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.

It’s been a while since the shift of power in the console gaming industry from Japanese developers to their Western counterparts. Microsoft kick started this trend with the introduction of the Xbox, a video game console that was similar enough in architecture and design to a PC that formerly PC-centric developers had little problems porting their titles to the system. All of a sudden, Western developers like Bungie, Epic, id, and Valve who were marquee players in the world of Windows and Macintosh gaming but virtually unknown by gamers whose cash lined the coffers at Nintendo, Sega and Sony found themselves at the door of a whole new market of consumers.

However, while the console gaming population’s appetite for games like Halo, Grand Theft Auto III, and Splinter Cell grew, they still relied on Japanese developers like Square and Namco for their role-playing fix. Game series like Final Fantasy, Xenosaga, Kingdom Hearts, and Dragon Quest were among the many Japanese role-playing franchises available on the PlayStation 2, and the genre contributed to the console’s greatest strength: its “something for everyone” library of software. Some titles even reached blockbuster status with four in the top ten list of best selling PlayStation 2 games.

Then, the Xbox 360 arrived and everything changed. (Cue dramatic music.)

Actually, all Microsoft did was take the smart approach with regards to the design of their new console. (Cue PlayStation 3 fanboys ranting about RROD.) Microsoft knew the appeal the Western style of game development, up to that point mostly exclusive to the PC platform, would have with the growing video game market, and knew what those developers liked about working with the Xbox. Instead of trying to make radical changes for the sake of change (and under the guise of innovation), they simply expanded on what already worked and kept the architecture similar enough that the transition from Xbox to Xbox 360 would be fairly easy for developers. More importantly, they listened when the teams demanded more memory without which games like Gears of War and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare would have been impossible.

One of the results of this approach was the release of highly evolved fourth entry in the Elder Scrolls role-playing game series on video game consoles. Oblivion arrived to much fanfare due to the high degree of character customization, the vast and fully realized world, the sheer number of characters with whom to interact, the epic story, and the beautiful graphics which all but guaranteed that gamers who weren’t interested in role-playing games before took notice. Critics raved about the game to the tune of a mid-90s average review score and many year end awards. The game went on to sell 2.93 million units on the Xbox 360 platform and 1.15 million units on the PlayStation 3 platform.

Bethesda followed up this masterpiece two and a half years later with the even better Fallout 3, a more action-oriented role-playing game set in the post apocalyptic world of the Fallout series of computer role-playing games. Fallout 3 was almost the exact opposite of Oblivion as far as concept – instead of a high fantasy world of wizards and warriors, elves and monsters, and good and evil, you had a depressing glimpse at a realistically possible future set on the desolate backdrop of a ravaged Washington D.C. where the denizens didn’t have the luxury of worrying much about the morality of their choices.

Similarly, BioWare’s space opera Mass Effect, released a year before Fallout 3 in 2007, challenged the player’s own perception of what was right and wrong. Although the setting was completely different – Mass Effect took place in a distant future where humans are galaxy-trotting with aliens on board advanced starships – the developers had the same approach with regards to the choices you made: almost nothing was clear cut good and evil, and it was commonplace for someone to find themselves conflicted about which path was the right one to take.

What these three games did was introduce console gamers to actual role-playing games where the gamer actually plays a role by deciding what their character says and does, and how they say and do it. Until this point, most gamers only knew Japanese RPGs, which were games that merely paid lip service to the term “role-playing game” – the stat-building aspect of traditional tabletop role-playing games was there but the spirit of the genre was missing.

Oblivion, Mass Effect and Fallout 3 opened gamers’ eyes to the reality of JRPGs. The wool over their eyes had been lifted and many realized just how shallow and simple these games were: it’s kind of hard to go back to the linear progression, restrictive turn-based combat, static stories, and canned dialogue that simply served as sound for pre-rendered cutscenes when you’ve experienced open worlds, thousands of dialogue options, real-time action, and the ability to make choices that have an actual impact on the game.

The old style of “role-playing” was no longer acceptable, and both sales and critical reviews reflected this new attitude. Of all the JRPGs released this generation, only one – Final Fantasy XIII - broke a million units sold with 1.88 million as of early February. Mind you, this is after seven weeks on sale in Japan where Final Fantasy XII sold 1.82 million units in Japan in the first week alone and ended up with a total 5.69 million units worldwide when all was said and done.

Games without the benefit of a mega franchise fared significantly worse at retail: Infinite Undiscovery from Square moved only 0.57 million units; Blue Dragon moved less than that at 0.53 million worldwide; and the well-reviewed Demon’s Souls (GameSpot’s 2009 Game of the Year) has only managed 0.63 million in sales. And none of the JRPGs released this generation have achieved aggregate scores in the 90’s at MetaCritic whereas just one – Demon’s Souls - barely made it at GameRankings (Oblivion, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and Mass Effect 2 all scored in the 90’s on both sites).

