Halo
Halo - The Game
Ok, i'm not saying it's a bad game. From all accounts, and my own small play, its seems pretty decent. Better than Half-Life, but probably not as good as Deus Ex which is admittedly a different style but IMO the plot driven FPS genre needs something more than run and shoot. Once the PC version is out well see how it fares properly in the multiplayer department, but currently its probably the best single-player FPS game.
If that didnt make sense to you, then i'll just say that Halo is a computer game, you run about doing missions and killing bad aliens. The innovative bits are the AI is better/realistic than just about all before, the plot and story are well defined, and the "feel" is fun and demanding. I'm not anti X-box as such, any console with good games deserves support.
Halo - The Rant
The main problem I have is that many reviewers are saying "X-box throws out a genre defining game", "Halo is X-box's killer game", "Microsoft produce the perfect console game", blah blah. It's like the X-box has an application running on it which only it can run, and was specifically designed for it. Wrong! If only they did a little research then they would know that Halo was originally a Macintosh game! Yes that sad platform that has very few games, and is not generally thought of as a gaming machine.
What happened is that Bungie, the software company, had a load of Mac fans who decided that the Mac needed a decent FPS. At the time there was no versions of Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, so they took it upon themselves to make something PC gamers would weep over. They crafted Halo lovingly, and some months before its scheduled release Microsoft bought the company and the game was "cancelled". Note that at this time the X-box hadnt been announced, so it appears a MS scout had been looking for a killer game to make their console release much less sad than it was currently going to be. Later the X-box is announced and low and behold on the game touted as next-gen is Halo! Any uninformed person might think it is an X-box game, but the reality is it was designed for a Mac, the AI routines are all developed on the Mac. Level design, plot, gameplay were all implemented for the Mac. The only thing you can point at being X-box exclusive is the fact it took the developers 18 months to force this game to run on the X-box hardware, with the necessary decrease in graphical output, and to get the console controller interface tuned.
The credit is not Microsoft's or the X-box, its all a Macintosh software company that got bought out.
Halo- The Monopoly
This all points to Microsoft's dubious "crush the opposition by any means" tactics, buying out promising companies, waving money at developers to get X-box exclusive releases, and generally hardball methods. Although competition is good in any area, the way they are doing this is not by innovating, and therefore increasing the available choice and quality, but by monopolising and moving the available pool of games from one console to another. To a gamer it's meant to make them swap consoles, but to me all it smacks of forcing the Competition out while offering nothing new, one wonders that if Sony and Nintendo go down will anything but clones of PC games be produced? It seem likely that if they are not willing, or able, to generate growth in a competitive market, they will have no incentive if they gain market share.
So there's my rant, the evil-empire raises its head once more, and shows its hand by its by way of Halo.
