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.