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| Halo 3 'review' - by me a year ago. SUPER LONG | |
| Posted By: Cody Miller <speedruns@codymiller.org> | Date: 1/24/09 6:31 a.m. |
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I wrote this about a year ago. Not really a review, but more of an exploration of the game's essence. I promise it all goes somewhere, and that I actually start talking about the game. I’m sure you all know that guy who lets you know that he liked your favorite band before they got famous, and also lets you know that he doesn’t like them now because they got popular and sold out. I always found those people exceedingly annoying, but I can understand where they were coming from. Maybe you’ve been to their shows, not at the mega super dome, but in a small club in a small town with personality of its own. The very club that the band couldn’t get into before, and so they wrote a song about dancing in the streets instead. You can touch them, dive off their stage, which belonged to you as much as them, and smell their sweat as they play. Maybe you’ve even chatted with them after the show and been invited to their after party, where free weed and beer cemented their status as bona fide rock stars. You’ve seen them in four different cities, and they look delighted when in Cleveland the bassist asks you “Hey, weren’t you the guy who ripped his shirt off in Milwaukie and broke that girl’s glasses?” “Yes,” you tell him, “and I made out with her later.” The band changes, replacing a few members until eventually only the lead singer remains. They grow enough in popularity so that anybody has probably heard “Gay Bar” on the radio or MTV. It’s not the same, and the testosterone fueled disco rock about dancing, sex and machismo slowly morphs into new agey ballads about roughly the same topics. Maybe the music didn’t change, so much as the fact that each song no longer feels like it was written for you, a loyal Detroit fan. Enough about my experience with the Electric Six. Alexander Seropian started Bungie because he “wanted to be the man, rather than work for the man”. It was this rock and roll rebel spirit that led him to recruit Jason Jones, a fellow student at the University of Chicago, and create a fairly unique game called Pathways into Darkness. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of it, because while it was successful enough for them to actually get offices, it was released for the Macintosh only. That’s right, back in a time where gaming on the Mac was lampooned even more than it is now, Bungie created a game exclusively for it. By the time Marathon rolled around in 1994, Bungie has a certifiable hit on their hands, in relative terms of course. And so Mac gamers had a place to call home, and due to this emerging thing called the internet, they actually had the means to form a community. Being the son of a teacher in a tech savvy town, our household was graced with free dial up thanks to the city’s property taxes, and so I was somewhat privy to its development. It’s lucky my parents were so technologically inept, because nobody in their right mind now would let their ten year old son use the internet for hours unsupervised in this day and age. The Bungie team regularly interacted with their fans online, and entire communities sprung up devoted to this one gaming company. Like any good piece of rebellion, Bungie was steeped in lore. Nothing quite on the level of Zeppelin’s infamous mud shark, but just as strange and dripping with personality. At the center seemed to be Jason Jones, who regularly sported a bandana, which is in and of itself was representative of a kind of youthful defiance. Jason would frequently destroy his heart with Tijuana Mamma pickled sausages, worship a severed dog’s head, and wield ‘the shaft’. The games themselves had their mysteries, which were only perpetuated on alt.games.marathon. Not only that, but the games were ballsy, which only stands to reason coming from a company who seeks nothing less than world domination. Marathon dared to have a story and sophisticated level design for the time. Myth was a real time strategy game most unlike Warcraft or Command and Conquer. There were no resources to manage, and when one of your units dies, the game’s announcers speaks “Casualty” in a disgusted snarl, as if he is angry at you. That’s right, the loss of one unit was deemed critical enough to alert you, and the fact that you could name your units and have them cary over from mission to mission made losing even one a sad occasion. I got a tingle the first time ‘Mr. McGoo’, having made his way through the campaign from the beginning, had to sacrifice himself to Soulblighter so that ‘Marlow’ could throw Balor’s head into the great devoid and win the game. Casualty. You will be missed Mr. McGoo. Bungie was our indie band. Halo was going to be be big, and it was going to be for Mac. Steve Jobs himself unveiled the game at Macworld in 1999, and every Bungie fan came simultaneously, and if you were an Apple fan as well you came twice. It was going to be awesome, and it was going to be ours. How were we to know what was coming? Microsoft wanted to get into gaming, and needed a killer app for their xbox. And so, Microsoft dangled money in front of Bungie, and they took it. When Green Day signed with a major label, Billie Joe described the backlash, and downright hatred coming from their fans, at the abandonment of everything they stood for. How ironic, that Bungie would now be working for the man, instead of being the man as they had always planned. There was backlash, and it was heart wrenching. We’d been abandoned, not just to a developer like EA, but to Microsoft, who stood for everything that wasn’t Apple. It was irrational, but it didn’t hurt any less. To their credit, Bungie did a remarkable job of sticking to their principles, having laid out the terms securing their creative control over Halo to Microsoft. The team was small, and the game was still ballsy. It was huge, and fresh. Having forgotten about Bungie I stumbled upon Halo in a Cyber Café, and instead of playing Unreal Tournament with my friends, I played the single player campaign alone. I bought an xbox the next day. This was when Alexander Seropian got out, going off to form Wideload games, where he could once again be The Man. He said it was so that he could spend more time with his family, but I also believe he saw what was about to come. When a corporation like Microsoft owns a cultural phenomenon like Halo, you can bet they are going to do everything they can to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. A sequel was demanded, the team working on the game grew to over 80 people, and Microsoft had their hands in it every step of the way. Bungie created a game that wasn’t fun, and they wanted to redo it. Microsoft wanted a firm release date, and so Bungie had to scramble, finishing what they could, and released a game with a cliffhanger ending, which guaranteed yet another sequel. Jason Jones wasn’t wearing his bandana anymore. And so we’re at Halo 3, and Jason Jones is literally the only original member of Bungie left. In fact, most of the people working on Halo 3 came to work at Bungie after Halo shipped. As much as Bungie tried to maintain its own culture, its corporization and influx of new talent inevitably created an environment very different than having your offices next to a crack house and eating burritos everyday. You’re in the system whether you like it or not. The modern Bungie lore is not nearly as Mythic (heh). I think as we age we all settle down a bit, as evidenced by all the baby boomers who now wear ties to work, or have already gone off to gated retirement communities. Jason Jones is in his 30s now, and so perhaps some of that rebellion inside has been quelled. Here I am though, 23, still in my prime for anti-establishmentism. Go Ron Paul. And so, while Halo 3 is a good game, there is nothing spectacular or ballsy about it. It’s established, conventional, and on par with other shooters out that owe their existence to its predecessor. It’s not that Bungie’s games aren’t good anymore. Far from it, they are still top notch. It’s just that they are now safe. Halo 3 throws up invisible barriers to keep you on course, while the original permitted exploration anywhere. Yet Halo 3 was designed to be so accessible, that the designers feared a player straying from the path would get lost. Bungie made it known that they extensively play tested the game, looked at where people were getting stuck, and fixed it. They compiled data and spreadsheets from thousands of playthroughs, ranging from pro gamers, so soccer moms. Design by committee. The experience results in one being so crafted, that the freedom and spirit of the original is greatly lessened. Still, the core fun remains mostly in tact. Shooting bad guys. Driving Vehicles. This is of course a compliment of the highest degree. Halo 3 is still Halo at its core. Congratulations Halo, you were a good game. Sex has never been a large part of Bungie’s games. Their games prior to Oni were completely sexless. Bungie claimed that they were trying to create