When Halo was first announced (now so many years ago) I was ecstatic. Why? Because one of my all-time favorite game development companies, Bungie, the guys who gave us the wicked-great Myth II: Soulblighter, was working on what promised to be the mother of all space-based, first-person shooter (FPS) games! And it looked amazing. Every advance screenshot was a marvel, every video clip was filled with flawless animation, brilliant audio, and provided a veritable feast for the senses. I was practically beside myself as I followed the development of the game.
Then Microsoft bought the developers out and screwed PC users completely. Hard. With a bottle. All of a sudden, what was going to be the best PC game of the year had become X-Box only. I would have to buy a console if I wanted to play it. I used to play console games when I was much younger. Then I got a PC and said goodbye to low resolution graphics displayed on a fickle television; I bid farewell to the awful and limiting controllers that come with consoles; and I never looked back. I wasn't about to buy an X-Box just to play Halo, no matter how good it was.
I've put up with more Microsoft crap over the years than any customer should have to, and this was the last straw. I vowed not to buy the game myself, even if it came out on the PC. I decided to vote with my dollars. It's not like I'm stupid enough to think Microsoft would even notice, but it was a matter of principle. Maybe if enough PC gamers made a fuss about it they wouldn't screw us again (yeah, right).
And as if the initial screwing weren't bad enough, the PC version of the game took forever to port. The X-Box version of the game was released in November of 2001, whereas the PC version wasn't released until nearly two years later in September of 2003. Not only did Microsoft shaft all of Bungie's fans on the PC by making Halo an X-Box exclusive, they then left us all hanging for an additional two years!
But hey, at least the developers had plenty of time to tune the game for the PC, right? Surely they polished it to a high sheen, taking full advantage of the PC's greater capabilities, right? No doubt they worked hard to make it into something truly amazing on the PC, yes?
Nope. The greatest evidence that the developers porting Halo did a crappy job is that it runs worse than games far newer and better looking, despite having years to optimize and tune the game engine! I can't even enable anti-aliasing (AA) when playing the Halo because apparently the AA modes on my NVIDIA card are somehow incompatible with it. This wouldn't be such a problem if the game ran worth a darn, but it's the worst performing game I've seen in years.
Seriously, the best way to state the point is to provide a stark contrast. I can't play Halo at any resolution higher than 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp or else the frame rate bogs down into the single digits any time a serious firefight erupts. And I can't enable AA to make it look better. I can enable anisotropic filtering (AF), but this causes odd, spiky visual artifacts.
In contrast, I can play the recently released, and far more visually stunning, DOOM 3 (D3) in all its glory at 1600 x 1200 x 32 bpp with 2xQ AA and 8x AF enabled and still get much better performance than with Halo! For the record, I've got an Athlon XP 3000+ CPU, 2 GB of physical RAM, and a BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC video card. Other games from Halo's time frame scream on my system. But Halo on the PC is the worst job of coding I have seen in years. It's pathetically bad.
That's simply insane. I'm really glad I didn't pay for the game. It would have ticked me off to no end to spend money on such shoddy coding. It's almost as if the developers took the X-Box code, made it run on the PC, and then spent a few years trying to figure out how to make it run like crap on even next generation hardware! I honestly don't understand how the game could possibly have been released in such a terrible state.
If one can get past the performance woes, however, then the visuals aren't bad. It's clear that Halo must easily have been the best looking game ever when it was originally released. But today, several years later, it merely holds its own with some of the games on the market. D3, for example, looks much better, more realistic, and runs far better to boot. Halo falls far short of the cutting edge these days, but it does still look good enough to provide a fun experience—that is, when the frame rate isn't plunging into the toilet or the jaggies aren't threatening to rip my eyes from their sockets.
The animation is fluid and very well done, the texture work is nice, and I'd have to say that the special effects are pretty amazing considering how old the game is. I really like the incoming fire from enemy tanks, the plasma grenade effects, the cloaking effect, etc. If only the game didn't run like crap I would have come away from it with a much better impression of its visuals.
The audio is both good and frustrating. On the one hand I positively love the music, and the sound effects are very well done. All of the weapon firing sounds, the screech of the Covenant aircraft, the rumble of the marine tanks, etc. are all first rate. Better still, the voice work for all the major actors is well done. One truly feels for Captain Keyes as he drives The Pillar of Autumn on her last voyage, even more so during the last time one sees him, in no small part because of the acting.
But then one can't help running into the ridiculous gibberish spewed by the bulk of the Covenant. It's as if the developers went to the trouble of trying to create a meaningful, interesting, fictional world, and were then told by some jackass that many of the "fearsome enemies" have to sound like comic relief from an animated Disney film. Their ridiculous voices remind me of the Jawas of the Star Wars fame, but while it works in Star Wars it simply prevents me from taking the Covenant seriously in Halo.
