A review of Halo 3.

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.