“Halo” will always remain a mystery to me. Since its inception, the award-winning first-person shooter (FPS) video-game franchise that started on the Xbox game console has defeated all of my logic of what a good game should be.
When I first played Halo: Combat Evolved, I was under-whelmed to say the least.
It had no network multiplayer, except in the PC version, which also included more maps and weapons. While the console cooperative play mode was fun, it was nothing new.
I had played a myriad of PC FPSs before starting with Doom and working my way forward to the Quake series and Starsiege Tribes.
I had also played console FPSs before; everyone loved Goldeneye on the N64.
Though I never really liked using a controller for a FPS, it’s something that I’d just come to accept as a middle-of-the-road gaming experience.
And then there was Halo. It reminded me heavily of Tribes with its use of vehicles and futuristic setting, but it can easily be played drunk by someone who has never played it before.
After about an hour of playtime, I put it down and prepared to write it off as another so-so gaming experience I would forget, yet would remain popular among “bros” and prepubescent boys because it was so simplistic in nature.
Unfortunately, the gaming world would not let that happen. Thanks, in part, to Microsoft’s epic advertising strategies, Halo would go on to be a success.
By some estimates it would be ranked as one of the top video game frachises in gaming history. Time Magazine ranked Halo 2 in its 2005 Top 100 . On Halo 3’s release date, Microsoft’s shares increased by 1.7 percent . That’s a lot of money. Halo would go on to spawn two direct sequels, a couple of off-shoots and a prequel. Books, games and various little knickknacks can be seen on many a gamer’s shelf.
Even still, “Machinima,” or using captured video game footage to create movies through clever editing really took off on the Halo engine.
Indeed, Red Vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles is one of the biggest and I am guilty of having watched the entire series many times over. It is absolutely hilarious.
In part, I think Halo’s success stems from the fact that everyone else is playing it.
The majority of gamers that I’ve talked to keep their skill level up simply so they can play with their friends who seem to be doing the exact same thing.
Judging from this, one might consider Halo merely a self-propagating gaming trend: Everyone’s playing because everyone else is playing.
Halo could never hold my interest because there were more challenging FPSs that required a bigger skill set to enter into and maintain.
As the years continued and far superior franchises continued to spring up, like Left 4 Dead, even the smallest fraction of interest Halo might ever have held for me waned into absolute entropy.
The Halo series represents to me the very basic and most savage the gaming world has to offer.
It’s short, linear, limited in what you can do and what strategies you can use and all in all reeks of mediocrity.
Yet, it’s trendy, insanely popular and the merchandise is prevalent and expensive. Playing Halo is akin to shopping at Hot Topic when goth was “in” or listening to Blink-182 and calling yourself a “punk rocker.”
The fact that the term “Halo-Killer” is used when inevitably every game a reviewer reviews is compared to Halo is an absolute insult.
Worse still, gameplay mechanics that Halo has either invented or repopularized and brought to the forefront have been cloned and repeated in many a game since, much like a child learning a swear word from his or her parents.
In this manner, Halo has stolen from the deep, hardcore FPS market and made it viable to churn out cheap, mass-market crap that no actual gamer in their right mind would want to waste the 4 to 10 hours to play through.
Almost comically, when Halo incorporated basic things like a map editor that older FPSs had pioneered years ago, it was hailed as a brilliant step.
Leave it to Microsoft to oversimplify an entire genre, then reintroduce things that have existed for awhile and receive praise.
I can’t even be mad, that’s just good capitalism.
Perhaps I am just too old to get with the times, too set in my gaming ways, but I am glad that Halo’s reign of terror on the video gaming market drew to a vainglorious close this September.
Now, if I could only get World of Warcraft to stop destroying another genre that I hold so dear.
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