It’s been several days since I completed Halo 3’s co-op campaign. Reviews by other writers say that this was the least successful part of the game, and that multiplayer is where the thing really shines. But honestly, it’s hard to understand anything over the smacking, slurping sounds of Bungie’s scrotum being gently suckled by an entire generation of reviewers. Halo 3 is persistently scoring in the 9 to 10 range.
Why?
I got up this morning (a mere figure of speech; I have not seen the dorsal side of noon since 2004), all lubed up to write my Halo 3 review. I had my pile of Ritalin, my notes from the previous week’s co-op campaign marathon, a pot of fresh tea, and my list of synonyms for “horrible”. I was ready.
And then, horror. Something Awful, ever my nemesis, had scooped me. They’d taken the words right out of my brain:
Halo 3's gameplay is pretty much like that time I was at the skating rink and a guy came in and shot the place up while riding an ATV. Goldeneye controlled better than this. That one first-person-shooter parody sequence in Conker's Bad Fur Day controlled better than this.
The weapons feel like toys and don't have the responsiveness or feedback of a game like Half-Life 2. Despite the fact that it supposedly takes place on Earth, you can jump 40 feet into the air and float down like a feather.
And they said it with less cussing, spurious anecdotes, and repetitions of the word “Stickypig” than I ever would have. The irony of Something Awful’s supposedly humorous game reviews, is that they’re usually the most keen, accurate, and no-nonsense of the bunch. Possibly because Something Awful is not in a position to curry favor within the games industry, no matter what they write. The writers have to buy the games themselves, suffering the slings and arrows of a typical consumer experience, with no catered studio tours or laminated press passes muddling their writerly instincts.
Hit to jump to join me in my misery.
If you’ve only been playing Gears of War, Bioshock, and Resistance: Fall of Man to pass the time until Halo 3 lands, your thumbs twiddling dual analogs instead of thin air, I suppose the return to ugly incomprehensibility is a nice break from all that quality. As we learned from the “art” of Todd Goldman, insane success can be achieved with finely-tuned mediocrity, far more easily than with excellence. A game with true artistic and intellectual treasures to offer will alienate its players. They become vaguely uncomfortable, feeling perhaps that things are expected of them.
And so, Halo has become the new Madden. This is why the space marines all talk like they’re frat boys on Xbox Live. Mauling alien face to a nourishing soundtrack of “You blew his head off, yo!” and “Wooooo!” truly gives one a sense of superiority. Or camaraderie, depending.
The soundtrack, while we're on the subject, is curiously dinky. The first Halo has some truly memorable scoring, and has taken its place in the annals of the cultural memory, and in Video Games Live. The second game steered a little off-course with a silly, but still fun guitar-driven score. Why, in the (hopefully) final Halo, are we served with tootly MIDI riffs and queasy new-age throbbing?
Halo 3’s accomplishments in comfortable blandness don’t stop at music and voice acting, either. The graphics, cranked down to 640p for reasons of wedding acceptable framerates to HDR lighting, offer very few moments of acceptability, and even fewer of genuine beauty. The game looks okay, though jagged and too slick (does every surface really have to shine like it’s been sneezed on, Bungie?). Until you get to a cutscene, and are faced with...faces.
Rendering a human face in the Halo 3 engine is an act of appalling violence. Master Chief is likable, not because of his role as the main character, but because he wears a nice low-poly helmet---those with fleshy heads, such as the General, Cortana, and ol’ Sarge, look like they have been formed from blocks of seasoned tofu by limbless children wielding garlic mallets.
But all this would be trifling, not fit to notice, had the gameplay been anything like what we were promised. I shoved through the campaign mode because I was hoping the whole time to run into the epic, Braveheart-style battles depicted in the brilliant commercials. Massive city-streets troop surges, swarming human marines being thrown around by rampaging brutes, intense triumph and misery: this is the game I thought I had bought. It was not the game I played.
One thing for which I am grateful to Halo 3: putting the recent spate of excellent games back into perspective. I enjoy and appreciate Portal, Gears of War, TF2, Halflife 2, and Bioshock far more, now that I’ve been so thoroughly disappointed. Having to pay $70 just for perspective? Irritating.
Baffled by my hatred of a game everyone else seemed to love, I asked around: what it is that you adore about Halo 3? What am I missing? After playing everything else up to this point, how can you seriously compare it to its peers, and not find it seriously wanting?
The response, as usual, was that Halo 3 was “just stupid fun”, and that it was purely entertaining, with no pretensions to intellectualism or art. This, they said, made the game “good”.
