A "Master"ful Performance?

In an effort to bring something new to the Village Tavern, we're actually going to make an attempt at reviewing something that came out recently. Anyway, here's my review of Halo 3.

Story: C-

Despite some rumors to the contrary, Halo 3 picks up pretty closely to where Halo 2's (drastically disappointing) ending left off. The game begins with the Master Chief bailing out of the forerunner ship that he was (apparently) on and crashing on Earth, conveniently near a party of marines. The story from then on is pretty similar to the Master Chief portion of the Halo 2 story – you fight your way through the Covenant on Earth (in this case Africa) for a little while, and then eventually end up on a forerunner installation trying to cause some giant explosions and prevent others. That's a little bit of a simplified version – in actuality, the depth of the story is somewhere between those of the first two games. While this game doesn't have a bad story, there were a few things I didn't like about it:

- A lot of the scenarios, and in some cases even level layouts, are really, really similar to stuff that happened in the other two games.

- The arbiter follows the Master Chief along throughout the campaign, and while it's kind of fun to see both fighting alongside each other, it essentially eliminates the arbiter's storyline, which was the most interesting aspect of Halo 2's story. Remember how the story for The Lord of the Rings was entertaining when the characters were all traveling together, but then got really interesting once Tolkein split them up? This is kind of the complete opposite of that.

- I'm not a huge fan of boss battles in shooters as a general rule, but they did a pretty good job with them in Halo 2, and the problem here is that a lot of this game's story seems to be building towards epic boss battles with Gravemind and the Prophet of Truth, neither of which actually end up so much happening. Seriously, how do you kill off the two primary villains in a video game without a boss battle? It's unheard of. I should mention that there is at least a battle with 343 Guilty Spark (the Monitor), which is nice since everyone who plays these games has wanted to kill that thing since 2/3rds of the way through the first game.

- Although the ending is not nearly as bad as the end of Halo 2, it's still a minor letdown, not to mention the fact that the final scene is a little bit confusing, both in regard to what actually happened and how.

Gameplay: A

This was probably both one of the biggest strengths of Halo and Halo 2's most severe weakness, so considering those facts, and the fact that this is what I consider the most important aspect, this is obviously the make-or-break point for this game. Well, I'm happy to report that it's mostly good news. In Halo, the Master Chief was quick and agile, much like Mike Williams at USC. Once Halo 2 started, it looked like the Chief had taken a year off and then trained with the Lions. You have to play the games back-to-back for it to be very noticeable, but the walk speed was substantially reduced in the second game for no apparent reason. While it doesn't seem like a big thing, it not only makes it take longer to walk to an objective in a level or multiplayer game, but also reduces the extent to which dodging and strategic movement is helpful, and basically makes the game a lot less fun. And while I'm not sure if the Chief is as fast in Halo 3 as he was in the first game, he's definitely quicker than in Halo 2.

Another significant improvement is the weaponry available, both in the quality/quantity of weapons available and in the weapon balance. While Halo 2 introduced dual wielding, they attempted to compensate for this by making every dual wielding weapon weak and useless as a stand-alone gun. This took a lot of the fun out of the multiplayer games in Halo 2, since in order to be successful you had to spend as much time looking for weapons and items as you did hunting down the other players. While I haven't played the multiplayer game a lot in Halo 3 yet, the only really useless gun in the game is the plasma pistol, and even that's more of a situational weapon than it is truly useless. The end result is a game which includes all of the added wrinkles from Halo 2, such as dual wielding, vehicle boarding, and melee weapons, but has fixed the major flaws from that game. So basically, you have the game that Halo 2 should have been.

Improvement Over Previous Games in Series/Genre: B+

This game doesn't do anything new that's Earth-shattering (beyond fixing the issues from Halo 2 mentioned earlier), but there are some nice new wrinkles:

- Several new weapons, including a machine gun that shoots spikes, mini-shotguns that can be dual wielded (weld?), and the hammer that Tartarus had at the end of the second game, which is called the “Gravity Hammer,” which is a little bit of a strange name since I thought that was how every hammer worked.

- You can pick up the turrets and walk around with them, although you move at Halo 2 speeds when you do. There are also a couple of other heavy weapons that work this way, like a missile launcher and a flamethrower. Which is always a nice touch.

- A few new vehicles, although with the exception of the Hornet (which is basically a helicopter), most of them aren't that great; the Ghost, Scorpion Tank, and Banshee are still the most fun vehicles in the game to use by a pretty good margin.

-There are now four kinds of grenades, including a fire grenade and a spike grenade, although this was probably the one addition I didn't really like, since you now can only carry 2 of each kind, and I honestly would rather just have more frag and plasma grenades.

