I've Got the World on a Ring

Confession time: Up until very recently, I had never played Halo: Combat Evolved. Weird, right? Halo is one of those games that even non-gamers' grandmothers have played, but I never got around to it. There were a couple of reasons for this, the biggest being that I never owned an Xbox. By the time Halo came out for the PC, Halo 2 was almost out and I had move on to other games. The other reason I never played it (and I am embarrassed to admit this) was that Halo has a bit of a reputation for being the game that the beer-swilling, football-throwing jocks play. Not only that, it has the reputation of introducing the beer-swilling, football-throwing jocks to gaming in general, and I guess part of me resented that at the time.

Of course, what I saw as an invasion of my hobby was really just an example of the budding trend of our culture's general acceptance of geekiness. When I was a kid, we were the ones being shoved into lockers, but three Star Wars prequels, three Lord of the Rings movies, seven Harry Potter books, six Halo games, and a string of popular comic book movies later, I can have an actual conversation with someone on the street about why I'm excited about the new Thor movie. That's something to be celebrated, not looked down upon, and it was partially the acceptance of this fact that made me decide to finally sit down and play Halo.

I still had pretty low expectations. I had heard from a lot of hardcore gamers that Halo was over-simplified, derivative, and overly repetitive. Maybe it was these low expectations, maybe it was my newfound respect for mainstream geekery, or maybe Halo is just a really good game, but I really liked it. I didn't love it, but I liked it.

So here's my opinion of Halo: Combat Evolved, as someone playing it for the first time, a full decade after its release.

The first thing that struck me about Halo was the color. It's a very colorful game, all the way through. There is more color in this one screenshot of Halo than there is in the entire Call of Duty franchise.

And there aren't even enemies on the screen there. In the middle of a firefight, there are dozens of enemies with deep red and blue armor, highlighted by the lush, green, outdoor backdrops, as hundreds of multi-colored plasma bolts fly through the air. If Halo had been yet another bland, gray, visually unappealing shooter, I don't think it would have won me over like it did.

The second thing I noticed about Halo was how well grounded it was in its science fiction roots. If you pay attention, you'll notice that Halo is hardcore sci-fi, and I was surprised to see how many tropes they were able to pull in. Just within the first hour of the game, you have a ring world, strong AI, holographic interfaces, anti-gravity propulsion, plasma weapons, energy swords, alien races, and faster-than-light travel. In this day of "realistic" sci-fi, very few games are able to hit as many iconic themes as Halo. The people at Bungie are clearly fans of the genre. The fact that the pilot of the main human dropship had the callsign "Foe Hammer" made me grin from ear to ear.

In terms of gameplay, everything I had heard about Halo was true. It was simple, derivative, and repetitive. That was what made it fun. I was able to mindlessly run and gun for the vast majority of the game. I didn't have to hide behind cover very often, my finger was constantly on the trigger, and I almost never stopped moving. It made me feel powerful and awesome without shoving it down my throat by reminding me how much of a hero I was.

In fact, Master Chief is such a staple of today's gaming culture, that I just assumed that the game idolized him the way most Halo fans do, and that's not true at all. Master Chief appears to just be a high-ranking soldier in some cool armor. Nobody on the field seems to recognize him and when he does something cool, people congratulate him on a job well done instead of lauding him with unnecessary praise and affection to make the player feel good like some games do. It was well done and appropriate. I appreciate that.

Then there's The Library, Halo's seventh level. For years I have been hearing about how terribly designed The Library was, and, again, it might have been my low expectations, but I thought it was a blast. The environment was lonely, yet mystifying and reminded me quite a bit of Space Mountain in Disney World. The music provided good atmosphere, I got through it pretty quickly, and it gave me another opportunity to fight the Flood.

I really enjoyed fighting the Flood (Halo's equivalent of the headcrab zombies from Half-Life) simply because they offered a different approach to combat. There are so many of them that every time you kill one, five more take its place. They aren't that big a deal to fight individually and even fighting a dozen or so isn't that bad, but when they start to swarm and they begin to live up to their name, they start to feel like a real threat. Of course, shooters have done this before, but I think Halo does it particularly well.

