not only had I never played Halo before I'd never even taken the slightest interest in the series and bothered to watch any gameplay, so I was completely unaware as to what its appeal was. playing it helped bridge some gaps in my shooter knowledge. i see that it basically sits at the midpoint in the lineage between arena shooters like Doom and Quake and the dour propagandist military shooters like Modern Warfare and Battlefield.

it helps explain, to me at least, how Call of Duty 4 didn't just spring up out of nowhere. that the pivot from WWII shooters starts here, I think: Halo, with its jingoistic portrayal of American Marines. Halo was clearly conceived in the 90s and intended to have the sort of goofy enemies audiences were used to from games like Doom. but the result is this weird feeling of you shooting a mix of innocent-seeming yet very annoying grunt cunts (some times in their shrines while they sleep) who speak a language that's essentially gibberish to you (no subtitles or anything). and then later, in the second half, you're blasting an overwhelming force of zombie bugs.


Halo ends up feeling a bit like a non-satirical Starship Troopers, almost serving as the straight-forward example of how fascists can dehumanise "the enemy" by representing them as stupid annoying bugs. i think something like that is going on here, even if by accident. but it is there.

i mean, the original PC release for Halo: Combat Evolved was less than three weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks. kind of awkward then for so much of the game to vaguely reflect the eventual US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. obviously it's a coincidence but it's an awkward one.

Halo reminded me a bit of Avatar too, which is odd considering that movie came out eight years later. like starship troopers, avatar is another example of a sci-fi movie with a lot of transparent political themes. chiefly, indigenous genocide. i only mention it because sometimes i think game developers assume if they can cherry pick from an assortment of human history for their stories, and then wrap a sci-fi, space bow around it all, then their game can better appear apolitical. call of duty infinite warfare seemed to think so. mass effect, too, to an extent. but when your main army human characters genuinely look like US Marines, your (understandably) biased POV starts to show.

the leeway i'll grant Halo is that it's more clearly influenced by a different James Cameron movie: Aliens. it so wants to be Aliens. there's nothing wrong with being Aliens or having inspiration beholden to b-movie schlock. but Halo is rarely that playful. and its story/lore so thin, there's not much else left for you to cling to. it has such a self-serious tone to it all too that it makes how much of a blast it actually is to play feel like a guilt trip.

a lot of Halo also reminds me of Half-Life 2. when I was playing half life 2, I actually thought the beach scene reminded me of the beach scene in Halo, which was odd, because at that point I'd never played a Halo. i don't know where the association came from. the games do have a lot in common. linear corridor sequences. bug creatures that jump on yo face. shitty vehicle sections. a silent protagonist. the difference being here you're closer to the baddie than a rebel resistance fighter.

i do actually kind of like Master Chief though. he isn't just Gordon Freeman with a badass full face BMX helmet, although alone that is more personality than freeman is ever given. i was surprised Chief actually can talk too, he just seems like he'd rather shut up most of the time. he's a genuine strong, silent type. a real gary cooper. in fact, until he spoke i thought it is an interesting decision to have his female AI friend, Cortana, do all the communicating for him. it's like everyone respects Master Chief on the battlefield, the big bad iconic war hero, but with Cortana doing all the speaking for him, he's almost like the shy son doing whatever his mum says behind closed doors. it's a very different relationship to the one Alyx has with freeman/the player in half life 2. i was also surprised how sassy Cortana is. or not sassy but she's one of the most human AIs i've encountered in a game. i wish the game had a little more of her. i wish she could have been the player character, really. it's weird when the female character is given all the personality but none of the chance to actually be the hero (which Cortana is here, as Master Chief was fooled into ending all life in the universe by a robot).

i ultimately wound up vibing with Halo though, way more than I thought I would, or than I even probably should. the level design is very basic but i am a simple man, i love corridors. i love the weird alien architecture. i played this with the original graphics and i loved the minimalist limitations and the sparseness of it all. i loved how vibrant the game was at times, and with how purple and turquoise everything was. i've never played such a purple game. a lot of boomer shooters today take their influence from Doom and Quake and splatter red and various muted, muddy colours everywhere. would love to play more games that look designed off of a 90s Anaheim Ducks jersey. the gunplay was fine. shooters haven't gotten much better 20 years later, imo.

this an instance where maybe the game is the devil but it presents itself in an alluring enough fashion for me not to care. there was a moment when i was shooting one of the sleeping grunts in a shrine, and i thought "this is wrong" but at the same time i blasted away and my thoughts turned to "i can't wait to play Halo 2". it's like, i know candy is bad for me, i wish i had more self control but if something is sweet it's sweet, i don't know what to say. blasting aliens in Halo was sweet. i'd do it again. . ¯\(ツ)

Reviewed on Oct 02, 2021


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