Ironically, a role-playing game inspired me to write this entry.  I won’t tackle it until Dragon Age is an afterthought, but the reviews suggest the soon-to-be-legendary Mass Effect 2 is akin to “Borderlands, this is how you do a role-playing shooter.”  However, I had an allergic reaction to one review snippet:

Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats – Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.

Four years since Gears of War popularized cover mechanics, and as good as Uncharted 2 worked the flavor, I’m already sick of hiding behind walls.

It’s been a decade since Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena were the creative heights of twitch shooting.  Since then, developers have gone out of their way to prevent pinball wizards from permeating the new pay-to-play shooter culture of X-Box Live and beyond.

I’ve come to tolerate it.  Twitch shooters didn’t die because they were an inferior format; the business of gaming changed.  My problem?  We’re still hailing and deriding “Doom clones” that embodied nothing Doom and its successors were about.

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Author’s Note: This is one entry in a series highlighting the “greatest” games of all-time.  This is not a “best” games list. “Quality” is only part of the story.  This list exists to recognize the impact and legacy of selected video games. It is written from the perspective of a North American gamer who has witnessed the North American reception to the business of video games.  Thus, Pro Evolution Soccer will not make the list because soccer is just football without cage fighting.  Mother 3 will not be featured because in the States, Mother 3 is a porno.  And despite the injustice in a medium where Charlie’s Angels and Big Rigs were sold in the name of the dollar, Cave Story and Counter-Strike are disqualified because they weren’t intended as commercial releases.  For that reason. I do not care if Game X was totally better than Game Y.  I do not care if your friends jerked to Game Z until four in the morning.  Don’t like a selection?  Argue it on the criteria I’ve established.  We good?  Good.

Author’s Note, Part 2: This was originally intended to be a sliver of a year-end “Games of the Decade” entry.  But given my criteria, it proved impossible.  Go ahead: Argue that the three-month-old Uncharted 2: Among Thieves belongs on a list designed to highlight video games that changed the industry for years down the road.

Halo: Combat Evolved
X-Box (Later Ported to PC)
Developed: Bungie Studios
Published: Microsoft Game Studios
Released: November 15, 2001

It’s a dose of polarization: Halo is gaming’s modern-day, love-hate affair.  If Doom or Unreal Tournament is your fancy, you hate it.  You hate it because it’s driving the most shooter-capable platform to irrelevance.  You hate it because it ripped Starsiege: Tribes’ blueprint and turned the dial to half-speed.  You hate it because college campuses are now colonies for half-gamer-half-drunk adults who think they’re the baddest men in competitive gaming.

That hate is your concession: Halo: Combat Evolved is one of the most important video games in the medium’s history and one of the all-time greats. It was the perfect game for the right system and the right audience at the right time.  And whether you think the industry is better or worse off, it changed a whole lot.

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I’m not keen on the Halo love story, either.  It’s a good franchise with great marketing, the first console shooter with passable controls.  Of course, being the best shooter on a console is like bragging you live in the nice part of the ghetto.

If you’re annoyed Microsoft took an expansion pack and priced it for sixty dollars, fine.  If you’re annoyed the game still moved two million units on day one, whatever.  But please, stop manifesting your hatred for Halo by railing against its single player component.

Ben Kuchera of Ars Technica was critical of the game, namely on price point.  On the side, in a development that shouldn’t surprise anyone:

Does anyone play Halo to wander around an empty city, searching for items to move the story forward? Of course not, but the hub concept is used in Halo 3: ODST, and while it doesn’t add to the game, it does give the campaign an extra hour or so. That’s great, because if players weren’t forced to root around the city to find out where to go next or look for audio files that tell a side story, the campaign mode from the game would be around four hours long. In fact, on normal mode a friend and I beat the game in around four hours, meaning that without the tacked-on hub concept there would have only been around three hours of play time.

We’re on the fourth Halo game and people still complain about the single-player?  What’s the line about “Fool me once, shame on you”?  News-flash: Nobody plays Halo for the single-player.  The 600,000 people currently on Bungie.net validate that.  Purchasing Halo and complaining about single-player is like buying Wii Fit Plus and complaining the competitive play sucks.

