An Exercise in Meh

I was doing some random websurfing and stumbled upon, and I shit you not, a completely serious website devoted to how Halo ‘changed the world’.

Ok, time for my take:

Halo 1 was a completely and totally average shooter. It didn’t have anything new, the weapons were samey and boring…and as for the ‘amazing’ story, Aliens trying to destroy humanity? Yawn, been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. The levels were unimaginative and in some places looked like the same area cut and pasted over and over again. Seriously, it was so easy to get lost on some levels because every room and corridor was exactly the same.

Don’t get me wrong, it was fun, but it was a plain vanilla shooter.

Then I tried Halo 2. I thought it was just like Halo 1, but with better graphics.

Halo 3 I have no intention of playing. Unless I hear some unbiased reviews that say it’s absolutely amazing, it holds absolutely no interest for me whatsoever. Wasn’t impressed with the first two, and I don’t buy games on looks alone. If it’s pretty, great, but I don’t buy a game to look at it, I buy a game to have fun playing it.

Anyway, I started to wonder why everyone was going so nuts over Halo. I mean, the frigging pistol from Halo 1 was voted the ‘best’ FPS weapon of all time.

Did these people sleep through Doom’s BFG, Duke Nukem’s Shrink Ray and Half Life’s laser guided rocket launcher?

The website that inspired this post made some good points about why Halo was great, but I started to realize, these points only counted if Halo was the first shooter you ever played and you ignored everything that came before it.

For example, the original Half Life changed shooters because it was the first to have a really compelling story, and it told this story with scripted sequences while you were playing. Quake was the first shooter to be 100% 3D. What about those?

Long story short…Half-Life was groundbreaking, amazingly fun shooter…Halo was purely ‘meh.’

Then I finally got it.

Halo was the first ‘real’ first person shooter to appear on a console. In essence, it was the ‘Fisher-Price’ shooter that opened up the genre to people who couldn’t be bothered learning how to use a computer to game.

This almost annoys me in a way. We’ve had Wolfenstein3D, Doom, Duke Nukem3D, Quake, Half Life, Dark Forces…I could go on forever, and now thanks to the total dumbing down and ‘lowest common denominator’ direction the games industry is taking, we have these douchebags proclaiming a totally average game as the best thing ever.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how good the game is, as long as it has it’s own ‘energy drink’, comes with a collectible helmet and more marketing and TV time than the Presidential election.

I know this seems a really odd thing to get worked up about, but as I’ve said a million times before I see games as an honest to god artform. There’s nothing like seeing classics getting ignored and dismissed, all because the latest game appeals to the frat boy crowd who get suckered in by the hype and like to ‘pwn bitches’ while drinking their over-branded ‘Master Chief’ edition ‘Game Fuel’.

Put it this way, when we have people proclaiming any game is the greatest game ever played and creaming their pants every time it’s mentions, before they’ve actually played it…something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.