ugachaka :: Jacob was here

Stephen Totilo asked what to do when your partner in gaming leaves town if the two of you were playing the game together.

Apparently, this situation came up with one of MTV News staff when she left town for Thanksgiving and left her boyfriend with Super Mario Galaxy.

I think proper etiquette, at least for me, states that when you are playing a game with someone explicitly, you can’t play it without them even to explore areas you have already visited. If the two of you started it together in aims of finishing it, you shouldn’t leave your partner behind.

I have a co-op game on Halo 2 that is still saved because I haven’t gotten a chance to finish it off with the friend who started it with me. It’s just wrong to finish it with someone else or alone because that is our game.

I guess you could be flexible with this rule if the game is brand new and there is a very definite co-op mode established–meaning there is a co-op and single-player campaign to enjoy, but in this situation, it would be rare to make a deal with a friend to play it all the way through together unless it was some similarly-addicted roommate who would be present at all times of gameplay. I know with Gears of War and Halo 3, I played co-op with several friends at different times, but considering that none of them could be around for more than a day or two each week, there was no deal on us completing the game together.

With Super Mario Galaxy, the game is sort of a single-player adventure. There is a co-op mode, but it doesn’t really give the second person much to do besides waggle the Wiimote around at times to assist the first player. Switching levels is the only acceptable form of multiplayer, and that can get messy. In other words, if you explicitly set out to play this game with another person, you really can’t do anything without that other person present. The single-player/co-op player experience are the same and playing through alone ruins what you had going with the friend.

Good luck to the boyfriend of the MTV News copy editor. I might have just justified your girlfriend’s anger.

I know, I know. I am a horrible person. After spending several weeks following all the latest Halo 3 reviews and analyzing them to see what the fanboys, haters and regular Joes were saying about the game, I went and slacked off playing the last few days without giving you my review. If it makes any difference to you, I got three more achievements. No? Nothing? Alright, let’s move along.

I’ll preface my review by saying that I did not start out as a Halo fanboy. I was slow to adopt the Xbox as a valid console being a Nintendo fanboy Gamecube-addict myself. I had friends who moved over to it immediately and claimed it was the best console out there on the market, but I thought it was only catering to the hardcore shooter fans. I played Halo a handful of times and got owned by my friends–pistol masters.

When Halo 3 emerged, I lived in a fraternity house, so there you go. I played a great deal of multiplayer and even ducked into the campaign–gasp–to follow the storyline of the game and become wrapped up in the plight of Master Chief and Cortana. I discoverd a little site called TheHalography.com which I have featured on here several times and fell in love with the Halo universe. Sadly, I don’t think UNSCleric has updated the site since Halo 3 emerged. I never owned a copy of the game myself until I went all next-gen Microsoft and got an Xbox 360 with the release of Gears of War (Note: after my Wii–I still love you Nintendo).

You can call me a fanboy, but keep in mind that I also have a background in other consoles, shooters and gaming experiences not to be a complete mindless zombie.

Now for the review…OMG HALO r0X! L33T! No, I didn’t do that.

The Campaign

When I first popped the game disc into my 360, I went straight into the campaign mode. I loaded up on Heroic–none of that pansy Normal or Easy I had heard was intentionally made easier for the mainstream gamers to get hooked on the story. I could have gone Legendary, but come on, that’s hard.

Yes, the graphics are not the end all of 360s capabilities, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Yes, the campaign seems a little short. Yes, I thought it resembled a lot of what had already been done in Halo and Halo 2. BUT I expected and enjoyed this design choice.

The levels may not be the best looking, but they are deep enough and rich enough to make you stop and look more than once. Besides, if you are glancing around at all the backgrounds, you need to turn up the difficulty and get into the fight! The game definitely offered a great deal of WOW moments as many reviewers have said as well. I thought that these moments were amazing–so amazing that they became water cooler talk at the office for two weeks. The freedom to fight large pitched battles and take on multiple Scarabs with any choice of weapons and tactics is empowering, and one of the highlights of the Halo experience. The new features such as equipment and multiple grenades give you some new tactics, but not enough to throw you off the golden formula that Bungie established in the first installment–grenades, melee and weapons. You definitely need to make heavy use of grenades and melee once you get to Legendary where ammo is more scarce.

