don’t visit gaming websites or post on message boards.

I assure you those mainstream gamers didn’t contribute to Halo 3’s eight million+ in sales because of what Bungie was doing at some gaming convention or because of cryptic websites, both of which really only matter to the devoted hardcore Halo loyalists. Everyone else? They were just brainwashed by the insane marketing machine Microsoft pushed out there, with images of the Master Chief everywhere from movie screens to bus stops to soda cans.

If Epic can really take anything away from this, it’s that you need to spend over $40 million if you want to sell eight million units of your game. I imagine, though, that they were happy with selling five million based on the strength of the previous game alone.

Mr. Geddes goes on to talk about how deep and expansive the Halo universe, how much more complex and provoking Bungie’s games are, when in reality the Halo and Gears of War worlds really aren’t that different when compared at face value. He states that Bungie is obsessed with expanding the universe “because they love it,” a sentiment that is contradicted by the rather lazy job they did with Halo 3. The rehashed story, recycled set pieces and stagnant gameplay tells the story of a development house that was sick of doing the same thing for a decade and rushed the game out so they could finally announce their split from Microsoft a week or two later. Hardly the behavior of a loving parent, is it?

Especially hilarious, though, are the criticisms Mr. Geddes levels towards Gears of War’s world without realizing that they apply as much, or even more so, to the Halo games. For example, he states that Halo is “about people struggling to survive against overwhelming odds” when a rather prosperous human race living on safe and sound Earth have a genetically engineered super soldier in tank armor who can skydive from one starship to another in orbit around a freakin’ planet to lay waste to the Covenant for them. That’s not to mention the entire army of soldiers with a fleet of spaceships and a seemingly endless amount of combat vehicles backing him up. But I guess the fear that the isolated pockets of emaciated stragglers exhibit anytime a pothole opens up in the ground or the lights go out at night on the planet that they had to bomb with nuclear warheads just to have a chance is all just an act.

He asks why Sera, that devastated planet on which Gears of War takes place, is worth saving. Why is Earth worth saving? It seems pretty obvious that Sera is the equivalent of Earth in the Gears universe considering the game notes at several points that the events unfolding before them are humanity’s last stand. Do we really need to know which specific people built the “towering buildings of lattice and spire,” which I might add look a helluva lot better than anything in Halo 3? Much like the barren wastelands of Fallout 3, the “destroyed beauty” of what remains of those magnificent structures tells a much more powerful story than some recited history lesson soliloquy from a floating metal sphere or blue holographic supermodel.

And while he’s right that we don’t know much about the Locust even after two games, how much did we really know about the Convenant and the Flood at the end of Halo 2? We don’t know where the Covenant or Flood came from whereas we know that the Locust call the subterranean bowels of Sera their home. We don’t really learn much more about the Covenant society than we do about the Locust society: both are actually collections of various species with the same “religious beliefs” – the Covenant believe in the “oracles” (the artificial intelligence maintaining the halo installations) and the Locust worship the riftworms.

We have no idea why the Covenant hate humanity so much whereas we learn through the course of the two Gears games that humanity’s ever-growing need for energy sources led them to dig into the Locusts’ territory, an intrusion the Locust chose to take as an act of war. The ensuing conflict even served a dual purpose for the Locust, who were in the midst of a civil war with Locusts who had been powerfully mutated by overexposure to the same energy source humans tried to harvest.

And the Flood? They don’t even have any real motivation we can gather aside from the – say it with me – cliché desire to assimilate all living creatures in the galaxy. They’re really nothing more than a virus – how many times have we witnessed that metaphor in science fiction works?

Ultimately, though, the real difference between the Gears of War and Halo franchises is the humanity of the former. Despite everything Mr. Geddes claims, Gears is a far more personal, far more emotional experience from the heart-racing, visceral, in-your-face nature of the combat with its focus on teamwork and strategy to the more believable and accessible purpose all the way to the actual characters themselves.

He describes Marcus and Dom as meat puppets which I suppose would make Master Chief a meat puppet in a can since he has virtually no personality and is one of the most underdeveloped characters in gaming history. Master Chief displays nary an emotion through the course of three games – the fate of the galaxy rests in his hands and friends and comrades fall left and right, yet you’d never know it with his calm demeanor and monotone murmurs. He fears no one and nothing, is never relieved at having just made it through a treacherous fight, has no sense of humor, and is never elated or even just happy for his victories.

