I created this blog for two reasons: to provide a platform for my in-depth ramblings and critiques of various forms of media, and to inflate my fragile ego. How better, then, to start out as I mean to go on, with a long-winded piece explaining why something I like is the best thing ever, followed by a second piece complaining about how the new ones aren’t any good?

Yep! Let’s dive back in time to a game now older than some people allowed to use the internet unsupervised, and so influential it ultimately shaped the future of gaming right the way through to the modern day! I am talking, of course, of Halo CE.

A couple of things to mention before I get into the meat of this post:

Firstly, Halo CE was the first real video game I ever played for myself. I’d played Flash games online before, of course, and watched over friends shoulders on playdates as a kid, but I’d never had either a console or a game-capable PC myself. But, when I was 12, someone uploaded a pirated copy of Halo CE onto the school computers, and that was it: I was enthralled. As such, I am definitely biased, not so much by nostalgia (I still replay it regularly, and it holds up well), but by the fact that Halo CE is the benchmark that I judge all other games by.

Secondly, due to my console-less childhood, I started playing games with a mouse and keyboard, and stayed that way. I’ve played all the other Halos multiple times, on friends’ machines, but the imprecise, sluggish console controls always get in the way of my enjoyment. I try and look past that in my appreciation of the games, but it’s still a factor to consider.

But enough of the disclaimers! Let’s begin in earnest!

I believe Halo CE to be the single greatest single-player campaign of all time.

No, seriously. No, I haven’t played every game ever, but I have played a hell of a lot of classics. No, it’s not as great a narrative as Spec Ops, it’s not as much of an over-the-top spectacle as Bulletstorm, or as tactical as X-Com, or as stylish as Bastion. When it comes to a pure, sustained, high quality balls-to-the-wall gaming experience, however, Halo CE beats everything.



All those other games have one or two elements that put them above everything else, but Halo CE is extraordinary in every capacity. The world. The music. The game mechanics. The graphic design. The level design. In other words, Halo CE is not a pinnacle of concept, but of execution.

Let’s start, with the obvious: the game mechanics. At the time, they were revolutionary, and Halo is widely credited with making shooters work on consoles. I feel that’s doing it a disservice, however; Halo didn’t ‘console-ify’ shooters, so much as it advanced the mechanics of the genre as a whole. This is most obvious in the shield mechanics it implemented so well:

When I play shooters, I have a terrible tendency towards 'RPG Potion’ Syndrome. If I can get through an encounter without using potions, then I will, or at least try desperately to do so, even if it sucks the fun out of the experience. Only, apply this to everything; ammo, health, grenades, you name it. Result: I play the vast majority of shooters as a sniper. One shot, one kill, minimal risk.

The downside to that is that, while occasionally it can be quite fun, it never makes you feel like a genetically enhanced super-soldier. And that is what shields do: they give neurotic hoarders the freedom to play like the psychotic badasses they want to play as. The same is true of the two-weapons mechanic, as, while it does work nicely with console control systems, its primary benefit is stopping you from hoarding all your best weapons for an encounter that never comes. In other words, it forces you to take risks and have fun.

But this is where the original stood tall, and the sequels fell increasingly short, in multiple ways. The binary of both health and shields made the game infinitely more interesting than pure shields, by creating a real 'risk’ for your risk-reward dynamics. Yes, you had enough leeway to blitzkrieg your way through little encounters, but in a major battle you had to take care. You could deal and tank some extra damage by staying out longer, but every time you did you’d be reducing your margin for error. Playing very aggressively was never catastrophic, but it meant that, should you fuck up, you would have no reserves to fall back on, and it meant you were constantly judging whether you could make it to the next health pack.

In addition, the sequels actually made the dual-weapon mechanic less tactical, simply by adding a bunch of, essentially, reskinned weapons. Halo CE was beautiful in the simplicity of its weapon roster; it shaved the various video-game weapon tropes right down to their cores. One shotgun, one grenade launcher, one rocket launcher, one sniper rifle. Sure, there were three assault rifles, but each was distinct in its mechanics, with only one hitscan rifle, one projectile-based rifle, and the Needler, which barely functioned like an assault rifle at all. Same goes for the pistols, with one being a dual pistol/carbine, and the other a projectile weapon/mini-grenade launcher.

Each of these weapons served a niche, and, when you wanted that niche, you used that weapon. And, if your enemies were using that niche, you could use their ammo, whereas in later instalments you spent a lot of time switching out weapons for whatever very specific ammo type happens to be lying around that particular room. Which, in turn, significantly reduced your choices as to what to pick up, and what to conserve.

