I should be writing my novel.
I’ve got the first three chapters and synopsis of book #1 at an agent, and I’m ten thousand words into the first draft of book #2, and what am I doing?
Playing ODST, that’s what.
Halo 3: ODST (standing for Orbital Drop Shock Troopers) is the latest game for Xbox 360 from developers Bungie. Bungie designed and released Halo: Combat Evolved for the original Xbox, and was largely responsible for that console’s relative success – without it, it’s my belief that Microsoft would’ve ended up with so much egg on their face they wouldn’t have seen their way clear to devising the Xbox 360, and so wouldn’t be in the position they are now: leading the console war against Sony and the Playstation 3. (I’ll ignore the phenomenon of the Wii for the purposes of this post – a topic for another time).
Bungie released Halo 2 for the original Xbox, and such was its success that when Microsoft first released the 360, most gamers’ cries were not “cool! A new games console!” but “Will it play Halo 2?”
Of course it did.
When Halo 3 came along, designed solely for the 360, people gathered it to their breasts and loved it like a child.
But they didn’t quite love it like a firstborn. No, the Halo crown had been tarnished somewhat. Bungie had, to my mind, lost its way a little.
How did this occur?
Let’s step back to Halo: Combat Evolved. Check it out:
So what have we got? Obvious homages to Cameron’s Aliens, cool tech, a vicious alien Covenant hell-bent on wiping out humanity using a giant space weapon… And Master Chief. “That’s not going to happen”.
Cool.
Halo 2 was a long time coming, and when it arrived, the multiplayer was heralded as the way forward for online console gaming: smooth, easy to navigate, and more importantly, great fun. But the single player campaign left a lot to be desired. The graphics, stretched to breaking point on the (by then) old Xbox, popped in and out of existence. The campaign also relied on an old storytelling technique: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Just under half of the campaign was told through the eyes of the Arbiter, a disgraced Elite from the original game, fighting against the Covenant, now taken over by the Brutes, gorilla-like aliens that were a new addition to the Halo series in part 2:
This cut scene exemplifies all that Bungie did wrong in the Halo series: focussing on a bunch of alien politics and back-story when all I’m interested in is Master Chief blowing stuff up. I simply didn’t care.
Halo 3 brought things back on track somewhat, but by that time the first flush of love had gone, and although the single player campaign had some stand-out moments, and the multiplayer was as polished as ever, it wasn’t quite the same. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had stolen Halo’s online crown, regularly beating it on Major Nelson’s weekly top ten online games, and my frustration with Bungie reached a peak when they released a teaser for a teaser trailer, showing less than nothing. Hugely frustrating, and as far as I was concerned, a real turn-off. I stopped visiting Bungie.net as often, and made no concrete plans to pick up ODST.
That was until more details came out.
The first thing that I paid attention to was the fact that Bungie were releasing all of the original Halo 3 multiplayer maps on a second disc to accompany ODST. Good move as far as I was concerned: I wasn’t prepared to shell out exorbitant Microsoft points to purchase the maps online, and the multiplayer environment had been so mauled by teenage Americans calling everyone “fag” and other unsavoury things, I had no desire to re-enter the online arena – that was until I heard about the extra disc, and Microsoft’s canny new “party” functionality, meaning that the screaming Yanks could be silenced and never heard from again. Hurrah!
The second point in its favour was Firefight. Nicked from Gears of War 2, it’s a four-player co-op fight against wave after wave of Covenant baddies, with brief pauses to reload and restock on grenades, etc. I’ve yet to get stuck in, having spent most of my time to date on the single player campaign, but am looking forward to it.
The third thing was the inclusion of the boys from Firefly. Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk play three of the troopers, and they’re just great. I understand that it was Nathan who suggested casting the others to Bungie’s Marty O’Donnell, but it was a canny move. You get more of a sense of familiarity, a willingness to see the characters succeed and meet up after the accident at the start of the game that sees the team split. I’m a huge Firefly fan (more on that another time too!) so this was the thing that tipped me over the edge.
And boy, I’m glad I did! The graphics are great, the gameplay is as good as ever, and the story is back to Bungie’s best: no cutaways to the aliens, just human humour, explosions and a huge beating heart in the middle of it all. I even heard a reference to Ghostbusters, so there you go.
