'Halo' by Bungie

'Halo' is the 'Die Hard' of video games.

Depending on your background, that can be taken as either an immense compliment or mark of shame; in my case, it's both. 'Die Hard' is an immense achievement of technicraft by journeyman who got their hands on a script ten levels beyond what anyone expected or intended (It was supposed to star Frank Sinatra and be connected to a TV series before Arnold Schwarzenneger turned it down). People call it the "perfect film". I ate it up as a kid, then fell asleep rewatching it recently, because I'm just so fucking cool that I'll handwave myself with phrases like "I suddenly awoke to the truth of its fascist revisionism" when really the film just all of a sudden aged incredibly poorly. I still like 'Dirty Harry' and that one's even worse by the fascism metric.

So I consider 'Halo' a "perfect game" in the same sense, where I expect it to one day — how long was the delay between 'Die Hard's release and 'Halo's? Ah, 13 years, 4 months and 3 days from when I publish this — cease to be remarkable or interesting for any of the qualities that I am about to gush over finding so captivating.

I also make the comparison because, like 'Die Hard', both ended up as absurdly long-running series that never — no, not even entry three — ever came close to touching its initial greatness. Mostly because they never tried to be great in the first place.

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Have I dissembled enough? Have I couched my appreciations in enough qualifiers? If not, let me know in the comments (there are no comments). Time to gush. Sort of.

'Halo' is, fundamentally, a high-concept thriller: While fleeing a theocratic alien collective's galactic pogrom, a cyborg war hero and a sentient AI crashland on a mysterious artificial ring-world that harbors a horrifying secret.

It's a lot to absorb, but it's grounded in a series of simple motivations by understandable characters who, unlike in 'Marathon', never turn the plot into syllable soup — even though some of them easily could, and in later games successfully do. (It helps too that it packed in enough then-vogue sci-fi pop culture references — mainly 'Aliens' with a dash of 'Predator' — that things stay recognizable and coherent juuuuust long enough for the rug to get pulled out.

This narrative is propelled by three core mysteries: first, how this uncanny version of humanity works; second, who the Covenant are as a war collective; and finally, what Halo itself was built for.After a level of being acquainted with the first two, you're (literally) catapulted onto the third.

When I was a kid, I would walk around the levels for hours just "hanging out": poking at the margins and otherwise exploring everything the designers had (intentionally or otherwise) left for me to play with. What if I just walk funny around this pipe? Wow, I can get over it without jumping! Can I go down to that ledge? Not even if I rocket-grenaded off a warthog I shoved through four doorways to a ledge? (I stole a lot of tricks & secrets from online too.) The game seemed to invite me to do these things; I would seldom get rushed along by an NPC voice, or even hear much of a voice at all, even though for vast parts of the game I'm walking with a superhuman intelligence in my head who by all rights should be bored to tears or outright indignant over the constant weak shuffling her host performs to slip carefully onto the lower part of a bridge that doesn't in any way allow you to escape without subsequently reloading your game or plunging to your death. Wait, did that Grunt say he wanted a food nipple? For a big, grunty thirst?

It was so much fun! And it still is! Back then I didn't have an inkling what the limits of games were, and it felt like there was always more waiting for me behind the scenery. Now I can see the limits of this game clear as day — especially when the camera has a clipping bug and shoves them in front of you; how did I miss that as a kid? — and yet I still want to poke at its corners to see what comes out. I won't find anything new, of course, but I don't care; I just want to re-experience the act of uncovering something hidden beneath the surface, which this game delivers in both form and function.

Even its flaws get warped by context into something at least excusable. The level design (which I earlier praised for its inviting atmosphere) deserves particular criticism: Not only does it have some of the worst qualities of copy-paste architecture, but half the maps aren't even fresh, instead retreading assets and layouts. In the case of level seven, "Two Betrayals", you play the exact same map but in reverse as (in what I consider one of the two betrayals) you must force yourself to go the opposite way of the arrows the level designers put on the ground so you wouldn't get lost the first time you played this piece of shit. But, well, Halo (the ring-world) is a clearly utilitarian structure — those arrows do lead to the station's control room — with an initially inscrutable scientific aim that also seems to somehow encompass religious undertones, and anyway, you're supposed to be stumbling around as you bust through an entrenched enemy force, many of whom you can skip entirely, even on higher difficulties; and double-anyway there's still plenty of variety to go around — that map, for instance, is the only one where you get to drive a tank or fly a banshee. Heck, the latter can be used to sequence break past a difficult combat section if you know how, so there's even a small additional salve baked in. And triple-anyway, once you get a sense for exactly what was being concealed from you, having your vital structures be composed of & surrounded by confusing and disorienting architecture actually makes a lot of sense. It even comes into play as a horror element during the second half of level 6.