- You now can pick up items, like deployable shields and active camo, and use them at strategic times during the game. While I don't think I've really figured out how to take full advantage of most of these, it's a very nice touch.

Graphics: A

While the graphics in this game don't blow everything else out of the water like the first Halo game did, it does look better from a real standpoint than either of the first two and, honestly, almost everything else that I've played. The Brutes actually now look vicious and more resemble the ancient vampire from season seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer than they do evil care bears or ewoks on steroids. I actually saw them and thought, “oh, THAT'S what those were supposed to look like." The flood also has been revamped and are basically a whole lot creepier. Between that and the fact that Cortana and Gravemind occasionally appear in hallucinations throughout the levels, the game seems to be going for more of a Resident Evil/horror movie type of feel. Watching someone play one of those games gave you the feeling that you were watching a great horror movie (which is the exact feeling you don't get while watching the Resident Evil movies) and although Halo 3 never really manages to do that, this is more because it's a space fantasy than because of any problems with the graphics.

Replayabilityness: Incomplete (tentatively C-)

Officially I'm giving this an “incomplete” since it's not really possible to judge how well a game that I've had for two weeks will hold up. But there are a few reasons that I'm not all that optimistic. The campaign is too short – I finished it on heroic the first time in about ten hours over two days, and for that matter I don't remember using the banshee or the rocket launcher even one time during that, which was a little bit of a downer. The other glaring flaw is that it was widely reported/advertised that this was finally going to be the shooter that had a four person co-op mode, and it most certainly does not, or more accurately, it only has this feature online, which is stupid, unnecessary, and completely defeats the purpose. I suppose it's better than nothing, and it will hopefully pave the way for other games that will do this (even though other genres have been doing it for a long time and it should have happened at least five years ago), but it still stands that Bungie had a chance to make possibly the most replayable game ever, and they dropped the ball by not including this feature as a split-screen option. In some ways, they fell into Microsoft's typical approach to customers, which is:

Step 1: Imagine who your ideal client/customer would be.
Step 2: Force as many people as possible into that mold by making sure that it's completely necessary in order to take full advantage of any products you make.

The thing is, I sometimes get the impression that Microsoft (and Sony, for that matter) are trying to kill split-screen gaming in favor of online action, which of course enables them to collect activation and subscription fees on a regular basis. And while it's nice to have that as an option, the fact of the matter is, people who don't mind paying monthly fees for their gaming, not being able to talk trash to someone's face that you're playing against, and spending the majority of your time playing against 12-to-15 year-olds that treat gaming as a full-time job are not big console gamers; these kind of people mostly play PC games. Console gamers for the most part are either kids or more casual gamers who don't really have the need, desire, or even ability to be a big part of an “online community.” Anyway, that's it for the soap box about that...and I will mention that I haven't played the multiplayer game – online or otherwise - very much, so if the multiplayer game is really good (and it seems like that's what they put more of their time into) and the game holds up well over time, this could easily move up to a B or even an A-.

Overall: B+

This is a good game, but I was hoping it would be better, and for various reasons (not all of which have to do with the game), I'd be surprised if I get nearly as into this one as I did Halo, or even Halo 2. I think the legacy of the Halo trilogy could be similar to that of the Matrix trilogy – an awesome, generation-defining first chapter followed by two sequels which were actually pretty good, but didn't quite live up to the promise of the original.


And now, so we can review TWO things that came out within the last two weeks (for the first time ever on the Village Tavern)....

Foo Fighters - Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace: A

Unsurprisingly, this album includes a mix of numerous hard rock songs, poppy, radio friendly songs, and a couple of nice acoustic numbers, in other words, everything you would expect from a Foo Fighters album at this stage in their career. What is a surprise, and a good one, is that it also includes a lot of things you wouldn't expect from a Foo Fighters album. While it's well-known at this point that Dave Grohl is a great drummer and songwriter, he's also become a very good guitar player and is starting to show it, with some legitimate guitar solos on a lot of the songs and an acoustic instrumental. They also mix their acoustic sound with hard rock on several songs, which I don't really remember them ever doing in the past. While there's some cases where they fall into the “play a nice acoustic song for a couple of minutes, then play something similar but rock it out” style of songwriting, there are also some cases (like “Let it Die”) where they're already doing this brilliantly. They've also gone to a much more classic rock sound, and while the influence of the grunge scene Grohl helped to develop isn't completely gone, this is an album that sounds more like Neil Young or Led Zeppelin than Nirvana or Pearl Jam, which in this case is a good thing.