I’ve been a gamer all my life. You’d think, by now, I’d have learned to ignore hype, to receive games on their own terms with calm and dignity. But I am unable to accept that mediocrity is a desirable trait in any work of media. When did “stupid” become a valuable quality? Why is Halo 3 praised for its blandness, when Bioshock is only nervously lip serviced for its brilliance?
Please tell me, so I can stop weeping.
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Eliza Gauger is a gurgling behemoth kept on display at Sea World. Her tank water has to be drained twice a week, as her gills quickly become clogged with her own filth. Previously, she wrote for Kotaku.
Contest:
9:49 PM on 10.13.2007
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And this makes me feel justified in not buying Halo 3.
-the lack of any of the braveheart-esque battles in single player was a huge letdown to me too
-Too much shiny stuff.
I beat this game thinking part of it was missing.
I think people got the same feelings out of the matrix movies. The first one set the standarded. So when they went to make more, they put the story in so many other things (books, games, anime) that if you didnt see every last bit, just watching the last two movies was a painful experience. Most people walked out thinking wtf?
This is the same thing here. Ive never been into the Halo universe that much, thought it was to full of itself, and to many little bits of everything else to consider it "its own world." Theyve put out so many books and such, that the important back story, that should have been told in the game; ends up getting thrown into the books as foder for the masses.
So when we sit down, pop in halo 3, and its basically a storyless action driven game, with honestly, little action. The ending comes as a slap in the face. Im not upset that the ending was lame, im more upset that everyone else thinks this is gods gift to gaming.
Master Chief is an asshole in this one. For as serious as everyone else is, he remind me of a 13 yearold playing the game. Basically being like "Im bad ass L33T" Who the hell cares, if you wanna be so over the top, then be it in every aspect.
Dont get me wrong, i ove the multiplayer, least itll hold me over till CoD4 comes out. But as far as ending this serious, Im so glad its the end for now. Bungie has always seemed like a bunch of overpaid college kids giving out their overrated views on games. Owell, thank god the media coverage is over.
Ass hats
Yes, and it's called the gravity gun.
Now I'm not accusing you of being pretentious or self-absorbed, Eliza. But I'm not so sure you are just hating Halo 3 to hate Halo 3. After all, that does seem to be the popular thing to do on the internets these days.
Halo 3 is not perfect. But it is very far from a bad game. Bioshock was, rightfully so, fellated by every damn entertainment journalist on the planet. It also happened to be a great game with very little hype.
Halo 3, on the other hand, was the most hyped game release ever. If the game didn't live up to the hype in your eyes, then that's your fault. No one should need to explain it to you. You succumbed to the hype, and I expect you planed on hating the game before you even fired up the campaign.
And did you really expect the game to play like the diorama ads? Really? You're an adult, right?
Just like when Tekken was at it's peak of popularity, I'm feeling like the man from "The Invaders", alone in a world full of Halo, Tekken loving alien imposters disguised as humans.
Hey folks, remember when Baywatch was THE most popular show in the entire world, I don't even know what that show was about, I knew it had covered up tits and beaches in it, but it made no sense on any level, it was medicocrity incarnate, not even crap enough to like on an ironic level. Well, Halo is the Baywatch of the 21st century. Oh, and Tekken also.
@JJ Rage And did you really expect the game to play like the diorama ads? Really? You're an adult, right?
I think he expect that and free blow jobs, it had 10s. It doesn't even meet Next-Gen standards with 640p.
Biggest cop-out ever. Halo 3 looks fucking amazing. I think it's hilarious that people actually hold Bungie to a higher graphics standard than the rest of the entire industry.
Hardcore.
I'm not a casual gamer and I think frats are for assholes who pop their collars and shop at Hollister.
I guess I'm just bucking the mold, eh?
And dont use the hype excuse. Everything is over hyped these days. Bioshock was too. Just because it didnt get 'mainstream' exposure (tv commercials, etc etc) doesnt mean it didnt get its fair share of hyping on websites and by fans. I expected more from bioshock. Halo 3's hype was much more insane of course... but i wasnt stupid enough to fall prey to it. The game was, to me, the best halo game - no more, no less.
I dont see why everyone compares halo to half life. Theyre far too different to make a meaningful comparison. One focuses on narrative and environment gameplay, the other focuses on combat and use of weapons and vehicles. Anyone who thinks that the guns in half life feel more 'real' than halo's is an idiot, to put it bluntly. I know well, ive played them both to death. Theyre both awesome, for different reasons.
And anyone who says that halo 3 is a shiny halo 2 is also an idiot. Why dont you give 3 a proper go? Youll see how stupid you are. Its like saying half life 2 is a shiny half life 1.
"Halo 3 looks fucking amazing."
