At the hearts of these rings lies a beautiful tangent of open-endedness.
Sat somewhere between full-on simulations where grenades stick to carapaces and the toy-box arcade of closed arenas, a kill in the Silent Cartographer was never just a kill, with pillars sinking into the subterranean, tubes of halogen concrete harnessing an old mass of secrets to which we already have an answer. It's not that the history of these places is irrelevant but what more can be told, exactly? The means have been laid out in front you - a floor of rifles is coming alive. Jet-engines in direct conversation with the sand. Rocket spores prong out of lush warthogs. Every round unearthing new verbs to wield in tacticality or pure idiocy. Say what you will about its cheesy renditions but Combat Evolved still feels like the most violent Halo - perhaps the only truly violent one. When I blow up a Grunt and watch their meagre corpse flail in the air searching for purchase there's shits and giggles, yes. But they’re also so obviously there. It's not drama. Not quite. But a body is flung all the same.
Immense places in my mind.
Another souvenir; piercing the Elites’ precious metal at age nine and hearing a death rattle that sounds like the growls of puberty. Moving on, with our guns. A frumious loudness. This assault rifle was always an absurd feat of sound-design, the kind of auditory blast that only ever sounded right with a low-polygon count. Without it Combat Evolved would be more hostile - an eco-manifesto lacking the punchline - spreading the atoms of the island instead of knitting them a little closer together with each bullet salvo. It's charmingly inelegant - only useful within the logics of Halo's choreographic freedom. During a recent playthrough I found myself spending a good minute or two facing a single Elite inside the sophomore forests of the Cartographer, desperately trying to finish him off, a whole crowd of collisions standing between me and him. But this gun’s a funny thing - only inflicting meaningful damage at intimate distances - and I was happy to dance amongst the tree trunks. Its shields are a fucking pain in the way they force you to repeatedly engage until one of us gets tired of waiting and the tango ends in short, purple murder. These spaces have to be negotiated by the both of us even if their programming only serves my curiosity when the dust settles. Kinesthesia drags out these encounters - before the squeeze of level-design - tentatively pushing me to prod around their geometries in order to decipher an imaginary arc; I shoot by artistry and kill by necessity. A life-injecting headshot.
They stood no chance.
Robert McFarlane, the great nature writer of the Anthropocene, once said that "trees make meaning as well as oxygen." I think about this often. I think about it now because Halo, though it has grown progressively bleaker over Bungie’s - and now 343’s - tenure, remains an object fascinated by hypernature springing forth from its epic vistas and how one may blend themselves within their stone foliage. In industry years, Combat Evolved is a time-worn artifact. Games felt more unknowable back then. The machine will transform again and we’re never going back. But what if? And what of the technologies and the trees? The needlers and the strings? Guns make meaning as well as death. Echoes in a brutalist mausoleum. Halo has always been about grooving in the remnants of ancient engines. No one lives here anymore. Every time you choose to look at the paint too closely it dissolves before your very eyes just like any other game. But these colours are all yours and what matters is the wish - a wish to stay here forever - and how it is sustained in the countenance of air - this idea that spectacle could truly be the place.
I think about the meaning shooters impart onto us - fantasies of metal evergreens, from Jupiter to Iraq, a vehicle for violence so deeply imbedded in the sense of identity games have built for themselves that we’re bound to a halfway vision. “If only you could talk to the monsters…Now that would be something.” I think not. Silence is worth its weight in salt. Yeah, we can talk about encounter flows and how good the gun feels to shoot - reduce language to a concise excision of meaning from game verbs - but I prefer the stop-start interrogations of synergy to immediate shotgun intents. A relationship to space told through thorough imprecisions. Shits and giggles and awe - and all the wonderful, terrible things in between. And maybe the Silent Cartographer ain’t all that in the end - a Library rocks harder indeed - but it’s given me the most juice for all these years. Green guy standing between these trees and those guns. Sacrificing my little marines, seeking the grand chorus within the pulp. Now two decades later, still idling on those shores, looking ahead to Destiny. All alone.