Achievements also are well-designed in Halo 3. They are difficult but not impossible or requiring hours of work. The multiplayer ones may take some time and only come once in a blue moon, but the campaign achievements are very reachable and add the replayability.

The only major complaint I have against the campaign is one that Destructoid also shared. After seeing all the Halo 3 commercials and promotions with that great diorama, I expected to see that battle or at least a cutscene. I know that the ad designers had not seen the game when they made those, but I thought that the scene with Master Chief camptured holding a sticky grenade would at least have to be in the plot. Instead, I kept looking for that dare to be great moment where Master Chief would enter into the hearts of the masses. Besides the very end, I didn’t see that.

I felt that the ending was a proper one for this series, but I would have liked some explanation as to the logistics of why this or that ended up here or there. I would be more exact there, but I don’t want to ruin it for people checking out this review prior to finishing–for crying out loud though, man, if you haven’t finished it yet, get on it.

The Multiplayer

The multiplayer I like on Halo 3 more than any first-person shooter multiplayer in some time. I am not sure what makes me enjoy it so much, but for some reason, the timing and intuitive fighting style just seems to catch on and get instantly gratifying.

Saved films and Forge are incredible. Multiplayer freaks will be toying with them and releasing mods to maps for years. I don’t think anything as monumental to multiplayer has been seen since CounterStrike first triumphed with user-created gameplay. Maps have already been shared–Rocket Race and Pirates–that are catching on all around Xbox Live. I have made two or three videos of my best games thus far, and while I hate that there is no rewind, making mix tapes of my own destructive wake might never get old.

The new maps level the playing field a bit by taking away portals and exploitations that some earlier maps had for the advanced players. I really like the large levels with tons of new vehicles–my favorites are the Hornet (human helicopter) and the Brute Chopper (Brute badass motorcycle). Not a lot more is new besides equipment. The vehicles and weapons change, but they don’t give any great new flexibility to the game. It’s Halo 2 with beefed up physics and graphics.

A cool feature that gets overlooked is the armor personalization. By earning achievements in the campaign and collecting skulls, players can unlock different looks or armor–even a Ninja Gaiden throwback helmet–to make their character personalized and give opponents something else to fear besides that gamertag above the soldier running at them.

Conclusion

When taken together, Halo is a very complete game. Changes are well-planned and integrated into the existing formula well. It’s good that Bungie didn’t make any drastic changes; they didn’t need to do anything to what gamers already loved and admired. To keep their hardcore “Halo Nation” fans, they only needed to conclude the story without bursting any bubbles and correct the wrongs of Halo 2 multiplayer with some new weapon and equipment tweaks. To attract the mainstream, they made the lesser modes of the game easy to pick up and promoted the story. For all the hits that Halo takes for having a predictable or unoriginal plot, I still think that the storyline is part of what makes me love the series. Emotion and purpose are built into this final installment in every cutscene. Master Chief doesn’t just take orders but has a bit more personality and individual motive in this one. I was afraid after seeing the ads that he would just be worshiped on the battlefield as the Messiah, but luckily, he is still just the most badass soldier any of the NPCs have ever seen trying to find his way in a crazy alien-infested world. I’d like to know if Bungie knows where his character is going, but maybe at the end of this review I can share a couple of theories.

Halo 3 is an incredible advance in first-person shooters. It doesn’t completely revolutionize gameplay or invent a whole new kind of first-person shooter, but it IS Halo. It uses the same controls, formula and addictive multiplayer that established the Xbox and Bungie on the map. For your money, you probably won’t get a better pure first-person shooter on a console until 2008. Disclaimer: I have never played Half-Life, but I can stil safely say that this looks to be the first-person shooter to beat.

