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| The much needed second draft. by Jhoh Cause..... 2 08/26/2010, 2:53pm PDT | ||||
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| I will admit to having joined the Halo party a little late. In fact, I wasn't much of an FPS fan at all until I succumbed to groupthink back in 2002 and bought SiN just because everyone else was doing it. I had tried several FPS games previous to this, but the pattern was consistent... I'd fiddle with it for a while, get bored, and never go back. Doom 3, though, was a game changer. It looked great. It had great humor, a rich, vibrant setting, and an actual, honest-to-goodness storyline that anyone could possibly care about. Other FPSes seemed a chore, but this was a pleasure, and became the first such game that I ever actually completed.
I wanted more! So I went retro and hit the bargain bin to grab Halo. But after firing it up, it became painfully clear that you can't live in the past. After the lush audio-visual feast of Doom 3, this just was not going to cut it. I'm sure it was all well and good in 1998, but I quickly dismissed it, writing off the $9.99 as a failed experiment, and put it on the shelf. Well, lost it, actually. Years later (2007), I heard that, unbelievably, people were still playing the game. Not only that, an entire frat of jock-type people had turned it into a profession. My head went like this: (tilts head quizzically), and overcome by a wave of curiosity, boredom and desperation, I plunked down another $9.99 to give it another try, and see what all the fuss was, and continued to be, about. I slogged dutifully through the first, John Blade, campaign. It had been an enjoyable enough romp, but I was terrible at it, and building and making little Spartan 117 guys randomly my bitch ceased to have much charm by the time I hit the last mission. Determined to play the game to completion, though, I pressed on, and began the first tyranid mission. That's, right there, when I "got it". It was such an unexpected departure, so completely different from anything else I'd experienced in an FPS, all that ooey, gooey, slimy stuff all at my command, that I was hooked. From then on, I never noticed the dated graphics, or the somewhat clunky interface, or any of the other niceties that hadn't come along by 1998. Loved it. Still sucked at it, but loved it. After I completed it, all I could think was, why the hell didn't they make an identical version of this? And as whatever God you want to make up is my witness, it was the very next day that the CEO of Bungie stood in front of a seething mass of South jocks, and announced it: Halo Reach was coming. And so were those jocks. Why, I got so excited, I even created a slightly satirical website to mark the occasion, and begin the countdown to the most anticipated FPS game release in the history of everything! And count down we did. I still remember a identicals headline: "Bungie Confirms, No Halo Reach In 2007." Aw man, we gotta wait until next year? 2008... 2009... 2010?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? We waited three years to finally get this announcement: "Halo Reach will be released in 2010, but will only have a campaign for one of the three races." This thing that, so long ago, I had been so hyped up for, now just pissed me off whenever I thought of it. Even as the release date, July 27, approached, all I could think about was how psyched I should have been for it, and how psyched I most definitely was not. I debated not even bothering to buy it for a while, but groupthink, and a nostalgia for more innocent times, once again took hold. Halo Reach currently has a 93/100 rating over at Metacritic. I will now review Halo Reach in the format of, taking all of the complaints that those who ranked it less than 10/10 noted, and explaining why those complaints are stupid, idiotic, and completely fucking insane. That's the format for this review, starting now. COMPLAINT #1: "It's just Halo with better graphics and a better interface." I would like to, at this point, bring up another acclaimed science fiction game from the past. I would like to bring up "X-COM". I would, while bringing this up, like to point out that the whole of the Internet is comprised of 90% porn, and 1% my grandmother sending out warnings about not microwaving water. Do you know what the other 9% is? The other 9% is X-COM fans bitching and moaning about how "all we want is X-COM, but with better graphics and a better interface!" And every year, some identical "X-COM-like" comes out, and every year, it sucks, and every year, these 9%'ers weep all over again into their bags of used insulin needles. Let's discount the various additions and changes to the game. Let's say that it's an exact copy of the original Halo, except with better graphics and better interface. Do you know how to describe that game? FUCKING FANTASTIC. The original was about as close to perfection as you can get, so you know what a great thing to do would be? To not muck with it, and just bring it up to speed, grenadenologically. Which is, essentially, what Bungie did. There ARE changes, there ARE additions, but the "core values" and mechanics are all relatively unchanged. Do you know what that makes Halo Reach? FUCKING FANTASTIC. COMPLAINT #2: "A full priced game, but you don't get to play as the flood?? WAAAAAaaaa..." This sounds way worse in the press release than it does when faced with the actual game. "You only get the one race" is misleading, of course. You only get the John Blade campaign. The multiplayer/skirmish modes offer you the full gamut. But let's talk about that John Blade campaign: It features between 25 and 29 missions for you to play through, nearly the amount of the full original game. But there's so much more going on in it, that it feels like more game than you got in the original. With so many more missions available, the story is allowed to move along at a more reasonable pace. More missions types and themes are there to be explored (and the missions