Gun pointed at the head of the universe.
Sat somewhere between full-on simulations where grenades stick to carapaces and the toy-box arcade of closed arenas, a kill in the Silent Cartographer was never just a kill, with pillars sinking into the subterranean, tubes of halogen concrete harnessing an old mass of secrets to which we already have an answer. It's not that the history of these places is irrelevant but what more can be told, exactly? The means have been laid out in front you - a floor of rifles is coming alive. Jet-engines in direct conversation with the sand. Rocket spores prong out of lush warthogs. Every round unearthing new verbs to wield in tacticality or pure idiocy. Say what you will about its cheesy renditions but Combat Evolved still feels like the most violent Halo - perhaps the only truly violent one. When I blow up a Grunt and watch their meagre corpse flail in the air searching for purchase there's shits and giggles, yes. But they’re also so obviously there. It's not drama. Not quite. But a body is flung all the same.
Immense places in my mind.
Another souvenir; piercing the Elites’ precious metal at age nine and hearing a death rattle that sounds like the growls of puberty. Moving on, with our guns. A frumious loudness. This assault rifle was always an absurd feat of sound-design, the kind of auditory blast that only ever sounded right with a low-polygon count. Without it Combat Evolved would be more hostile - an eco-manifesto lacking the punchline - spreading the atoms of the island instead of knitting them a little closer together with each bullet salvo. It's charmingly inelegant - only useful within the logics of Halo's choreographic freedom. During a recent playthrough I found myself spending a good minute or two facing a single Elite inside the sophomore forests of the Cartographer, desperately trying to finish him off, a whole crowd of collisions standing between me and him. But this gun’s a funny thing - only inflicting meaningful damage at intimate distances - and I was happy to dance amongst the tree trunks. Its shields are a fucking pain in the way they force you to repeatedly engage until one of us gets tired of waiting and the tango ends in short, purple murder. These spaces have to be negotiated by the both of us even if their programming only serves my curiosity when the dust settles. Kinesthesia drags out these encounters - before the squeeze of level-design - tentatively pushing me to prod around their geometries in order to decipher an imaginary arc; I shoot by artistry and kill by necessity. A life-injecting headshot.
They stood no chance.
Robert McFarlane, the great nature writer of the Anthropocene, once said that "trees make meaning as well as oxygen." I think about this often. I think about it now because Halo, though it has grown progressively bleaker over Bungie’s - and now 343’s - tenure, remains an object fascinated by hypernature springing forth from its epic vistas and how one may blend themselves within their stone foliage. In industry years, Combat Evolved is a time-worn artifact. Games felt more unknowable back then. The machine will transform again and we’re never going back. But what if? And what of the technologies and the trees? The needlers and the strings? Guns make meaning as well as death. Echoes in a brutalist mausoleum. Halo has always been about grooving in the remnants of ancient engines. No one lives here anymore. Every time you choose to look at the paint too closely it dissolves before your very eyes just like any other game. But these colours are all yours and what matters is the wish - a wish to stay here forever - and how it is sustained in the countenance of air - this idea that spectacle could truly be the place.
I think about the meaning shooters impart onto us - fantasies of metal evergreens, from Jupiter to Iraq, a vehicle for violence so deeply imbedded in the sense of identity games have built for themselves that we’re bound to a halfway vision. “If only you could talk to the monsters…Now that would be something.” I think not. Silence is worth its weight in salt. Yeah, we can talk about encounter flows and how good the gun feels to shoot - reduce language to a concise excision of meaning from game verbs - but I prefer the stop-start interrogations of synergy to immediate shotgun intents. A relationship to space told through thorough imprecisions. Shits and giggles and awe - and all the wonderful, terrible things in between. And maybe the Silent Cartographer ain’t all that in the end - a Library rocks harder indeed - but it’s given me the most juice for all these years. Green guy standing between these trees and those guns. Sacrificing my little marines, seeking the grand chorus within the pulp. Now two decades later, still idling on those shores, looking ahead to Destiny. All alone.
Gun pointed at the head of the universe.