Welcome to another beautiful Whinesday. Last night, I watched Star Wars with a good friend of mine. Today, I watched The Empire Strikes back. Needless to say, I’m in a fairly positive mood. Never fear though, it’s Whinesday and if there’s one thing I can never resist: it’s a good chance to bitch.
I grew up with nothing but PC games, I love them, and somehow they’ve managed to stand apart from their console counterparts. Games don’t really play that differently from console to console (until the Wii came out), but the PC’s unique interface set it apart. The mouse and keyboard are superior in many ways, they offer a degree of control that can immerse you into something much more than thumbs’ movement on a D-pad or analog stick. Not to say that consoles don’t have their place, but I believe that there are some genres that just play better on PC’s. Namely, FPS’s.
I was brought up on Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D and Quake (not necessarily in that order), and god did I love them. They set standards for FPS’s that are still honored to this day on both console and PC. As I understand it, a quaint little title called “Goldeneye” came out for the N64 that’s widely considered the first GOOD FPS on consoles. While I have tried it and enjoyed it, I still argued that PC controls were superior, and competitive PC games at the time were more popular when I argued this anyway, so it worked. I was on the majority side and loved it.
Early on, I got sucked into a wonderful FPS called Unreal Tournament, it and its immediate successor’s became my favourite FPS of all time, and I’ve measured up all FPS’s that followed to the standards for multiplayer that they set, and the standards for gameplay customization that they set. This was put to the test when, within a few years of my discovery of Unreal Tournament, somebody made a statement to me, bashing my love of this game in favour of another. This other would go on to become one of the most popular games of its’ time and creating an icon with what which the new-age of online-console gamers would consider the first game character that they gave a shit about.
At the time, I was playing UT with Instagib CTF maps online, 135% gamespeed lowgrav. Needless to say, if you’re in a big open map and someone sees you, you’d better be constantly dodging, because 1 slow move and you’re dead. I decided to tell a friend of mine about how amazing this was. His response (carefully re-worded for the sake of being humorous… and I don’t remember what he really said, it was damn near 10 years ago) was, “Hahaha, you think Unreal Tournament is fast paced? Man, that shit sucks, I’ll show you fast-paced. Come to my place and play…
That’s right kids, I DON’T like what’s considered the best killer app the XBox ever got. The StarCraft of FPS. Right. Fuck this game.
My first experience with Halo was a number of years after the release. At the time, I had just played American McGee’s Alice, in itself a very dated-looking game, and had loved it (I don’t judge games, graphically) but needed something else. A friend insisted that I join him in playing it and I agreed, simply to see what all the hype was about. We played co-op for maybe half an hour before I wanted to do something else, it wasn’t immersing me, it was feeling very typical thus far, and decided not to bother giving it another shot for awhile.
I was finally given the shot to play and beat it a few years later, both on the XBox and on the PC. Now I know, a lot of you will give me flak for playing it on the PC but it’s a port, that means that aside from bugs, the games plays THE SAME, and while the bugs may have been problematic in multiplayer (which I didn’t bother with on the PC), they won’t affect playing through the campaign, whether or not the story is immersive, or the general feel and physics of the game.
So, I must be blunt: it was abysmally dull. I didn’t give a fuck about Master Chief by the end any more than when I had been introduced to him. The lack of an in-game soundtrack that would otherwise have added to the atmosphere during gameplay and fight sequences – made every attack feel dull.
The atmosphere of the game is introduced with the first attack by the Covenant. The “grunts” honestly made me look at the entire Covenant as a joke, and while even Quake 4 has some silly enemies, at least they don’t do a backflip when you kill them. I had trouble taking the game seriously from their first appearance. As it continued, the ridiculously strange physics coupled with the enemies that I never really found to be very threatening (the classic circle strafing + hide behind big things strategy applies), I struggled to look at the game from its’ time period perspective. When I did, I remembered Alice, I remembered Quake 3, I remembered Unreal Tournament – and I’m only talking about gameplay, not even storyline. Let’s look at the gameplay for a moment.
Corridor gameplay seemed to work out decently, there were things to hide behind and run to, it was good – however as soon as I left the corridors and the game became open, the interest left me. I would jump from time to time, float into the air, and float back down. It didn’t feel like low gravity, it felt like I was a balloon, because enemies fell and died just as they would in normal gravity. I’d always float. I couldn’t understand it, it even happened on the ship. The weapons were… interesting, but nothing really stood out for me. The enemies had little to no A.I. that I could really discern, they were just programmed to do follow very specific strategies that were very easy to counter.
I didn’t really care much about the characters it had introduced. One of them was a programmed soldier and the other was an A.I. that I didn’t understand the huge importance of. The Covenant as I said, I could not even take seriously, and these are the big baddies. By the time that I had finished the game, I felt like the explosion represented all of the time I had just put into that game were symbolized. Destroyed.
I didn’t play multiplayer, I tried Halo 2′s multiplayer at a party once but lost interest quickly. Given that so many people go on about the immense story that draws you in “better than Half-Life 2″, perhaps I was expecting too much. Nowadays everyone says “Oh man, forget Halo, the second one is WAY better”. While that’s great and all, I don’t want to play the second game when I didn’t care about the first. If the first is so bad then why did you love it to begin with?
I tell you, Halo fans, this is what all of you are to me:
–Jeff “DanyLektro”