Special Mention: Halo/Halo 2 - XBOX

I am not a Halo fan. Nothing against the series to be sure, but I find it to be no more or less than a very competent and derivative first-person shooter. That said, as someone interested in video game history attempting to chronicle the greatest games of the previous generation, I feel that I would be remiss not to take the time to mention and give due respect to this phenomenally popular series of games, and discuss its significance to gaming as a whole.

Halo should be recognized and applauded for so successfully doing everything it does. That is, the game itself really has no weaknesses. It looks and sounds great, plays extremely solidly, develops a compelling world in which to play in, and works well both as a single-person adventure and a multi-player combat experience. I was impressed when I first played the game at how well the game transitions from interior spaces to massive outdoor areas. But Halo does not tread any new ground. PC gamers were and are still playing far more fleshed out FPS games. The multiplayer experience isn’t much different from Goldeneye back on the N64. So while Halo is certainly superior to the vast majority of games by virtue of not having any significant flaws, how did it come to be such a wildly popular game?

Part of it are the qualities discussed before, but another significant part is luck. With the previous generation, video games became more popular than ever before. The audience was growing, thanks to an increase in titles designed for older audiences, as well as an increase in the power of consoles on the market. For a lot of people, the XBOX may have been their first console, or at least their first since they were children. Without exposure to Goldeneye, Tribes, Counterstrike, or Quake, Halo was revolutionary, delivering an experience they had never before so fully experienced. Launching alongside the release of the XBOX, Halo was a logical purchase for longtime gamers as well who were early adopters of Microsoft’s new console. So, in a bit of fortuitous luck, Halo ended up in a lot of people’s homes, and the multiplayer experience it offered bonded this generation of gamers, and became a sort of gold-standard for the console multiplayer experience, appealing on all sorts of levels.

Halo’s influence is also that of a sort of gateway game. Fans of the series looking for more of the same quality experience may open their horizons to other games on the market. A negative consequence as such has been a flurry of mediocre shooters on all platforms, but Halo keeps people interested in games, and gets them to the video game store. Halo deserves credit for being an accessible game that succeeds on all levels, and continues to breathe life into the medium I (and I am assuming, you) so dearly adore. It’s the blockbuster film that funds the movie studios and lets them take risks on smaller indie flicks, if I may be allowed to make such an analogy.

So I salute you, Halo and Bungie and Microsoft for doing good for the video game community. But no, I still don’t want to preorder Halo 3. Thanks for asking, though.

6. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker – GCN

What a shame it is that this entry into the long-running and extremely popular Zelda franchise will almost certainly be remembered primarily for the controversy surrounding its development. Nintendo made a stylistic decision for this 2003 release, abandoning the “realistic” look developed for the series on the Nintendo 64 in favor of a new, “cel-shaded” approach. The result was a more abstract and dynamic graphical setting that awed critics. An extremely vocal portion of the gaming community labeled the look as “kiddy” and “cartoony,” longing for the “mature” Link they had grown accustomed to in the Ocarina of Time. Clearly I am a fan of the look, though I do not believe the tastes of those who were and are not fans of cel-shading are without validity. Now, Nintendo is working to please as many people as they can, returning to a “realistic” approach with 2006’s “Twilight Princess”, while sticking with the cel-shading for Zelda’s first appearance on the Nintendo DS.

So here I am, over a paragraph into this summary, guilty of perpetuating what made me so upset about the release of this game in the first place: the dialogue was about the look of the game, and not about the game itself. The game itself, since we’ve finally reached this point, is absolutely stellar. The Zelda franchise is perhaps without equal when it comes to a series that is so consistently excellent with each and every outing. Wind Waker adheres strongly to the well established series formula, with some notable diversions.

Instead of a large land mass navigable by foot and horse, the world of the game is a massive ocean, populated by islands of all sizes. Travel is done by boat, opening up a wealth of new puzzle and quest options, while consequently adding a degree of tedium to the game. Such a large land mass makes exploration difficult, and a lot of the players’ time is spent simply sailing into the blue. With a larger world comes more freedom to explore, however, and this game is packed with more secret rooms, quests, and little nooks to explore than any other Zelda game. Wind Waker has fewer dungeons than fans of the series may be used to, but I found these dungeons to be both larger and more difficult than other entries of the series; a real treat for longtime veterans of the franchise.

Like any good adventure game, the fun of Wind Waker is in the players own discovery, so I feel I would be remiss to speak much more of the game here. The reason it made it to the list, and quite highly, is twofold. One, to remind all that this game is more than its cartoony surface. And two, to emphasize the unique quality of this series as a whole. Without major changes to a well established formula, this was still the sixth best game I played during all of the previous generation. If that doesn’t get your triforce glowing, I don’t know what will.