However, it's certainly not the god-like messiah of first-person shooters that many claim it to be, and there were quite a few things that stuck out to me as being particularly poorly done. First, the vehicles (though varied and interesting) were so difficult to control I began to wonder if Master Chief cheated his way through Spartan Driver's Ed. Couple that with the fact that every small speed bump skyrockets ground vehicles into the air in a fascinating display of physical surrealism, and you have a  recipe for a controller-throwing headache-fest.

I also didn't understand why Master Chief's armor could withstand hundreds of bullets, plasma bolts, and attacks from parasitic bug-monsters, but one slice of an energy sword kills him on the spot. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I died from conventional enemy attacks in Halo. Nearly every time I died, it was because I was stabbed by a sword, had a grenade attached to my armor, or was blown off of a ledge by tank fire. These deaths were very difficult to avoid and were all one-hit kills. Normally, I wouldn't mind this, however the rest of the game is so easy that having to do the same section of the game over and over just because there's a guy with a sword breaks up the flow. In a really difficult game like Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden, you see the "Game Over" screen every five or six minutes, and it becomes a part of the game. Going two hours without dying and then dying five times in a row from the same thing grinds the game to a halt.

In addition, maybe my perception is skewed, but it's hard for me to see Halo as revolutionary. Halo came out in 2001, and by that time we had already had Half-Life, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Quake II, Deus Ex, and many others, and there really wasn't much that Halo introduced that wasn't done just as well (or better) in those games. True, it popularized "Wolverine health" and introduced the idea of carrying only two weapons at a time, but while these features were well-executed (and made sense) in Halo, I really hate them in other games. It's hard for me to see those things as a positive influence.

All that being said, however, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I intend to play the sequels, however I'm a bit hesitant, since I have heard that none of them was quite as good, but maybe they will surprise me, as their predecessor did. No matter what happens, I have certainly lost my most vital asset for the next time I play "Never Have I Ever."

Huge Tracts of Land

I once knew a game called The Elder Scrolls. You may have heard of her. She really likes attention. I've heard her called a lot of things in the time I've know her: "the best-looking RPG ever," "Game of the Year", and "one of the best role-playing games ever made.

I just called her TES.

TES and I first met back in 2002. She was different then. She had just gotten out of a long relationship with the PC, and decided that in the new millennium, it was hip to be bi-platform. I played her on the Xbox. She was cute, near-sighted, and one of the most expansive games I'd ever played. Her favorite color was brown, she loved to read, and she called herself Morrowind.

Morrowind was an open-world game, the first I'd ever played. Her world was detailed, imaginative, and grandiose. She was going through a more detail-oriented phase. I had heard at the time that back when she was called Daggerfall, her world was over 300,000 squared miles of sparse, randomly-generated land. Now, she was only 10 squared miles, but her attention to detail in landscaping, lore, and atmosphere was more than apparent. Unfortunately, our flirtation lasted only a few short hours. She was directionless, hard, and wanted to take things much too slowly. I was immature, unable to recognize the value of the story she was trying to tell me, and was unwilling to put in the work to unlock the potential of our relationship. Besides, I was kind of stealing her from a friend of mine, so I cut her off. There was no animosity, no bitter feelings. We just weren't right for each other. I wanted something easy and fun, and for all of her wonderful qualities, Morrowind was not that game.

I didn't see TES for a long time after that, and to be honest, I didn't think that much about her either. It wasn't until 2006 that I saw her again, and I was floored. Gone was the pretty, brown-loving, near-sighted game I met years ago. This game was a knockout! She had clearly gone through several makeovers, changed her name again (this time to Oblivion), and she featured the voice of Patrick Stewart.


Patrick Stewart!

