Halo, or how those things happen
Posted on January 31, 2003 @ 01:37 in Games
Quite a while ago some rumors surfaced about an exciting new game in the making, called Halo. Microsoft announced its new gaming console, the Xbox, and bought game developer Bungie and Halo was to become one the launch titles for the Xbox. The console was launched, the critics raved about Halo, I lusted after the game, but the Xbox just was too expensive, at least for the practical me, who reasoned that there wasn't a whole lot of things the console could do except playing games.
I was surprised when I spotted the novel The Fall of Reach, "The official prequel to the award-wining Xbox game" in the sci-fi section of the local bookshop about a month ago. I had no idea that Halo had become something of a franchise with other products being sold besides the computer game itself, but I just had to buy it, right? Reading the novel would at least give me some surrogate Halo experience. (I wouldn't be too surprised though to see some more franchising of the Halo brand, especially when Halo 2 comes out, as the game seems to have quite a bit of brand recognition.)
Reading The Fall of Reach was something of a guilty pleasure. You know the book is a shameless marketing ploy, trying to hitch a ride on and/or boost the popularity of the original computer game. It's a derivative and derivatives really can't be as good as the original -- or maybe that's just too normative an idea lodged in my brain. What didn't help either is that Bungie, Halo and this book are part of the big money-hovering Microsoft monolith. And Microsoft isn't exactly a company you immediately equate with fun. MS is about work and getting things done, writing documents and doing spreadsheets and even the saccharine Windows XP look feels like fake cheerfulness, like two-tone paint on a family sedan. This seriousness seems mirrored in the Xbox console. The Xbox is a big, black, serious-looking machine with serious specs, so surely you must do some serious playing on it. "Xbox" is serious name, whereas "PlayStation" immediately tickles my funny bone as well as my console thumbs. What helps of course is that Sony makes other fun consumer devices, like Walkmans and Aibos, carefully building their 'high quality fun' brand experience.
The narrative backdrop for a game is often not more than one or two pages in the manual and functions as a minimal (and sometimes laughable) conceptual framework for the game. Having a whole novel as the narrative backdrop for a game is fairly unusual, but not entirely unprecedented. Regardless, I was pleasantly surprised by the novel itself. The storyline of The Fall of Reach is rather straightforward, trying to push but not exceed the limits that the game sets. There's a lot of detail about the Halo universe, the different technologies, the aliens and the battles fought. On the one hand it's exactly what you want to read about, while on the other hand the whole set-up of two opposing forces and their radically different technologies and cultures -- especially the human military -- feels a bit strained, as if the author had to limit himself in his descriptions and ideas. Still, the author has done a great job weaving personal stories and idiosyncracies into the tapestry of the Halo universe. It's clear though from the storylines of ensign Lovell, the young not-yet-commander Keyes and the young dr. Halsey, that given some imaginative elbow room the author can write very compellingly. Eric Nylund is that author and his name rang vaguely familiar to me, until I realized that at several occasions I'd actually considered buying some of his other novels, Crimson Skies and Signal to Noise. Those novels are now at the top of my to-buy list and that is praise for The Fall of Reach. I enjoyed The Fall of Reach as a novel even though when I read it I had neither an Xbox nor had I ever played Halo.
You can probably guess what happened next... I even dropped a clue yesterday. Microsoft had lowered the price of the Xbox to 259 euro before christmas and the local electronics superstore had a special 299 euro offer on the Xbox, three games (JetSet Radio Future, Sega GT 2002 and of course Halo!) plus the dvd playback kit. So between christmas and new year and after an optimistic assessment of the money I would still receive from my research expense account, I succumbed and bought me a Xbox. I must say it was a bit of a cathartic moment, buying a machine that will do nothing but play games and dvd's. Until now I've always played computer games on computers and I could justify buying a new computer or some components with the many useful tasks they can perform besides playing games. So I arrived home giddy as a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. Actually, I was kind of surprised by the size of the Xbox... not nearly as big as it was made out to be, probably about two-thirds the size of my VCR. Setting up was a snap, nothing to say about that really.
The reviews were right. Halo is one fantastic game. Of course, if I wanted to I could jot down some minor complaints, but that's really besides the point: everything's just right about Halo. I've never played a game whose controls were so intuitive and well balanced that even the aiming is a pleasure (which is something where a lot of games fall down). Pacing, checkpoints, cut movies, enemy AI, graphics and music, it just all comes together in an amazing and absorbing way. I'm pleased to say I've completed Halo -- on *cough* Easy level. Right now I'm replaying on Normal level and I'm impressed again how the game teaches you to use new tactics to defeat the now stronger enemies that previously could be dealt with by brute force and just absorbing their hits.
Of course, in the end, the whole exercise is merely a justification for continuing to buy and read Edge magazine, the only, truly worthwhile games magazine on the planet.
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