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."