But when it's good, it's great, and it hits from the beginning. Take the beginning of level 2, one of my favorite sequences in the game. As the white fades from your sight, you emerge bleary-eyed from a cliffside crash landing that turned everyone but you into a bloody corpse. You immediately see Halo's grand curve pulling up from beyond the cliffs, shrinking as it arcs above, then returning to its full majesty in your sight as it meets itself on the horizon. After salvaging what supplies you can, you take a few short steps and the crevice for a gigantic waterfall blocks your path, with the only bridge appearing to be a set of pipes. Where do these go? Why are they here? No time to figure it out; a platoon of Covenant pop up just then to hurry you along...

Everything about the game is communicated here in deftly interlocking steps, all in the span of about thirty seconds: You will survive unscathed what will kill everyone around you; you will do so in the shadow of an inscrutable construct that you can only hope to one day understand; and your efforts to do so will be hampered by alien forces that wish you dead. And indeed the end of the game suggests you are the only survivor as you finally escape Halo, having killed a small army of aliens along the way to kinda understanding the whole story.

It is stressfully bizarre that a AAA studio on a time crunch managed to produce a perfectly gridlocked masterpiece of incoherent design that — as previously mentioned — set the stage for a decade-plus of market dominance.

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I happen to think 'Halo' is successful because it's a dream narrative; perhaps the best of all time.

What do I mean by that? In a dream, the main character — i.e., you — is of pivotal importance, but seldom does that importance go examined (it's your dream, after all). In fact, all evidence may point to the contrary — you, as a passive observer of the dream, get pulled along its course by a series of guides and events often completely outside your control. You are central to the dream, yet you are also an automaton trapped within it. It's no coincidence that the rejection of such — lucid dreaming — instantly derails the narrative, as all events are forced through your scope of knowledge and awareness.

So it is that the Master Chief is initially an image of unstoppable force, cheered by everyone he encounters, even as he must literally be led by hand and ear from start to finish. There is only one point in the entire game when he doesn't have someone guiding him, and that's level 6, the horror level — the turning point in the story where his allies' cheers finally give out from all their increasingly brutal deaths, leaving only the automaton, nearly bereft of speech, reflecting brutality back at its foes (who from this point on increasingly become corrupted forms of the same enemies and allies he's killed and watched die countless times). The end of the horror level, by the way, is the last time the Master Chief fights alongside an ally.

Some ways through level 7 the mask slips, as a single line of background dialogue reveals that he's really very poorly suited for just about everything he's been doing, and his continued survival is a monumental stroke of luck. Once you are given that insight, it becomes plain that, even from the beginning, in spite of being augmented by High Fantasy Science (and also maybe continuously administered heroin & cocaine feeds), he's really just a shittier version of one of the main enemy types, and to have believed that he was unstoppable was to be swallowed by the dream yourself. I don't think it's a coincidence either that level 7 is the most brutal, with an unceasing string of traps and gauntlets from start to finish so unmatched in ferocity that there's an official achievement for beating that level specifically with no deaths.

Yet even as the truth is laid bare, the dream marches on. The Master Chief is still, somehow, the most important person on Halo, and he is still, somehow, the only one who can do whatever it is he's being told to do. This contradiction is arguably what drives the remainder of the plot — as the dreamer must wake, so must the Master Chief leave Halo. As he does, the dream collapses, and Halo explodes.

A dream is not its story, though; all that is to explain myself. Dreams are notoriously uninteresting to retell in exactitude, after all, to the point that refashioning them to be more interesting may have been how we invented storytelling. No, a dream is its visuals — the abstract, impossible and arresting imagery that spurts out like junk data from our subconscious processing our life's events. This is where 'Halo' really shines for me.

