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.