This game was the complete package. She was beautiful, smart, and had a lot of ideas. We had some great times together. We rode horses west to the far-off city of Anvil, fought our way through countless dark, terrifying dungeons, and searched for Nirnroot by every lake we found. We laughed at the bugs and we cried at the tragedy of The Gray Prince. We were happy. Sometimes, I was content to just walk through her world for an hour, just because. And if I happened to get a little action along the way, hey, all the better.

Then it all fell apart.

I remember our first fight. Oblivion gates (essentially portals to hell) were opening all over Cyrodil. Demons called Daedra were invading, with the intention of mass-slaughter. The allies of the resistance were gathering in a city called Bruma. TES told me to go out and find as many allies for Bruma as I could. Happily, I went all over Cyrodil, talking to the leaders of every city we had encountered in our travels together, but they all asked me to do the same thing. Somewhere nearby, there was an Oblivion gate. They wanted me to go in, close the gate from the inside, and then they would aid Bruma. This was a fairly boring, lengthy, and tedious process. I did it three times, and as I did, I was able to think about my relationship with TES. Why would she make me do this? This was her idea of a good time? Then I started think about our other experiences.

Riding for hours through a dense forest, trying to find the main gate of Anvil?

Long, drawn-out, repetitive dungeons?

Having to stop at every, single, stupid lake to look for Nirnroot?

Why was I doing this? What was the point? Oblivion had so much to do, but it was all boring.

But she was pretty.

That's when I realized what had happened. TES had taken all of the things that made her interesting when she was Morrowind and streamlined them, simplified them, and dumbed them down to make herself more accessible. All this time I had been mesmerized by her beauty and intrigued by her ideas, but her ideas were all the same. And they were bad.

As soon as I closed the third Oblivion gate, I took one last look at TES's blue sky, lush rolling hills, and snow-capped mountains, and I quit.

I didn't even save.

In my mind, Bruma is still there, waiting for reinforcements that will never arrive, as the Daedra ravish the land, and TES tearfully looks at me and asks, "Why?"

The next few years were tough. Even though I wasn't playing her anymore, Oblivion seemed to be a constant topic of conversation. Mods were released, then expansions, then DLC. When she won Game of the Year at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, I'm pretty sure I grumbled something like, "I hope it doesn't take her five hours to come up to accept." Any time anyone mentioned Oblivion, rather than tell them the truth, I told them that I hated her because the truth was just too complicated. Months went by, then years. Finally, TES fell off the radar when her sister Fallout 3 was released. Fallout 3 was a great game, but it took few risks. It became so popular that I began to think that TES was gone for good.

Then, a few months ago, at this year's Spike TV Video Game Awards,  Todd Howard from Bethesda Softworks came onstage to announce Bethesda's new game.

It was TES.

Her trailer didn't show much, but it was narrated by Max von Sydow and revealed her new name: Skyrim. I didn't know what to think about seeing TES again, but from the time I spent with her, I knew what the title referred to. In TES's world, Skyrim is a frozen wasteland where the barbaric Nords hail from. Screenshots confirmed this soon after, showcasing ruined temples, desolate snow-covered valleys, and tough, muscular monsters. It looked like TES had grown bitter in our years apart, sacrificing her roots in optimistic fantasy for gritty realism.  And I couldn't help but think it was my fault. In each of those shattered buildings, I saw the pieces of the relationship we once had.

But then she released this trailer.

And I noticed something. Behind the brutal, desolate landscapes, the dark chanting of her main theme, and grotesque monsters, TES had hidden something away. Take another look at that trailer, around the 1:44 mark. Behind the guy getting stabbed, there is a lake.

Beside that lake is a Nirnroot plant.

That one, little plant says so much. It says that despite the changes she's made, TES is still the same game I met all those years ago, full of optimism and new ideas. She lets you live in a world, not just interact with it. She gives you the opportunity to be whoever you want to be, even if it's not very interesting. She offers her players the chance to do anything they want, even if it's just look for plants. Whether it works or not, and whether it's fun or not doesn't matter. It's still a noble goal.

Congratulations on your new game, TES. I hope it goes well for you, and I look forward to hearing about it's release. May you find a better player than I.