That said, I totally agree. It’s not clear to me why people insist on comparing Halo to Bioshock. They are completely different experiences, even some moron wants to put “shooter” on both boxes.
]]>Halo has increasingly focused on the multiplayer experience, so much so that the current campaign mode is more of a tutorial and demo of what you can do in Halo. It’s a very well-balanced demo and it stretches you through a variety of interesting wide-open scenarios (and thanks to the flying, they are *very* wide open), but the long-term viability of the game is in its multiplayer. In the long run, its competitor is Team Fortress. When I think about “oh sh*t” moments in the Halo games, they’re moments in -gameplay-, like sneaking up near a collection of grunts and sticking a plasma grenade on one of them to see the ensuing wackiness. Or odd moments like in Halo 3′s level where you team up with gravemind, and I start frantically searching the corpses for UNSC weapons because I *really* don’t want to be using a plasma rifle if my guess as to how the story is going to progress comes true.
Conversely, Bioshock is all about the narrative elements, and the “oh sh*t” moments I have from the game are all plot twists or story-oriented. Things like Fort Frolic. This isn’t bad – the narrative is, within the confines of the genre, impressive – and the use of the FPS to express certain experiences more as a totality is also good (so, for example, the details on some of Cohen’s sculptures or the moment you realize that the smugglers are smuggling *Bibles* into Rapture). That I’d argue is it’s big improvement of SS2, and like Halo 3 it’s an evolutionary change.
I think in the long run, we’re going to find that Halo 3 is the one that people still keep playing because it’s a better -game-. Bioshock does have a better story, and many parts of it are original for the genre, but Halo’s the excel of the Xbox world – it’s the game everyone has so they can all blow each other up.
]]>I know Halo 2 got a bad wrap for its cliff-hanger ending, but I don’t think the universal complaints really hold up for the overall narrative.
]]>I just bought Halo 2. I don’t know if I’ll play the single player game or not, though. Hard to decide.
Best wishes!
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