At least the audio is uniformly well implemented. I never experienced any stuttering or other sound problems. The music was always playing beautifully and smoothly no matter how jerky the frame rate was. If only they hadn't gone with such stupid sounds for the Covenant grunts the audio would have fit the game perfectly.
The interface of Halo deserves a fair bit of praise. Not only does the game support the typical control customization stuff, it has built-in support for any DirectInput enabled game pad. That's probably not surprising, given that the game was published by Microsoft for a console, but it's still impressive. I also like the clear and functional default control assignments. It took me a while to acclimate to the right mouse button for throwing grenades, but once I got the hang of it I found it very effective. It all works and it works well, just as it should.
The game mechanics are relatively simplistic, but they work pretty well with a couple of notable exceptions. The mechanics of the shield are especially interesting. I'm not used to being able to sustain such direct fire in FPS games without losing health; the way the shield drains and the presence of the replenishment delay both lend an interesting twist to the whole thing. The movement options are far less innovative, insofar as they lack both a prone position and the ability to sprint.
The control scheme for vehicles is sadly unusual, for it leverages the direction the player is facing to control the turning of the vehicle. I'm far more accustomed to having to use the movement controls to change direction when using vehicles in other games, so much so that Halo really threw me for a loop at first. Worse, after using the system for a while I have to conclude that it's not nearly as functional. It works pretty nicely for the Warthog and other ground vehicles, but it doesn't work for beans with the aircraft.
Because the guns fire in the direction the player is looking, and because any acceleration will always be in the same direction, the player is stuck unable to strafe given the effects of gravity. I had an awful time in several of the Banshee sequences, so much so that I dreaded them every time I had to hop into one of those flying deathtraps. The best thing I can say about them is that they were usually over pretty quickly, but that's not a compliment for the game mechanics.
My perennial complaint applies as well: there is no quick-save option. Like so many other console games, Halo uses a checkpoint-based save system. To its credit, I must admit that the checkpoints are frequent and well-chosen enough that I really don't mind it too much. I hate the lack of a quick save function in games, but I do have to admit, albeit grudgingly, that Halo does such a good job with its checkpoints that I've only been bothered by the omission a couple of times. Halo handles the lack of save options as well as any other game I've played, so my complaint isn't too serious.
Halo's story isn't exactly complicated, but it does serve to propel the game forward. The war is typical science-fiction fodder, the sort of thing that has been done to death. But the addition of the ring, seemingly ripped straight from Larry Niven's Ringworld, makes for an interesting setting, as does the resulting conflict between the Covenant and the Flood. I don't think it's fair to say there's a substantive plot "twist" anywhere in there—or at least not one that wasn't painfully obvious ahead of time—but there are some interesting bits. If you're a gamer who needs a deep and engrossing story Halo isn't going to satisfy, but for all others it will provide the proper context for the action, which is clearly the game's focus anyway.
In terms of its content Halo is clearly a mixed bag. On the one hand it features a small but interesting arsenal of weapons, a small but fun bestiary, some entertaining vehicles, and a fair number of levels, some of which are pretty large. Yet on the other hand many of the environments are quite repetitive, the balance of ammunition pretty much requires the player to use lots of Covenant weapons, the vehicles play a relatively minor role in the game, a couple of the weapons could really use some tweaking, and the whole game ends up being far too short.
To get this off my chest right from the outset, I like the UNSC M6D pistol and absolutely love the M90 shotgun. The M6D is the most useful pistol I've ever seen in a video game. It packs a decent punch and has a nifty scope for sniping out to medium range. And the shotgun is even more fun, largely because of its unmatched killing power up close. But as much as I like them both they end up being underused in the game, the pistol because it just doesn't fire fast enough or have the clip size to go the distance and the shotgun because it runs out of ammunition far too often. I found myself having to use Covenant weaponry more often than not, simply because I couldn't find enough ammunition to keep the UNSC weapons stocked.
The UNSC ground vehicles are also fun. The Warthog is fabulous and the level that introduced the Scorpion tank was a non-stop carnage-fest that I shan't forget anytime soon. I played around with a few of the Covenant vehicles as well, as I'm sure most players do, but it was probably the Warthog that was the biggest kick. The only thing I really missed, aside from Battlefield 1942's superior control scheme, was the ability to switch from one position in a vehicle to another without getting out and getting back in from another angle.
The artificial intelligence (AI) is also decent. The enemies dodge effectively and even seek cover when damaged. The grunts are incredibly stupid, but maybe that's to be expected from creatures that squeak in such an idiotic cartoon fashion. I particularly like the way the AI uses grenades effectively, mans gun emplacements if available, and will commandeer vehicles. It doesn't quite hold up to the standards set recently by Far Cry, but it's pretty good nevertheless.