Marcus Fenix, on the other hand, actually has a personality (even if it’s tough to make out through his gravelly voice). He’s sarcastic; he gets pumped up; he mourns the dead; he fears for his friend Dominic’s stability. Dominic himself is probably the most “real” character in either franchise: he pines for his missing wife, is quick with a witty comment or wry jab at a comrade and understands far more than most people about the cruelty of the world and the necessity for military strength.

And let’s not forget about one of the most colorful characters in video games in a while: Augustus “Cole Train” Cole, who makes even the most grueling combat situations enjoyable with his enthusiastic banter and overconfident trash talk towards the enemy. He loves the thrill and the adrenaline, which is probably the reason why he was a star defensive lineman for the national “thrashball” league before all hell broke loose on Sera, a celebrity status that is reflected in non-player character reaction to and interaction with him (even your squad mates gush when first meeting him in the first game).

All these little details and nuances help make Gears of War feel so much more alive than the rather disconnected and neutered experience of Halo 3. This isn’t to say, however, that Gears of War did everything perfectly. The reason anyone can even claim that the franchise needs some degree of “saving” is because the single-player campaign mode of the second game simply fell flat, ironically because they listened too much to the fans.

To appease gamers who didn’t like the single-minded focus on generally close quarters squad-based tactical ground combat, the team diluted Gears of War 2 with new scenarios that felt tacked on – freeform vehicular sections where the player pilots an armored vehicle with clunky controls through icy caverns and fights giant spiders, tedious battles on top of giant armored transports, a Panzer Dragoon-inspired aerial on-rails level, and an excruciatingly boring and contrived end game where the player rides on the back of a plodding Brumak (a several-stories-tall monstrosity covered in armor and armed with missile launchers and guns).

I agree with Mr. Geddes when he says that Epic needs to bring the Gears of War franchise “back to basics.” It was a mistake to try to “go big” and expand the scale to be a little more like Halo 3. Gears shouldn’t be about Michael Bay-esque set pieces but about dark and gritty combat where the already wasted landscape is left a lot bloodier. It should be about saving the species and the planet, a more realistic, attainable goal that people can better wrap their heads around, rather than trying to stop some intergalactic force from destroying the galaxy with just an assault rifle and a couple of energy grenades – Gears works best as Saving Private Ryan, not the latest James Bond flick, and is a better game for it.

In fact, the Halo series could do well to emulate some aspects of Gears, and actually has already started to do so. Even after the disappointment of Halo 3, I was excited about Halo 3: ODST and later Halo: Reach. The scale of both games is cut back quite a bit.

In ODST, you’re just another soldier in the military rather than John McClane on steroids. You can’t go all gung ho on the Convenant and expect to last long – some degree of rudimentary stealth is inherent in the game.

In Reach, you even know right off the bat, if you paid any attention at all during the three proper Halo games, that you’re not going to save anything: Reach falls no matter what you do. There’s a more prevalent sense of danger in that even though you’re still playing a Spartan like Master Chief, the forces must be threatening indeed as they were able to wipe out an entire platoon of Master Chiefs. No more laughing in the face of danger, hopefully.

However, the thing that needs to change the most is the technology. Halo 3’s game engine, which is a moderately enhanced version of the Halo 2 game engine, itself a moderately enhanced version of the Halo game engine created way back at the turn of the millennium, is showing its age with subpar modeling lacking in intricate detail. Put side-by-side with Gears of War or Sony’s Uncharted, Halo 3 looks like a decidedly last generation effort.

I had hoped when Bungie announced their split from Microsoft that this would open up the possibility of another developer such as Epic to step in and create a truly innovative new game engine that could help usher the franchise into the top echelon of current-generation video games.

It remains to be seen whether Microsoft and Bungie will do the right thing and take a page out of everyone else’s playbook this time.

Experience this for yourself!

• Halo 3 (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Gears of War Platinum Hits Edition (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Gears of War 2 Game of the Year Edition (Xbox 360) (Amazon)

Rus McLaughlin over at IGN’s Xbox 360 site posted a very interesting editorial yesterday that criticized many publications for putting last year’s Halo 3: ODST near the top of their lists of best games of 2009. I agree with Mr. McLaughlin’s sentiments for the most part but point out that most everything he complained about with regards to ODST could be just as easily applied to Halo 3, a game that I have to assume he believes exhibits none of the mentioned “flaws.”