I'll borrow a quote from Ross Scott (of Accursed Farms), who described a game he liked (?) from around this era as embodying "a kind of surreal feel" that only the specific graphical limitations of the time could capture:

Well-defined graphics are nice, but they don't leave you walking away as if you've seen some sort of dream, which I still feel like even as I say this.

I think that statement is precisely true of this game as well, and not just because its vaunted ceilings were in geometrically and aesthetically twisted hallways of varying shades of gunmetal (the same hallways I sorta criticized earlier for being confusing). You can feel how absurd this place is — to start, how do you even start building such a ludicrous structure? Well, with a different, even more ludicrous structure, as we'd later find out, but still, from bits and pieces of environmental storytelling your mind can piece together a rough, broken but ultimately surface-level-coherent image of how things were logically designed & how that design ultimately fell apart at the seams. This was, to the phrase, a "fully realized world" with a visceral, engrossing power that I would argue ranks with the likes of, say, 'Myst' and 'Riven'. And the sequels fucked it all up.

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Spoiler time! I can't really hold off any longer, so here you go:

The big secret was that Halo was actually a containment facility for a parasitic alien called the Flood, who had gone around space absorbing everything Zerg-style until different aliens called the Forerunner made seven Halos, put a bunch of Flood on them for study, then used the intergalactic death rays they installed in each Halo to kill all life in the universe (except the Flood, for some reason) and thereby starve the Flood of its "food". The plot of 'Halo' concerns the spillover from the Human-Covenant war breaking containment on the titular ringworld and its caretaker — a floating robot AI named 343 Guilty Spark — nearly getting Master Chief to hit the universal extinction button again by allowing him to believe it would kill the Flood directly. Once he finds out the truth, Master Chief instead blows up Halo (and therefore the Flood) and goes home.

The plot holes are numerous: Why did 343 Guilty Spark need a human to activate a Forerunner weapon? Why can't Halo's weapon affect the Flood? Why would the Forerunners ever allow any Flood to be preserved? Why did they bother creating such an elaborate structure to serve as the gun pointed at the head of the universe? And so on. The series would later bend over backwards to bridge gaps, but I have almost no interest in doing the same; 'Halo' runs on dream logic, and plot holes come with that territory. I will move on instead.

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Now I must briefly address the 2011 remaster, which is the version included in the bundle and was primarily a port of 'Halo' to the 'Halo: Reach' engine and assets — this presumably being why 'Halo: Reach' was released before 'Halo' for the collection. I don't care to find out more than that.

My thoughts are, in sum: It sucks. I have a lot of reasons why it sucks, so here's a list of things I give at minimum a passing grade:

That's all I can think of before I stop caring. There are probably a few more I could dredge up or be reminded of, but that's still not nearly enough. The rest of the port buries its better qualities in a morass of poor choices that get so many of the little details — the glue holding this mishmash together — absolutely, breathtakingly wrong:

I could go on.

I am done going on. Suffice to say, this feels like a disinterested flip job. I don't think a single person on the 2011 team worked on the original, and further, a majority may not have even played it. I also think Microsoft hates 'Halo' because a) it was good, and b) Bungie escaped the corporate murder attempt.

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One of the best jokes in 'Halo' comes from Sgt. Johnson's character. Not any of his one-liners or witticisms, per se, but all of them together painting the picture of an R. Lee Ermey-type, all braggadocia and look-at-me individualism disguised as cynical truth-telling. The punchline was that he could die right in front of you, only for another one to airdrop in literally within the minute. Later on he became a meme, possibly because nobody — myself included at the time — got the joke, which might have also been an accident of the game's earlier form as an RTS. Did I mention this game's development was a mess?

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'Halo's greatness was due largely to the tight constraints of its birth coupled with an impressive level of skill and passion. Reading a synopsis of its development is like staring into the void of space to look for meaning and order; the game required a god-tier feat for it to even exist, let alone be good. They rewrote the multiplayer from scratch a mere four months out from shipping — while they were sleeping underneath desks! — and it helped define an entire generation of social FPS gameplay. Are you kidding me?! That's like writing a boot loader from scratch based on memory on a plane flight — It should never have even worked! But it did, and it made them gods.