But while the gameplay of Halo CE was revolutionary, it was nothing on the sheer magnificence of the level design. Every level offered multiple, distinct paths, with varied scenarios, arenas, chokepoints, and a distinct variety of strategies. Assault on the Control Room may be the greatest level ever designed: there are so many ways to approach every single one of the little rooms you cross, up to and including a full-stealth run (which I highly recommend trying, if you’ve still got a copy). I still remember the day when I worked out that, by saving a rocket until I reached the bridge over the final pyramid, I could knock the parked banshee off the bridge before the elites could get to it, and then pick it up when I reached the bottom of the canyon. Halo was known for being full of such tricks, but, discovering it for myself for the first time, it made a real impression.

The obvious exception to this praise, of course, is The Library. And yet, this is one of those exceptions that proves the rule. At the time everyone hated The Library for being less fun than the rest of the game, but, if you go back and play it now, an unfortunate truth becomes clear: re-decorate the level in sand and collapsed buildings, and The Library could be from any modern military corridor shooter you care to name.

“Hold on!” I hear you cry, “Half the point of level design is how you dress it up!” True, which brings me neatly to my next point. That Halo CE’s level design is nigh unmatched is hardly a novel insight, but less well considered is how well it all works with the world-building.

There has always been a push by Triple-A games to be 'cinematic’, to tell exciting, thought-provoking stories, and, basically, make games like movies. This doesn’t work that well. Indeed, as the Bioshock franchise demonstrated incredibly clearly, storytelling in gaming works in very specific ways, and not in others. It’s possible to create a very powerful narrative by manipulating what the player thinks they’re playing, as in the original, and, less powerfully, in Bioshock Infinite. Also see the previously mentioned Spec Ops: The Line, which goes even further in that direction. The other narrative aspect in which game narratives excel are in world-building. Bioshock succeeded spectacularly in doing this with Rapture, and Infinite fucked it up royally by utterly failing in the reconciliation of ludo-narrative dissonance achieved by the original. And this is how Halo CE succeeds.

'Ludo-narrative dissonance’, for those who don’t spend excessive amounts of time hanging around gaming forums, is the phenomenon by which the narrative of a game completely clashes with the gameplay. Frankly, I can count on one hand the number of major action games that fully escape the ludo-narrative dissonance trap. Bioshock and Spec Ops are the most obvious examples. But, astonishingly, Halo CE also makes that list.

The original Halo achieves this remarkable feat by entirely obeying the rules of it’s own internal consistency, while simultaneously pacing itself flawlessly.

To be honest, the Halo universe is, really, a bit silly. And this is because the story of the original game was designed to be a pastiche of sci-fi tropes; the lone Space-Marine, interstellar war, space-zombies, multiple types of aliens, the whole shebang. In doing so, however, it achieves the coveted status of being both a parody of a genre, and one of the best examples of it.

The secret is that, in Halo’s story, the story always follows a logical progression of events. In the later instalments, it makes no sense that the Masterchief is being relied of to save the entirety of mankind, when there’s a hundred-thousand Marines in the ship next door, who ought to be backing him up. Not so in Halo CE. The reason there’s never enough support is obvious: this is a military operation that’s utterly FUBAR. Half the crew died upon arrival, you’re all lost on a massive, enemy-controlled installation, the UNSC forces are, therefore, too spread-out and thinned to always support you. When they can support you, they do, but it’s not surprising that you’re often on your own, even when an air-drop could, theoretically, get to you.

And so, the plot progresses like a military operation. What’s the first thing to do? Get all your forces back together. Next job? Rescue the Captain. Then? Work out what this ringworld is. And so on and so forth. You never feel like you’re just running an errand three steps removed from the main plot, purely as an excuse for some gameplay, instead the story is streamlined and makes perfect sense in context. Hell, the characters even act vaguely as you’d expect in a military SF space opera (I’m looking at you, Cortana of the later games). Ultimately, ridiculous as it is, the storyline makes sense in context, and is written like the plot of an action film, rather than a video game trying to ape an action film.

And thus it all ties together incredibly neatly. The world is intentionally ridiculous, but it all comes together with the well-paced plot and the gameplay, and even manages to justify such gamey elements as the game’s HUD. This all works well with the astounding level design, and game mechanics that give you the freedom to actually experiment with different playstyles. Each component would make a lesser game noteworthy, and together the whole is even more than the sum of its parts.

And now, finally, we come to the soul of the game, that which always gave the Halo series its identity: the score.

Written by Marty O'Donnell, Halo’s main theme is probably the most recognisable piece of gaming music since the original Super Mario theme. The OST is, in and of itself, a masterpiece, but the implementation of it in-game elevated it all into something truly transcendent.

Swinging out around a corner, guns blazing, with the main theme booming in the background, was always the quintessential Halo experience, for me. It was, in essence, the soul of Halo. Which is why, in Part 2, I’ll talk about how Halo 4 failed. Thanks for reading what turned into a bit of an epic, I hope it proved interesting and informative!



Continued in Part 2