He starts off by saying that “ODST sounded entirely like a retread. A side-story. Unimportant.” I know he was referring to the impression he got from the description of the game before he actually played it, but what he said was actually how I felt as I was playing Halo 3, which was supposed to be “THE EPIC CONCLUSION TO THE EPIC SAGA” but seemed more like a rehash of what I played in the first two Halo games.

Another halo (or in this case a bunch of halos). Another wicked plot by the Covenant to initiate mass destruction. Another mission to stop them. Another encounter with the Flood. Been there, done that.

“Hell, I didn’t even play it until a month post-release, and then mainly because I felt obligated by my games-related vocation.”

That’s kind of eerie because I didn’t play Halo 3 until about a month post-release, got turned off by the disappointing graphics, and then didn’t come back until a month or so later because I felt obligated as a gamer to “finish the fight.” I was entirely convinced, just from the first level of the game, that instead of being the whiz-bang introduction of the revered franchise on the next-generation hardware, Halo 3 was simply a modest retread of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2. I unfortunately cannot say that I was pleasantly surprised when playing through the rest of the game like Mr. McLaughlin was in completing ODST.

Halo 3 was by no means anything remotely close to a Game of the Year candidate. As I witnessed reviewer after reviewer buy into the incredible level of hype surrounding Bungie’s meager offering and write that it was a sure-fire Game of the Year candidate if not a shoe-in winner, I was shocked at how easily people put it “on a year-end pedestal it didn’t earn.”

Mr. McLaughlin correctly observes that “the best of the best elevate and innovate. A game that does neither has no place on a best-of list of any kind.” While I can’t say that Halo 3 neither elevated nor innovated, the mostly inconspicuous improvements to the graphics and physics and the new Forge feature, a sideline innovation that really didn’t have much relevance to the core gameplay, were not enough to make the game feel as if it were a truly next generation entry in the series. Halo is Xbox’s flagship franchise and shouldn’t feel as if it could have been accomplished on the original Xbox.

No, Halo 3 more represented “stagnant progress” by failing to surpass almost all expectations gamers deservedly imposed upon Bungie and their product. The studio proved with Halo 2 that they could take an already great game and make it even better by expanding the context of the story, advancing the intriguing plot and improving on both offline and online gameplay. In contrast, Halo 3’s story was a regurgitation of the events from the previous two games, its core gameplay was virtually unchanged from Halo 2 and the graphical improvements were about on par with differences between Halo and Halo 2.

Halo 3 should have been a mind blowing experience – it needed “more than a few cosmetic changes, more than a few new guns to play with and vehicles to drive,” but Bungie failed to deliver. The game certainly left an impression, but it wasn’t one that Bungie intended.

Now, I fully expect Halo and Xbox fanboys to gather up arms against my statements, citing how many reviewers loved it (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences adored No Country for Old Men enough to award it the Best Picture Oscar even though the movie is excruciatingly boring and little more than a cinematographer’s wet dream) and how popular it was (Independence Day grossed $817 million worldwide but is far from a shining example of filmmaking). Better yet, many will probably rattle off about how this is “just your opinion” as if all the good reviews and praise of the game isn’t someone else’s.

I welcome all of this because I wouldn’t dare begrudge someone else their opinion of a game although ultimately all that really matters to me is that Bungie failed to deliver to expectations.

Interestingly enough, I still had high hopes for ODST and for this year’s Halo: Reach. While Mr. McLaughlin was busy lamenting what he thought ODST would be (and ultimately was in his eyes), I was actually excited about a Halo game that didn’t toss me right back into Master Chief’s well worn battle armor so I could rip through Covenant forces like Superman on Kryptonian steroids as I tried to save the galaxy for the third time. Unfortunately, twenty minutes of gameplay reminded me what didn’t impress me in October 2007, although it still was more interesting than the Chief’s last hurrah. Even now, I hold out some hope that the more promising scenario promised in Reach will make the Halo world appealing to me again even while recognizing that I can no longer count on Bungie to deliver on their promises.

Experience this for yourself!

• Halo 3 (Xbox 360) (Amazon)
• Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360) (Amazon)

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)

So you’ve finally decided to take the plunge and buy a new video game console.