In the minus column, however, the game is scandalously short. It took me less than eight hours from start to finish, and I was pretty thorough on my way through it. Also in the minus column, a number of the environments are quite repetitive. Making my way through the control room level was dull enough, but then having to go through it a second time was even worse.
The Forerunners have an irritating propensity for building huge facilities that consist of the same sort of room over and over with strangely convenient glowing arrows on the floor. I guess maybe they get attacked often enough that they wanted to make sure their enemies could find their way through the mind-numbing sections of their architecture? All I know is that they really need to work on their floor plans.
The game also has some poorly designed sequences. I don't mind a challenge, but I despise it when developers stick the player in the middle of hell just because they can. One particular sequence required me to use a Banshee to make it down into a tunnel and toward a third generator which needed to be disabled. The problem was that I had two enemy banshees on my tail, anti-aircraft fire, a tank shooting up at me from down below, and a dozen or so infantry all unloading in my direction.
And as if that weren't bad enough, if by some miracle I could survive to make it into the tunnel there were two bad guys at the very bottom with rocket launchers and dead-eye aim. On the rare occasion I made it to the tunnel entrance they would nail me with a single round as I turned the corner. I'll bet I played that sequence at least forty times until I had some weird dumb luck that let me get past it. It wasn't the only such sequence, but it was the most memorable.
Then there was the tremendously annoying sequence near the very end, one that essentially amounts to getting past one nasty jumping puzzle three times in order to blow up the Pillar of Autumn. I could reliably jump onto the first "barrel", the second, and onto the manifold thingies, but I could not for the life of me reliably hit the catwalk above it. That wouldn't have been so bad were failure not typically punished with falling all the way to the floor and having a serious near-death experience from the drop. It would have been nice to have another checkpoint or two in that sequence, say, after the player hit each switch.
Suffice it to say that the game has some highlights and some low points. The stuff it does feature is pretty neat, but the game is clearly a bit light compared to other games in terms of its total content. None of its flaws prevent it from being fun; it's just that it could have been better.
Fortunately, the multi-player aspect of Halo does much to give it some staying power. The PC version ships with a half a dozen new maps and includes a couple of weapons that weren't available for use in the single-player campaign. More important than mere additions, however, is the fact that the gameplay turns out to be a rocking good time. I'm not sure what it is about maps like Blood Gulch, but they are so simple and playable that I don't easily tire of them. I've played a mere few dozen games on-line thus far, but I can tell I'm going to be playing quite a few more before it gets old.
Arguably, the coolest feature of the multi-player game is the Warthog, if you can find teammates with a clue. I've only been on one Warthog crew to date that clearly knew what it was doing, but it was a great experience. Our driver was tearing up the terrain while the passenger was making the whole shooting-while-moving thing look far too easy. Me, I wasn't doing such a great job as gunner, but I was taking my fair share of names. A well-placed rocket finally brought us all down but not before we assisted in a solid flag capture.
Because I'm still relatively new to the multi-player aspect I don't know what third-party maps or mods might be available, but I honestly don't care much. The multi-player aspect of Halo is delightful with just the stock content. It includes some nice maps and a number of genuinely fun game modes. To be clear, I don't think this makes up for the preposterously short single-player aspect, but it does represent a separate bit of value that stands well on its own.
So what's the final word? Despite all its problems Halo is a fun game. The first few levels were so engrossing that I played for several hours without even noticing the passage of time. I just suddenly looked up and found it was nearly two in the morning. That's a sure sign of gaming goodness! But then near the end I found myself growing tired of the same stuff. It's not the greatest game out there, and it's not the most engrossing game I've ever played, but it's good.
I could recommend the game pretty broadly were it not for a couple of things, first among which being Microsoft's reprehensible X-Box exclusive treatment. I know they technically have every right to do with it as they want because it's their property. But that doesn't mean I have to like it when a vendor ties a great game to their console, solely for the purpose of forcing gamers to buy their hardware. If you want to make great games, Microsoft, then make great games; if you want to make great consoles, then make great consoles; but don't shaft your PC customers in the process. Whatever happened to giving consumers choices?
Another big caveat, of course, is the single-digit's worth of hours of playing time the single-player campaign includes. If you're looking for a good value in single-player gaming, Halo simply isn't it—unless you can pick up a copy for just a few bucks or maybe beg, borrow, or trade from/with a friend. And finally, you shouldn't even consider Halo unless you've got a bleeding edge system, and even then you should be prepared for crappy performance.
Thus, in closing, because of my take on the publishing situation I don't recommend that any PC gamer buy Halo. I urge you to protest Microsoft's proprietary approach, and the insanely shoddy porting, in the only way you can. But if you can acquire a copy super cheap (I wouldn't suggest paying more than about $10), then give it a try. Halo is still fun, marketplace politics aside. I just wish that it ran worth a darn, was a bit longer lasting, and hadn't been used to screw PC users over.
09/23/2004