Due to this newfound godhood, later games were never as encumbered, and the bloat becomes apparent immediately. The first game is tight and self-contained, ending with the protagonist in a somewhat poor position but with his goals accomplished and safe passage to home all but assured; every game since ends on a cliffhanger to tie them to the next, and in a move of hubris since matched only by 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker', both 'Halo 2' and 'Halo 3' had their intros essentially cut and sold as separate media (which sold gangbusters, because gamers are marks). There's never a real mystery anymore; instead the focus shifts to exploring the Covenant's (frankly boring) hierarchy and the Forerunners' (frankly banal) history before the Flood fucked everything up. Our capable-but-vulnerable protagonist slowly transforms into an unstoppable force of nature — much like 'Die Hard', actually — chosen by Fate-Science-Loves-Verdant-Tin to lead a genetic revolution! And carry The Mantle of Responsibility!! For the entire universe!!! and blah blah typical corporate eugenics blah. I kept playing the games because I wanted the world I loved to come back; after 'Halo 4', the scales finally fell away and I realized it never would. It may never have been there to begin with.

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I was one of the first kids to get an Xbox back in the day. My parents grew up poor and abused, so when they lucked into a period of petty burgeoisie wealth they loved to pay forward to me what they never got. One of those things was video game consoles: first a GameBoy — because Nintendo, and long road trips — then the inaugural Microsoft console — because many reasons, some of which I'd rather not examine at this moment in time.

At any rate, my parents were also devout fundamentalist Christians. and my mother took that very seriously as far as whatever the other mothers had to say about what was or wasn't properly devoutly fundamentalistly Christian. One of those things was bloody, violent video games, because it was that moment in time and I happened to be caught in the typhoon. Amazingly, in that era I managed to successfully campaign to get 'Halo: Combat Evolved' — where you can literally paint an entire room in the blood of both your allies and foes — as the first game on my first home console system, which my father waited until the wee hours of the morning to buy (he'll tell you the story at length if you ask). My first playthrough was a co-op campaign on Easy with her to "make sure it was ok"; by the third level she was hooked, and by the sixth level she was begging me to keep playing with her as soon as I came home from school. Which I did, gladly. We both had to know what was going to happen next. To this day 'Halo' and the subsequent works in its series we experienced together remain a set of fond memories for us.

I bring all that up because, aside from demonstrating that I was directly/indirectly raised to be an out-of-touch asshole, it means that I approached its re-release in the Master Chief Collection with gigantic pangs of nostalgia. For better or worse, 'Halo' in some respects helped define me as a person for years, and I have no desire to let go of that — even more so after replaying it and understanding, with decades of hindsight and experience, exactly what drew my mother and I to this world, and why for years after that we would both dive deeply into the lore — what an immense catalog of lore! — to explore every inch of the universe this game had introduced.

Now, having replayed all the mainline games through 'Halo 4', lemme tell you — none of them hold a candle to the first. Frankly, they mostly kinda suck. The gameplay is overburdened, the graphics are mostly hideous (notable exception: 'Halo 4' is gorgeous), and — as previously noted — the story takes a rough tumble down a long hill.

The books faired slightly better, by my shoddy memory: the Eric Nylund stuff was pretty good, Dietz's novel was passible & 'Contact Harvest' neatly filled in the origin of the Covenant/Human conflict. Unfortunately, none of the stories really matter other than to provide glossary terms; one of the most interesting things Nylund does — trapping a pivotal character on an everything-proof "shield world" surrounded by a dyson sphere comprised of trillions of robots — is never properly followed up, instead being rather undramatically resolved as a minor plot point in a later book I haven't read because, after 'Halo 4', the scales finally fell away and I realized that the world I loved was never coming back. As I write this, I try to come to grips with the idea it may never have been there to begin with.

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At the end of 'Halo', the sentient AI declares victory: "It's finished." The cyborg you control replies "No, I think we're just getting started." At the time, they may have meant that as their own declaration of victory, and their intent to carry on their success. After all the failure that followed, they may have wished the computer was right. Then again, everybody got paid.