Maybe your stack of unfinished PlayStation 2 games has finally dried up. Maybe you’ve discovered the joy of playing games while sitting on your living room couch instead of at your computer desk or decided you don’t want to upgrade your 5-year-old video card to play the latest and greatest PC games.

Or maybe you just want to find out if there’s more to video games than sliding your finger around on your iPhone.

However you came to the decision to join the over 125 million people worldwide who enjoy video games on their Wii, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, you really couldn’t have picked a better time to do so. All three console manufacturers – Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony – cut their prices in the last few months and, for the first time this generation, the PlayStation 3 is at an accessible price point.

My goal here is to try to help you make the choice of which console to purchase according to your interests and concerns. It can sometimes be a daunting task to look for advice on the web because for every unbiased website there’s a slew of immature, irrational forum posts by raging fanboys who are fiercely and unmovingly loyal to what’s essentially a hunk of plastic that spews pretty lights and sounds at them.

Indeed video game console fanboys (and fangirls) can be some of the craziest, most rabid fans in the world, singing praises at their console of choice and hurling insults at people who disagree with them. Often there’s no rhyme or reason to their rhetoric, which tends to be formed out of ignorance to reality.

Why bother weeding through that jungle of idiocy when it’s so much easier to just look at the facts and make your decision based on which console is more suited to your needs? Hopefully, I’ll help you at least a little bit with that today.

The first thing to consider is the kind of games you like to play. The Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are aimed at generally older gamers who have a lot of video gaming experience and more sophisticated tastes whereas the Wii is aimed at young kids and the more casual gamer who maybe hasn’t played a video game since the Super Nintendo days or dabbles only in lighter fare like Bejeweled or Diner Dash.

While there are certainly children’s and casual games available to play on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as well as more mature and complex games on the Wii, you can get a general sense of the style of gaming on the systems based on their marketing. If you like blasting away enemies, going on epic quests with lots of interaction with characters or playing realistic sports or driving simulations, your best bet is to go with the the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.

In fact, the software libraries for these two systems are quite similar with the exception of a handful of exclusive games. The Xbox 360 has the better overall library of games with both acclaimed and popular titles like Halo 3, Gears of War and Left 4 Dead (and its sequel), but there are some killer PlayStation 3 exclusives like Final Fantasy XIII and Gran Turismo 5 (both entries in hugely popular series) coming out in the next year.

If you’d rather take a more laid back approach with games that have simpler and more straightforward goals and don’t require you to remember what two control sticks and eight different buttons do, the Wii is probably more up your alley. Another aspect to consider with regards to Wii gaming is that the games available on Nintendo’s system tend to be more geared towards “party play” – they’re not very complex so friends and family of all ages can quickly join in on the fun, no gaming expertise needed.

If you want to play games online with other people, you can do it with all three consoles. The Wii has the most restrictive online gaming functionality in that you can only play with people with whom you’ve exchanged “friend codes.” It’s a relief, in a sense, to parents who don’t necessarily want their children interacting with complete strangers on the Internet. On the other hand, it also means that you have to personally know a decent number of people who own Wiis in order to have some variety and flexibility in your gaming sessions.

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 allow you to send invites to people you already know (by typing in their IDs) or people you’ve played with right from within the gaming session. Even if you don’t have a lot of “real life” friends who own your system, you can still compile a sizeable list of people with whom you enjoy playing.

The Xbox 360’s online network, known as Xbox Live, is the only one that requires a monthly or annual fee (generally $50 per year) in order to play games. This seems like a lot to ask of gamers until you consider that Xbox Live is more mature (Microsoft introduced it in 2002 and has been improving it since then), more robust (there is a lot more content and functionality on Xbox Live than on the PlayStation Network) and more reliable (Microsoft has a lot more servers in a lot more locations for higher performance, greater reliability and more up-time). The online experience is also more consistent on Xbox Live due to Microsoft themselves handling most of the core networking code – developers of PlayStation 3 games need to program this themselves and can do it pretty much any way they want (to sometimes unfavorable results).

Of course, if none of that matters to you and all you want to do is play with some buddies, the PlayStation Network is a fine service indeed and won’t cost you a dime. Just hope that those buddies all have PlayStation 3’s (less likely in North America where there are almost twice as many Xbox 360’s).