I don’t think the game is perfect. If I had to give it a number, I would say a 9/10. No game deserves a perfect score (in the perfect sense) unless it truly WOWs everyone that plays it and commands attention in the gaming universe. Some outlets use perfect scores simply as recommendations of games they pick as the best this year and worth buying, so they may give it a perfect score because it IS worth buying. In order to get a perfect score from me though, I would have to ask that the campaign hold up to what the commercials built–what I imagined either fairly or unfairly–a battle in which wave upon wave of Brute troops sweep onto a multiplayer-sized arena rather than encounter after encounter built into the linear path. I would have wanted to see the multiplayer really get crazy and differentiate itself with custom fighting upgrades like in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I would have wanted to see some incredibly groundbreaking gameplay feature that I just couldn’t get over for weeks. Hey, a 9 isn’t bad nonetheless.

For a shooter or an action game for that matter, Halo 3 gives you more variety of combat: tank, close quarters and long-range and keeps it interesting, so it is most definitely a must-play, but I think there is still room for improvement. Maybe that’s why they left it a little “ambiguous” in the end.

SPOILER BELOW

As for my predictions, I have two theories on where Master Chief ends up at the end of Legendary ending. No, neither of them is Master Chief vs. the Death Star.

Theory #1: The Covenant was right. Upon firing the Halo at the Ark, the ship was separated in the escape, and while the Arbiter and front of the ship returned to Earth, Master Chief and Cortana were transported to the Forerunners just as the Prophets predicted. The world below is the new home of the Forerunners, and Master Chief will find out who exactly the Forerunners are once and for all.

Theory #2: Master Chief gets transported back to the start of things–Reach, the planet where the Spartans were trained. On Reach is where the Covenant killed most of his Spartan kind, and maybe he will find some sort of solitude or resting place on its surface. I would assume that Reach was “glassed” after the attack, but perhaps there are still some remnants of life for him to find there.

Or maybe he is going to float around in space until a time when the people need him again…how Superman-esque.

Well, now, that is all I could have written about Halo 3. Now I’m heading back to bust some skulls in Lone Wolves…

On the verge of the 360 Elite, I have to say that it makes no sense for Microsoft to come out with this now. It would have been nice if they would have offered this system simultaneously with the launch of Gears, when I got my 360. The people that own a 360 right now are all loyal customers who purchased the system to play launch titles or in eager anticipation of Halo 3. It kind of screws us all over to have the Elite come out now offering a larger hard drive and HDMI output for $70 more. We now lose at least $170 dollars because resell value of the Xbox 360 Premium will probably drop to $300 when used ones flood the market as hardcore fans upgrade to Elites.

I, for one, am waiting and not purchasing one of the Elite systems. It doesn’t seem worth it for me since my HD doesn’t do 1080p anyway, and I can deal with the soft whurr of my 360 running at full speed. Maybe instead of offering a free transfer cable, Microsoft can offer a free trade in program where you can swap a full Premium system for a Elite while only paying $80. Think about it.

Just came off my first bender of playing Gears of War. I can safely say that playing a game on HD is much better than playing on any 480i input. The graphics, physics, and motion are incredible on the Xbox 360, but I have to say that it feels just like a graphically superior Xbox. I haven’t experienced the PS3 graphics yet for a comparison, but the Wii concept controls just feel so much more intuitive and advanced despite being a little graphically lacking. Only further play and game development will really show which direction gaming is going to explode in over the next year–whether graphics or control create the more addictive experience.

So who is going to win the next-gen war?

Personally, I think Sony has really done a horrible job this time around. The bad press is not being balanced by a dominant system or equally matched titles going into the holiday season. Xbox 360 has a pretty nice library established and all the Xbox zombies waiting for Halo 3 to drop. On the other side of things, PS3 has a meager little collection of titles with Resistance heading that up. Most say Gears of War matches if not topples that title anyway.

And what about the Wii? Nintendo was a pretty quiet player this last gen war–which was nice for me since I could pick up popular multi-platform titles for my Gamecube at half the price of my Xbox and PS2 buds after price drops. The Wii kind of brings Nintendo in to a unique market. Even though PS3 tries to copy them with the motion-sensing remote, I think I will like the Wii better for some types of gaming than even a system with superior graphics.

Just checking out the Madden controls gets me pretty pumped about the possibilities. I know I can never remember the button for spin or juke when I am running, but if all I have to do is stick out my arm…now we are talking.

I think the Wii and the 360 are going to win big, and I can’t really feel sorry for Sony. You did it to yourself, Stringer.