a realistic female character in Oni, but the fact remains that Konoko was created to be sexually appealing. The game over screens show her with torn clothing, and a chapter screen shows her fully nude (which is actually in my desktop picture rotation). Her proportions still weren’t entirely ‘average’, and one of her more useful moves involves grabbing an enemy by the head between her legs and throwing him, in a spectacular display of gymnastics. In fact, I couldn’t help but feel a bit strange doing it to Muro, what with he and Konoko being siblings and all. But, Konoko was an actual character and Bungie treated her like a real person. So congratulations Bungie West, you managed to make Konoko into not Lara Croft. Why did sex appear in Oni? Maybe it was because there was an actual female on the team, Lorraine Reyes, now Lorriane Mclees. Maybe it was because Oni was being developed for the PS2 as well, and was meant to have some sort of an appeal to its installed base. Regardless of the reason, I very much enjoyed hitting control to say ‘You got beat by a girl’ after downing an enemy. Come to think of it, that’s kind of dirty Bungie. Cortana was always fairly sexual in nature. It was pacified in Halo, and at the time people only got off to Cortana fan art, as her appearance in the game was rather neutral. Halo 2 changed that, giving her long hair, breasts, and hips, and by the prophets, she got some hips. Halo 3 became even more perverse, by not only further sexualizing her as a virtual being, but by relegating her to a damsel in distress position with violation and tentacle rape innuendos. It is actually some super disturbing freaky shit when you think about it. Miranda Keyes is killed [SPOILER] by what else, the needler, a weapon that shoots giant pink spikes. Figure that one out on your own for bonus points. The only allusion to the sexless Bungie of the old days is the Master Chief, being clad from head to toe in one giant chastity belt. This of course makes Cortana seem more incongruous, being the sole source of overt sexuality. It’s almost as if her sexuality is supposed to motivate us to rescue her. Joe Staten, writer at Bungie, has spoken of the pseudo love story between the Chief and Cotana, and how it culminates with her rescue. It all makes sense now doesn’t it? I’m sure the Master Chief was smoking a cig after that fade to black, with Cortana finally being inserted back into him. He’ll probably call his friends the day after to brag about it. So it’s curious, that in a medium which seeks to justify itself as art, the sex has regressed into a disaster of gender roles. Then again, the ‘art’ portion of videogames never came from their stories or characters to begin with. They came from grenade jumping out of the deprivation chamber, from watching thrall body parts fly about and remain on the bloody landscape, from beating that ninja on hard without using the mercury bow, and from the freedom on Silent Cartographer. Bungie wasn’t really revolutionary, so much as they were subtly but importantly innovative. If Morimoto is Leonardo Da Vinci, then Bungie is Artemisia Gentileschi. After Halo 2, I sort of felt as if Bungie was like Sam Rami after he directed Spiderman. I didn’t think Sam Rami can ever do a small movie again. Likewise, I didn’t think Bungie could ever do a small game ever again. Halo 3 was a big freaking game. A big freaking game that’s pretty good. Big things don't have small charm though. So what’s the point of this review? I guess the point is that the Electric Six still makes good music, just like Bungie still makes good games, and that I want a girlfriend that's just like Konoko.
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| Replies: |
| Halo 3 'review' - by me a year ago. SUPER LONG | Cody Miller | 1/24/09 6:31 a.m. |
| Re: Halo 3 'review' - by me a year ago. SUPER LONG | ThorsHammer | 1/24/09 8:28 a.m. |
| I disagree. *Halo 3 Spoilers* | RyanTheHeretic | 1/24/09 10:26 a.m. |
| Re: I disagree. *Halo 3 Spoilers* | Cody Miller | 1/24/09 3:20 p.m. |
| Re: I disagree. *Halo 3 Spoilers* | Jillybean | 1/24/09 3:26 p.m. |
| AUGH | Hawaiian Pig | 1/25/09 6:39 p.m. |
| But, but wait...! | stan | 1/24/09 4:27 p.m. |
| Re: Halo 3 'review' - by me a year ago. SUPER LONG | Matt | 1/24/09 9:03 p.m. |
| Re: Halo 3 'review' - by me a year ago. SUPER LONG | Cody Miller | 1/25/09 12:24 a.m. |
| Re: Halo 3 'review' - by me a year ago. SUPER LONG | Ibeechu | 1/25/09 9:04 a.m. |
| Re: Halo 3 'review' - by me a year ago. SUPER LONG | Matt | 1/25/09 9:59 a.m. |
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