The Gaming Grid

First off, I never thought the Halo series was all that great. Well to the extent most people give it. I have however played and beaten all of them so far. Until now that is. I reserved Halo Wars in the thought that others will grab this and I will have someone to play with. Now this is the odd thing. That stops me from buying most games, so I really don’t know why I got this game. I know it has co-op but I don’t really know if I will play with friends or if I’ll be forced to play with some dick online.

Turns out that most of the people I know did not pick this game up, and there are good reasons for this. Normally I don’t like to give a review on something until I finish the game, but its just killing me. This game is not really that hard, in fact its to easy. Most RTS the units just do straight damage, in this game its a rock, paper, scissors match. The biggest problem is that you are a rock and they are always scissors, and you have a big rock. The funny thing is all you have to do is make marines. That’s it. just run around with them and kill everything. I have found my only reason to have vehicles is if they give them to me.

I also think the controls are not intuitive for this platform. This really just needed to be a PC release. To select units you can select al, select local, or use the painter. 90% of the time you will move some units one way and then select all units by accident and mess up your whole plan. I have found that if I just bunch them all up into a large mobile horde, they kill faster and its less frustrating. The game has programed events that no matter what you do, X will happen. I thought we got past that point 5 years ago. This game has taken the genre back to the original command and conquer, which in my opinion is a better game.

If them made the interface more like End Wars it would have been a better game. It did not even need the voice command, just the general controler layout and level layout. I think I will eventually beat this game, but I just don’t really want to play it. Maybe ill go play some Gears of War 2, they have a new DLC at the end of the month. I will also write a second look when I beat the game. Who knows maybe it will grow on me.

I’m a fan of first person shooters.  I’m not to sure what draws me to some and pushes me from others, perhaps quality of the game, maybe an engaging story line or two.

When the original Halo game came out for the Xbox, I was left out due to my owning of the far superior PS2.  Some may disagree with this sentiment, but those are obviously people that play Halo on a regular basis and continue to tell themselves that it’s a good game to be taken serious.  I played over at a friend’s house on occasion while I was either stoned or drunk enough to imagine I was having a good time killing annoying little dudes with annoying little voices and annoying little catch phrases.

That last paragraph means it should come as no surprise to you that I don’t like Halo 3.  I played for about an hour or so and realized I owned Fallout 3, which, when it comes to the third part of a game series, far out strips the Halo franchise.  There are a few reasons for this:

Fallout 3 had good games in the past.  The first two, while not in my preferred style of gaming, were brilliant and immersive.  There were choices to be made, people to befriend and enemies to destroy.  The third installment went a step further, turning it into an FPS and injecting a high dose of awesome into it.

The Halo franchise does nothing like this.  There is no interaction you have with others beyond putting bullets into them.  There aren’t any side quests and it takes absolutely no creative abilities necessary to make the plot line.  Go here, shoot some shit because of a thing, repeat.  You would think that the biggest gaming franchise Microsoft has among the 18-35 year old male douchebags of the would merit some sort of upgrade as the games went along, but there aren’t any.  You still shoot with the same guns and act in the same way.  Master Chief continues to be the same guy fighting the same war over and over without an end in sight, mostly because if there were and end, Microsoft would collapse in on it’s self and their design department of drunk frat boys would reabsorb into the collective douche.

The only thing Halo has ever had going for it was an extensive online player database, but wading into those waters will get you called all manner of horrific things if you’re bad at it, and eve worse if you are good.  Online multiplayer games have always suffered from this problem, and the way of solving it, playing with friends only, is hampered by the fact that I don’t have any friends that are retarded enough to play this crapfest.

Perhaps I was a little too judgmental on this game, but it had it coming. The release of this game was heralded on G4 as if it were the second coming of Christ as they held tournaments, countdowns and all manner of parties for a second rate game that wouldn’t have been given the time of day if it wasn’t championed by the idiot gamers of the world. It’s a travesty that these guys have been giving Halo 3 all of the laurels, yet Psychonauts hardly registers on their radar. If I hadn’t borrowed this game, I would have traded it in and then firebombed the store by now.

Your 360 can do better. You can do better. Pick up something with a bit of depth to it, a bit of story and a bit of fun. Pick up Fallout 3 or Mass Effect and play a real game that has replay value, and if you really feel a need to get yelled at online, you can always play End War.