From the Top Now

Well lets get this underway with a double serving of tough armoured faceless heros shall we. Earlier this week I took purchase of my brand new and shiny XBox360 with a copies of Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST and I couldn’t have been more excited unless it came with free chocolate and my very own robotic killing machine, however 10 unsatisfied hours later and both games are now completed. When I say ‘completed’, I mean that the campaigns have been finished and there’s no way that I’m going to sit around and unlock every single fucking achievement for the games – not when some of them are awarded for the walking forward or picking you nose or something. If XBox are going to ask it’s audience to ‘achieve’ things then at least make them a little harder, although of course the hardest thing for most Next-Gen console owners to achieve would be turning off the game and getting a fucking life. Anyway lets crack on and get good and personal.

Halo 3

After playing Halo:Combat Evolved on my PC I thought that I could really get into the whole Halo franchise after hating it and everyone involved in it’s bastard creation for years previously, and I’m happy to report that after playing Halo 3 that I should have stuck to my guns. Halo 3 is everything that is bad about mainstream Next-Gen titles, it’s pretty, it sound’s good but it’s agonizingly short and about as deep as a swimming pool on Mercury. Developers seem to have this over fascination that everything they do has to look the best instead of playing the best, treating they audiences like magpies by giving them lovely shiny things to distract their poor cola dissolved minds from the truth. The characters in the game seem to have all taken fierce bonks on the head and suffered memory loss from the first game, as they all seem to now trust the annoying flying robot that tried to kill them all during the events of Wombat Evolved. Talking of the NPC’s in the game, the same tiny amount of ‘actors’ voice almost the entire armed forces of the planet and the guy with the dodgy Australian accent appears so often that it’s easy to think that the Aussie’s have in fact taken over the world at this point. There are a few amusing moments involving the cast of the Red vs Blue series and cameos from Jonathon Ross, Nathan Fillion and the other male leads from the short lived SciFi series Firefly. Other than these however, the NPC’s will simply quote the same old one liners again and again until you want to snap the controller in half and stick one half in each ear just so you don’t have to hear them. Saying that it is hard to actually hate the NPC marines because they’re all so useless that hating them seems picking on the clinically stupid. Saying that however, at one point a set of marines driving a Warthog whilst I manned the turret and he drove straight into a cliff and then sat there reving the engine, after a while I got bored and tried to take the wheel and the moron ran me over and I had to start the battle again. Which was in no way extremely aggrivating! The shortness of the campaign mode is probably made up for with the multiplayer mode but as I haven’t spent £50 buying a wireless adapter I can’t access XBox Live as of yet so it doesn’t get any marks for it.

Halo 3 ODST

Set as a prequel/simultaneous storyline to Halo 3, ODST follows a similar character to Halos’ normal cyborg killing machine but this time you play as the world’s most useless, nameless, faceless, voiceless killing machine that is knocked on conscious right at the beginning of the game and misses all of the action. Instead of fighting epic hordes of Covenanents you retrace the steps of your team-mates and somehow piece together everything they’ve done instead. I don’t quite understand the logic of the game, at one point you find a used remote detonator and somehow discover that your teammate helped to cover a bridge in them, detonate them and then kick some ass in the Marine headquarters then blowing the ever-loving-crap out the building. Almost the whole game is set like this, it’s like shooting a film with every major event happening in flashback instead of at the time it’s set and when you do it out of the order the game would prefer you to do then really will need help to piece things together. The whole point of the mission that your team is on is just some random quest to find an alien creature that hasn’t been previously mentioned or seen and the whole thing is just a bit of a mess. I was really looking forward to playing ODST but again being far too short I was once again unsatisfied with the situation. One of the only good elements of the game is when you jump, quantum leap style, into your team mates as they do at least have voices and continuing the theme of guest voices, the Firefly guys re-appear to voice your team-mates. At the end of the game you escape the city just before the Elites melt the entirety of Africa in order to stop the Flood, this is the middle of Halo 3 but this dramatic escape was so obvious because heaven forbid that developers should kill off people when the chance of a sequel and more money is available.

Overall then, both games were a massive let down although I’m not sure if I’m more disappointed with the games or with myself for caving in to hype and live action trailers, that at no point showed anything to do with the game’s story. Anyway, I’ll probably buy Bioshock next as it’s a much longer game, apparently, so stay tuned for that review.

CraigE