And if the game with one of the biggest brand names in console gaming history can’t put Japanese role-playing games back in the spotlight, what game can? Dragon Quest X? Highly unlikely despite the history of that series because the game will be a Wii exclusive. A third Kingdom Hearts game? The Final Fantasy series has historically sold better and received better reviews so the likelihood of that currently theoretical game surpassing Final Fantasy XIII is probably low. Plus, the real diehard Disney gamers are actually likely to spend the money on a Wii (if they don’t already have one for all those Disney licensed games) just to play Epic Mickey, a Disney game where you actually play Mickey Mouse instead of just drag his buddies Donald Duck and Goofy along for the ride, instead.

No, sadly (for JRPG fans, anyway) this seems like the permanent trend as Western developers for all genres take the reins of the video game industry from Japanese developers mired in their old ways, unwilling to adapt with the times and create products that appeal to more than just the often quirky tastes of the Japanese consumers.

In response to a recent IGN interview with Sony executive Peter Dille in which Mr. Dille proclaimed that the PlayStation 3 would “be around in 10 years” and eventually overtake the Xbox 360 in sales, GameStooge writer Jordan Lund unsurprisingly went on an anti-Sony tirade, making sure not to forget any of the key fanboy tactics in arguing the superiority and domination of their preferred entertainment device.

Mr. Lund gets what appears to be an ad hominem argument out of the way early on in the article, declaring that Mr. Dille’s position cannot be taken seriously because he is a Sony executive and other Sony executives have in the past professed confidence that the PlayStation 3 would surpass its competitors (or at least its primary competitor, the Xbox 360). While Mr. Lund is of course unable to support any point of view that said Sony executives are wrong about their predictions since the timeframe has not yet passed, the intent is certainly there to link the possibly dubious nature of their claims to the validity of Mr. Dille’s.

The crux of Sony’s argument that the PlayStation 3 will eventually outsell the Xbox 360 is the premise that Microsoft’s console is not “future proof” and thus cannot possibly stay on the market for an extended period of time beyond the historically standard “five year lifespan” afforded to video game consoles, resulting in a period of time during which the PlayStation 3 will no longer have competition from the Xbox 360. This is a laughable strategy because the PlayStation 3 does not and will not have a deep and broad enough library of software to be a viable “cheap” option for so many years after the next Microsoft, Nintendo and, yes, Sony consoles hit the market. The PlayStation and PlayStation 2 were able to stay relevant because they had enormous game libraries – the PlayStation 3 selection pales in comparison.

Mr. Lund has the generally right idea, but argues based on the iffy prediction that Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony will not launch new consoles anytime within the next six years (assuming that Mr. Dille was actually referring to a ten year total life cycle for the PlayStation 3 and not an additional ten years from now). The notions that in six years the economy will not have recovered to the degree where gamers would not be interested in new console technology and would be fine with playing Project Natal games and editions of Halo and Gears of War that look pretty much the same as the ones we played a couple years ago are ridiculous at best.

He continues with irrelevant paragraphs of stats that are focused entirely on the North American region with no consideration whatsoever for the rest of the world mainly because the only significant Xbox 360 sales lead is in this region whereas the two consoles are nose-to-nose in Europe and the Xbox 360 is a lost cause in Japan. After crunching tons of numbers to show just what kind of a lead the Xbox 360 has over the PlayStation 3 in terms of install base, he “put(s) things in perspective” with an extreme example of the PlayStation 3 needing a whole year of sales consistent to its 2009 numbers while the Xbox 360 sells nothing instead of the realistic example – the PlayStation 3 maintaining its current weekly worldwide lead of just under 37,000 for three years – that might show just how flimsy his whole line of argument is.

In short, Mr. Lund’s protestation of Sony’s incompetent arrogance is understandable, but his modus operandi of using nearly any statement by Sony that doesn’t fit into his narrow world view of things to vomit a veritable feast of selective statistics tarnishes his credibility by painting him as little more than a bitter fanboy trying desperately to play down any bit of positive news for “the other system.”

And lest we forget – Nintendo did not lose the 16-bit console wars to Sega. Sega squandered a two and a half year lead time for their Genesis console to end up with only a 10% market share lead on Nintendo just two short years after the launch of the Super Nintendo. Now, to put that into perspective, imagine a scenario where the PlayStation 3 didn’t launch until December 2007 yet started off 2009 with the same proportion of sales to the Xbox 360’s that it enjoys today (45% of sales that don’t include the Wii) at only 10% the number of games that the Xbox 360 had. That would be pretty impressive indeed.

Note: It might be useful for me to mention that the reason why Mr. Lund’s fanboyism doesn’t surprise me is because he is a (now rare) poster in the Usenet forum alt.games.video.xbox that I often browse.

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)

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)