Loaded Console

This review was written for Evil Controllers.

Bungie’s last Halo is out, offering everything we’ve come to expect from a Halo game. Full-fledged multiplayer, added and upgraded game types, as well as a solid campaign. Bungie hasn’t been sitting idle in a vacuum of their own ideas, they’ve obviously been taking notes to improve the game we love, Halo, but is Halo: Reach the best?

While the conclusion of Halo: Reach is known before hand, it doesn’t mean the game is incapable of packing a wallop. If you’re familiar with the Halo universe then you should already know what happens on Reach, the humans fail to defend it. The Covenant’s invasion of Reach is successful. The narrative backdrop keeps the game consuming, the future grim, and the battles constant.

Since the outcome is known, Bungie had to focus on the delivery and making it compelling despite that. In Halo: Reach you play as Nobel Six, the sixth member of Nobel Team. Nobel Team is a group of Spartans that work to defend Reach in unison with the larger army. The game makes that clear in the campaign’s opening when your squad leader welcomes you. “Were glad to have your skill set, but we’re a team. That lone wolf stuff, stays behind.” It’s an odd meta moment referencing previous Halo games that haven’t occurred in the time line of Reach, but it sets a pace that’s felt throughout the campaign. You always feel apart of something bigger. You’re no longer Master Chief, the one man army.

The campaign sets you in a variety of gameplay scenarios, attacking Covenant installments, pushing back Covenant advancements, and vehicle segments that feel like breathers from the rest of the action. War skirmishes also look and feel more intense then they have in the past. Halo encounters have always had a particular style, they occur in large open areas giving you the option of taking down enemies in the order and manner in which you please. Halo: Reach maintains that, but has modified the games aesthetic to match the intensity of the doomed climate. The grunts no longer look as cartoony as they have in the past while the brutes look significantly tougher and more intimidating. The pacing has a slow start, but quickly ramps up as the rest of Nobel Team become familiar comrades, and Reach’s demise becomes evident.

Reach’s Multiplayer is really where most fans of the series will spend the bulk of their time and it definitely offers everything you’d expect from a Halo game, but not without improvements. Halo: Reach has added custom loadouts to multiplayer that can be selected before the match and after every death. This allows players to make slight alterations to their strategy depending on their specific circumstance. The loadouts are specific skills like: sprint, jetpack, or the ability to drop a shield. Your loadout also determines your starting weapons. Nothing game changing, but rather helpful in accomplishing specific objectives. This definitely reinforces creativity and makes those painful massacres a little more bearable.

Matchmaking is now available not only in multiplayer, but for the campaign as well as for cooperative game modes like Firefight. Bungie is definitely predicting that Halo 3 fans will migrate over to Halo: Reach’s multiplayer and with good reason. Halo’s multiplayer has never offered as many game types and specific game mode alterations as Halo: Reach. The system allows extremely customizable game types. If you want everyone to have jetpacks and use Rocket launchers, no problem. If you love the new game, but dislike the new loadouts, turn them off in the menu. You can then share your game types and playlists with other people on Xbox Live. Not only keeping players happy, but encouraging players to play around with all of the options by give them the resources to share their ideas.

The game isn’t perfect, the frame rate drops every now and then and the game’s campaign suffers from a slow start, but the ultimate package is solid. With all of the features offered through multiplayer, the bar is set ridiculously high for future shooters. The number of hours one could spend with this title is practically limitless and rewarded with in game currency. While the currency is used to unlock only audio and cosmetic changes to your specific character, it definitely makes playing another round a little more justifiable. The one negative thing Halo has been known for is an obnoxious online community, but even for that, Bungie created a solution. The “Psych Profile” feature promises to keep like minded gamers playing together. If you’ve never liked the Halo games, this one won’t change your mind, but if you’ve been a fan of any of them, there isn’t a reason to avoid this one.

Definitely a Must Buy

Written for Microsoft’s “Best of Contest” at Bitmob.com

BioShock is definitely the best 360 shooter on the platform. Most of my friends are probably tired of my story revolving around it, but people on the internet have never heard it, so here you go:

I hated first-person shooters, I played Halo, I played Golden Eye 64, but for the most part I could never really get into them. Conversations around FPSes equally frustrated me, if first-person perspective was supposed to be the most immersive gaming perspective why the hell did I hate playing in it so much. I always felt a natural disconnect in FPSes, but until recently never knew what it was. It’s that FPSes don’t give us great peripheral vision, or realistic looking peripheral vision. The edges of the screen always slam that 4^th wall back into place.

When Bioshock came out though, that wasn’t the issue for me. The issue for me was that I didn’t know how to play FPSes. Oh sure, I could get through the game, but the audio files, the turrets, electric plasmas, communicating with Atlas, the pounding steps of a Big Daddy, it was all so overwhelming. I was used to cut scenes and I like cut-scenes.

After 20 minutes of the game I decided that I wasn’t enjoying myself and that it wasn’t the game’s fault, it was my fault.

Having gotten myself to play Portal, and loving it as much as everyone else, I decided that I’d have to play more then Portal from The Orange Box to justify having bought it at full retail price. So I was going to go through the Half-Life series. This meant dragging myself through the original Half-Life on the PC, which if you know me, a keyboard and mouse just doesn’t click for gaming. It did though and I had a great time. Thank god for PC gaming’s save systems.

So I went through the games one by one, learning along the way the terminology of a FPS. I learned to judge what kinds of strategies to use in certain kinds of confrontations, I learned how to assess which jumps I could and couldn’t make, something that always irked me in first person, and by the time I finished Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the perspective and the action came naturally to me.

When I finally got around to playing BioShock again, for the second time, I could listen to Atlas, gun down enemies, and avoid turrets, without thinking about it. With so much more of my brain power available to me, I could appreciate the aspects of BioShock that really brought it together, the atmosphere, the crazed enemies, the eclectic personalities, the richness of the world. Rapture was truly defined.

When I’d explore and search Rapture I never got lost like I could in other shooters, because in the corner of my screen I’d catch something glittering gold and check it out. It was always worth it.