On the other hand, the PlayStation 3 has a related advantage over the Xbox 360 in that it includes built-in WiFi, useful for people whose Internet service providers have given them a wireless router (or who have purchased one themselves). You can, of course, use an ethernet cable to connect an Xbox 360 to your network (that’s the same cable you would use to connect your computer if you didn’t have wireless networking), but if you want to get a wireless adapter be prepared to shell out $80 or more.

If you’re interested in doing things other than playing games on your gaming console then you can all but rule out the Wii as there isn’t a whole lot more to do on that little white box. If you have a wireless router at home, you can easily configure the Wii to use that to connect to the Internet in order to read news, check the weather and see what Miis (the little characters that represent you within the Wii’s game “world”) other people have put together. If you leave the Wii in standby mode (i.e. if you don’t unplug it when you turn it off), it will even automatically update itself on a regular basis to get you the latest content.

Disappointingly for some fans, Nintendo once again decided that theirs would be the only console to not play movies in any way, shape or form, despite utilizing discs that are the same physical size as DVDs and Blu-rays. Nintendo wanted to focus on games and target consumers looking for nothing more than a fun gaming system. Their logic was that most everyone has a DVD player these days and that the hardware is so cheap that there was no real advantage to including movie playback functionality. I can understand their viewpoint as easily as I can understand some fans’ frustration.

If you absolutely need to be able to watch movies on your console, you have to choose between the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 3 has the obvious edge here in that it can play movies stored on the relatively new Blu-ray disc format (pioneered, unsurprisingly, by Sony). Blu-ray is a technologically superior format that stores high definition video and audio (perfect for all those HDTVs that are dropping in price by the year) and includes evolved versions of many of the extra features found on DVDs.

Whether you would benefit from that superior quality or care about it is an entirely different matter. I don’t want to get into a meaty Blu-ray discussion here but I will suggest you take a quick glance at this chart circulating around the Internet that shows whether you’d even see a difference between Blu-ray and DVD based on the size of your television and how far you sit from it.

If Blu-ray isn’t a priority for you, then you can still watch all of your DVDs on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. They’ll even upscale the image quality to pseudo-HD which looks quite good (comparable to the quality of the HD television broadcasts from most of the national service providers like DirecTV and Comcast).

You don’t even have to use DVDs, either. Both devices are capable of accepting streaming movies, television and music from your home computer. You can even view all of your photos on your nice, big television set. This is a little easier with the Xbox 360 if you own a Windows-based computer since it utilizes the Windows Media Center that’s part of most Windows installations. There are plenty of free software online that will allow you to do the same things on the PlayStation 3. In fact, I use TVersity (compatible with both systems) instead of the Windows Media Center functionality.

Beyond that, you can rent or buy movie and television episode downloads from Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. Many of these downloads are high definition with impressive quality despite not being as sharp as a Blu-ray movie. The pricing is skewed a little high, though, at the moment. If that’s a problem for you, join Netflix and you can stream thousands of movies and television episodes free to the system of your choice as part of your membership! The functionality is part of the Xbox 360’s operating system, but you’ll need to request a special disc for the PlayStation 3 which Netflix will send to you for free.

The final, and perhaps most important, thing to consider is the price you’re willing to pay to enter this generation of video game consoles. The Xbox 360 and Wii have the cheapest entry costs with models priced at $200 whereas you need to spend at least $300 for a PlayStation 3.

You technically get a lot more value out of the PlayStation 3 than you do out of the Xbox 360 and the Wii if you want and/or need the added functionality in Sony’s console (significantly, the Blu-ray capabilities). However, if all you want to do is play games, it’s tough to go wrong with any of the three consoles.

In short:

• If you’re a casual gamer who is looking for simple yet entertaining games that you can play with friends and family of all ages, your best bet is the Nintendo Wii.
• If you’re a more experienced gamer who wants a more robust gaming experience without breaking the bank, the Xbox 360 is a fine choice with the best overall video game library.
• If, on the other hand, you want all the bells and whistles and are willing to pay for them, you won’t regret purchasing the PlayStation 3, which will provide you with a solid library of games from which to choose and one of the best Blu-ray players on the market.

Experience it for yourself!

• Nintendo Wii Console (Amazon)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Arcade Console (Amazon)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Elite Console (Amazon)
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Limited Edition Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Bundle (Amazon)
• Sony PlayStation 3 120GB Console (Amazon)
• Sony PlayStation 3 250GB Console (Amazon)