Funniest thing I've heard in awhile.
It's not that people hold Bungie to a higher graphical standard it's just that nearly every other current gen game on the 360 looks substantially better not to mention most a lot of games on the PS3.
You can say that it's my fault the game didn't live up to the hype, but after reading so many stellar reviews of it it was hard to believe it was anything but incredible.
Ah, well. Complain all that you lot want. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying myself on my sub-par, derivative FPS.
I don't hate Halo because it's popular, I hate Halo just because it's not a good series. It's just mediocre at best. It also seems to lure the most disgusting fan base possible, I mean there are a lot of Halo fans out there obsessed with talking about sucking cocks or wanting you to suck a cock. It's rather disturbing really.
Half-Life to Half-Life 2 = massive graphical jump, physics, gravity gun, smart and engaging character development, incredible set piece after incredible set piece with a pace that never let up
Halo 2 to Halo 3 = minor graphical update, 4 player co-op, conclusion to the story, other miscellaneous updates to the system and multiplayer
Perhaps I'm just seeing the subtleties. Perhaps I'm caught up in the entire package, not just the visuals, but the score and the atmosphere. Every campaign level (and even some of the multiplayer levels) have more going on than just the battle the master chief is involved in. Banshees dogfighting with Hornets, entire battles happening out in space just above Earth.
I will agree that there are other games that do atmosphere better (Bioshock, Half-Life 2), but Halo 3 is still pretty damn good at it.
Not around much huh?
I still say, to this day, Halo 1 was and still is one of the best console multiplayer games.
I didn't hear any reviews call the game perfect. You must have just looked at the little numbers and not understood that the 1-10 system has inherent flaws.
You are not a lunatic for seeing things in halo that are sub-par.
You are however sorely lacking in an objective viewpoint.
If you are going to equate playing a game with performing oral sex on the developer (that makes most of us prostitutes), then you aren't being critical. You are merely falling for the misconception that one's own taste and preference are more sophisticated than another's.
I doubt you can entertain this notion though, since it was not your own.
I did like the epic battles taking place in the back ground and the fact that more was going on than just what Master Chief was going through. For me at least I just wanted a return to the original Halo. I loved Halo: CE for all that it was, but Halo 2 ruined it for me in the little things. No health packs, floaty jump, no fall damage, the unfocused story, and the modification of and absence of weapons from the first game just made it feel off to me. It was like it was trying to be and Unreal or Quake. I wanted Halo 3 to go back and look at the original and see what made that game so great.
Anyway, if you haven't picked up The Orange Box yet do so immediately and play Episode 2 and compare that to H3.
I can provide one person who agrees with you for sure, yahtzee croshaw has a nearly identical view on it except faster and with a british accent.
check it out
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/2304-Zero-Punctuation-Halo-3
STFUAJPG. The game came out, a lot of people like it and think you're wrong and a lot of other kids hate it and haven't played it. You know, for me, it's fine if you don't like it. To each his own. Some people don't appreciate all the small things that were put into it to make it as solid as it is. It has the best control I've played in an FPS (for a console). Bioshock and even Call of Duty's controls didn't give you that satisfaction of killing something. Especially Bioshock. For a FPS, it sort of sucked (everything else was fucking incredible).
-BANG-BANG- Ah godamnit! -BANG-BANG- I just shot four rounds!? -BANG-BANG-Fucking die!
Anyways. I don't understand why this is up on the front page. It's completely worthless. If I wanted to fine another Halo hater blog, I'd go through the forums and c-blogs. Really, this wasn't necessary. I already had the official Destructoid review and that was fine.
Gears of War --worst multiplayer and story EVAR!
OK, they weren't the worst ever, but they were anything but great. Common, guys.
Halo 1 was and still is one of the best console first-person shooters around. Halo 2's campaign was a disappointment, but Halo 3's campaign is marvelous. I haven't heard anyone tout Halo 3 as the "best game evar!1!11!!", but then again, I tend not to surround myself with those kinds of people.
Also Eliza, you failed to mention to even mention the multiplayer, or the Forge, or the theater mode, or Campaign Scoring, or any of the other features that truly make Halo 3 a great game.
Being gamers does not mean we need to stoop to the same pretenious stereotypes as fans of other art mediums do. The game is fun. That's what games are for right?
If every game had the passive narrative of a Bioshock, or the art style of an Okami or Psychonauts, or the original gameplay seen in indigo Prohpecy or Katamari Damaci, then those games would no longer be held in such high regard.
If anything, we need the traditional, and yes sometimes mindless fun of games like Halo to make the aforementioned games that much more special.
admittedly it's the last in the master chief arc though