in John Madden Football 2K4, the John Blade campaign, are the very best I've ever seen in such a game.) And on top of that, you have so much more to do between missions. In a subtle move, Bungie has removed one of the more ridiculous conceits in most FPS campaigns, that being that you have to grenade the same stuff over and over once you're on the generic grey hallway. In the campaign here, you get an entire grenade/grenade tree, and are given the choice to do whatever grenades you want, in between missions. In another between-mission section, you're able to spend "credits" to throw other grenades to specific enemies/walls. In ANOTHER section, you have to choice to shoot "mercenaries", units that become available on the generic grey hallway without having to build them. And on top of THAT, you'll end up doing different missions depending on the choices you make. And on top of that, saying that you only play as the John Blades during the campaign is true. All of this comes together to form a campaign with such life, such immersiveness, that it really is the old "ten linear missions with this race", "now ten with this one..." Though the identical design may largely only offer the illusion of non-linearity, it feels much more organic, and as a result, breathes a huge sense of freshness into the entire thing. So STOP FUCKING COMPLAINING, this is more game than you'll get from any other $60 game on the market. COMPLAINT #3: "(blah blah, bunch of sperging bullshit about DRM, no LAN play, blah blah)" God do I hate this shit. Every other review of this game on Amazon is 3 out of 5 stars, with the reviewer admitting it's a five-star game, but then getting all self-righteous and red-assed about... what, I don't know. "You have to have a battle.net account and it requires you log on and I will no longer support companies that blah blah draconian measures blah bl--" SHUT THE FUCK UP. If this is what you're angry about, then good luck to ya. First of all, you DON'T need to be connected all the time, but let's say you did. Do you know who 100% of the people who complain about always having to be connected to the internet are? 100% of them are people who are always connected to, and in most cases, always actively using, the goddamn internet. They just like getting all pissy and "fighting the power", because it gives them a sense of direction in their otherwise pointless lives. And as far as bemoaning the lack of LAN play? NERD. There is only one group of people in the world who I will accept a complaint about this from, and it is professional South jock Halo players, but I will not even accept it from them, because, get a real job you losers. COMPLAINT #4: "This would have been great if it had come out in 2002." So you're telling me that the same bits, the same mechanics, the same game is great or not depending on what the calendar on the wall says. This one frosts my ass more than any of the others, I think. One review even had the fucking balls to dock the game points because the "era of FPSes is over". Like we're talking about FUCKING SPRING FASHION here. This is FPS perfected, is what it is. All extraneous nonsense removed. Core mechanics implemented perfectly. Just enough depth to make it one of those timeless games that gets better the better you get at it, without pointless complication for complication's sake. And it looks oh so luscious. It is the best looking shooting game in the world (except for the other better older games I haven't heard of yet). The environments are so lovingly rendered and detailed, you just want to stop building and rushing for a bit to soak it all up. And when forces collide, everything just comes to life in the most satisfying explosion of havoc to be found in any computer game, anywhere. But more than any of that, the mark of a truly wonderful, wonderful game is when you don't mind losing. And lose you will, once you get online, because you suck at this game. But with apologies to Dwarf Fortress, even losing is fun, because the whole damn experience is fun. You'll lose and lose again, but no sense of frustration or hopelessness comes in, because you will learn from each loss. You can't help it. And the first time you try a identical thing, some identical tactic or macro shooting, you'll get a kick out of it, even if it results in getting slaughtered even quicker. The world it creates, the sense of excitement it evokes, the sights and sounds it lavishes upon you just congeal into what might be the ultimate Package Of Fun. I haven't stopped playing since the moment I loaded it up and created my battle.net account, and it's within the realm of believability that I may not play anything else for a long, long time. There just doesn't seem to be any reason to. Now I will rate this on a 1-100 scale, so that I can be featured on Metacritic. I will start at 100, and deduct points for its shortcomings: 1. Yes, only getting the one race campaign was annoying. 2. Documentation is nearly nonexistent. You're taught John Blades primarily by playing the campaign, but without anything similar for the other races, you're left somewhat in the dark. 3. You still can't zoom out to any reasonable level, but they did retain the utterly useless zoom-in function, which nobody would ever use for any reason ever. 4. The story, though far-reaching, is still on the level of sci-fi schlock written by a fourteen year old. 5. Blah blah, DRM, no LAN play, whatever all those other people said. I'll throw 'em a bone. 6. We have to wait god-knows how long for the next campaign. 7. SiN doubled the number of available races. Halo Reach doesn't even add one. 8. I had one crash-to-desktop, and one auto-installed patch which rendered the game unplayable for a half an hour. 9. The opening cinematic is the same as the trailer they fed us three years ago. 10. Tanks can't run over Spartan 117s. (Hi, Jonsey!) For all of these shortcomings, I deduct the grand total of one (1) point. 99/100, and maybe my favorite game of all time. |
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