Comments on: It's Finished

By: psu

psu — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:59:41 +0000

Sometimes it amazes me what people can type into a tiny little text area in the browser.

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.

By: Mike Collins

Mike Collins — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:19:27 +0000

Heh; I’be been t’inking about this a bit since I made the mistake of buying an Xbox 360, and I think it’s worth noting that both of these games have a very definite lineage to two parallel games in ’94: Marathon (for Halo) and System Shock. It’s also worth noting that the authors o these games have obviously made evolutionary improvements in each generation, but what’s happened is that they’ve decided to go in different directions.

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.

By: psu

psu — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:33:55 +0000

Just as a note of reference: tilt understands.

By: psu

psu — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:11:56 +0000

I liked the single player in Halo 2 a lot, and the writing was also more enjoyable because the game presented a whole new line of exposition that doesn’t really exist in Halo 1 and 3.

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.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:03:48 +0000

Glad to hear someone criticising the poor quality of the story but simultaneously praising the strengths of the Halo franchise… It is a very refined set of interface mechanics, and the audio design in the Halo games has been top notch. But we really could do much better with story than we have been doing. Still, the audience for this game (which I am not really a part of) will probably enjoy a simple sci-fi narrative, and that is actually more important than it being a “good” story in critical terms.

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!