If anyone is responsible for an industry where Bungie can lay low on single-player, it wasn’t the console shooter.  As great a party game Goldeneye was, it had a massive single-player component.  It was the near-simultaneous launch of Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Arena, shortly followed by Counter-Strike.  You don’t have to like Halo, but if you want to complain about its sub-par campaigns, start with the PC shooters that encouraged them.

Two years back, I huddled some friends for fun with the X-Box 360 port of Doom, a game I consider the cream of the medium.  Their experience with shooters was mostly Halo, currently fighting a tight battle with Call of Duty for “face of the genre”.  The words most consistent in coming out of their mouths: “This game is so fast.”  Having first played the Doom series when I was eight, I could only think “No, this game is not fast.  Halo is slow.”

Sunday’s entry was the story of a franchise (Team Fortress) earning accessibility by not only sacrificing gameplay, but the element of speed.  As other genres satiate the best players by becoming faster, adding more notes, and throwing more bullets at the player, what the hell happened to the first-person shooter?

No wonder pro gaming can’t get off its ass in the United States.  This country has a gun fetish.  It loves war.  Today, the most popular shooters simulate war.  War requires teamwork.  And guess what?  Teamwork doesn’t sell tickets.  Superheroes do.  And the pace of games like Halo have become Kryptonite for world-class gamers.

I am a carry-over from an era where Doom said “cover is for pussies”.  That evolved into Quake and Unreal Tournament, half-shooter, half-gymnastics simulation.  Those evasive maneuvers have been replaced by “get behind the wall, you noob!”

If you want to blame any one game for this, the answer is beautifully ironic.  It was Doom 3.

Yeah, Halo was the coming-out party for the console shooter, but ID Software is the undisputed father of the genre.  Set in code, they declared the first-person shooter a genre where reloading weapons was for bitches, that dozens of beasts would simultaneously fail to cut you down.  And then Doom 3, thanks to the Duct Tape Reduction Act of 2184, was pure darkness chugging at eight frames a second.

So much for “cover is for pussies”.  Maybe I should go order Painkiller.  I’ll be back later.

This week’s episode:
“Things Get Explosive”
(If you’re from outside the States, you can always torrent the episode. Unfortunately, the World Cyber Games is throwing every episode onto Hulu, presumably to keep the international audience from laughing at the game selection.)

Previous Episode Guides:
“Move it or Lose It”
“Shut up and Drive”
“Kicking and Screaming”
“Are You Ready to Rock?”

3:09 – Chelsea: “This morning, for the real-life challenge, we did it a little different this time. Immediately, we were blindfolded.”
3:20 – Swoozie: “We were split up randomly into our groups, in the car I had no idea who was sitting next to me, I had no idea who was driving…it was pretty scary.”
3:47 – Hannah: “This week’s game is Halo 3.” Now I can see why they blindfolded the contestants.

4:00 – Joel: “Halo 3 is the biggest-selling X-Box 360 title of all-time. In Halo, players compete as teams using futuristic weapons to get more kills than their opponents.” Here’s my honest take on Halo: It is the perennial division leader in the AFC West of video game genres, the console first-person shooter. Two problems:
1) If you live outside the States and don’t get the football reference, relax: By nature of being someone other than an American, you don’t give a shit about Halo, anyway.
2) It only stands out because it’s not direct competition for Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, and dozens of quality PC shooters.
It’s no killer app, but it’s certainly a decent shooter.  Tell you right now though, that’s much more credit than the PC crowd is prepared to give it.

4:33 – Amy: “All we knew was we were playing paintball. And then I see who’s with me, and it’s Chelsea, Ciji, and Mark, and my initial reaction was, ‘Oh my God, all three girls on paintball.’” Alright already, I get the message of the show: Girls suck at everything they do.

5:34 – Dante: “A cup, really?” Heheh, I’ll skip the easy joke.

5:45 - Jamal: “The girls are going to have issues, and normally girls don’t get along together when they’re trying to work together.” Alright, new drinking game: Whenever a contestant bashes on the fairer sex, take a drink. If it’s one of the girls, chug.

6:39 – Robert: “You know, the funny thing is, I actually did what I do in Halo, I tend to rush a lot.”
6:49 – And that, my friends, is why they call this the real-life challenge. Rushing only works in real life if you’re the Germans, and they’re the French.

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