Saturday 5 June 2010

Halo 3: What If It Wasn’t Halo?

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I finished Halo 3 today. It’s taken me… a year. Yea. Round about a year. I hate Halo, I think it’s boring. The problem is I’m the only person in the world who seems to hold this view apart from people who hate it for the sake of being different (but secretly love it anyway).

So I’ve decided to write a review for Halo, but in a different way. I’ve decided to write a review for Halo in a universe where Halo 1 + 2 were never made. Instead, Halo 3 was a standalone Xbox 360 game that was released to an audience that had never played any of the previous instalments in the series. Obviously I won’t mention the story elements because that would be silly, of course the narrative wouldn’t make sense. Instead, I’m focusing purely on game play. Enjoy, and please, no hate mail.

Original Dungeon Keeper Reviews: “PURPLE SCI-FI SHOOTER”

I finished PSS today. It’s taken me… a year. Yea. Round about a year.

I picked up PSS when I first got my Xbox because a mate of mine said the online was OK. Not as good as Gears of War or Modern Warfare but OK. It was cheap, so I decided to give it a go.

Upon booting up the main campaign It was instantly clear that this wasn’t going to be the greatest gaming experience of my life. It’s main character “Conventional Protagonist 1” handled like any other FPS character from Playstation era. He even jumps really high, something I thought they’d gotten rid of along with “Bullet Time”. This may seem like a minor complaint, but perhaps I’ve just been spoiled with the realistic movements of Soap Mc.Tavish, swaying left and right as he runs and bending his knees as he jumps. In comparison, CP1 may as well be a cardboard cut out with a camera attached to him.

After running through a jungle area I encountered by first enemies. Tiny, dwarf things that ran around shouting comments that even a five year old would cringe at. Still, all is fair in love and war so I pulled out my gun and pulled the trigger. My gun, what initially appeared to be a machine gun, may as well have been a super soaker full of piss. Flimsy little thing, it spat out bullets and laid waste to the creature in front of me in a way that was as exciting as an episode of the antiques road show. Again, this may seem like a minor complaint but the gun looked so conventional that the mere fact that it gave no satisfaction to fire whatsoever meant that it basically added insult to injury in doing so. In a desperate attempt to gain some enjoyment out of what I presumed was going to be my major pastime throughout the course of the game, I scrounged the corpses for some alien weaponry. Instead of some kind of devastating corpse creator, I picked up something clearly made my Tomy. It was purple, with bits of green taped on. Upon pulling the trigger it fired… green laser… balls. I put my head into my hands and sighed. Did they seriously think this work? Did they shred the big book of videogame clichés and mash it up into a game disc? Still. Like the brave little trooper I am, I carried on.

What followed was ten levels of shooting, terrible level design, unoriginal enemies (Shoot this one in the back, this ones slightly tougher than that one, this ones a token undead enemy, etc.) and really uninspired driving sections. Even the locations were dull and failed to make me take any interest in their importance whatsoever. PSS was a boring, sloppy and uneventful game that has failed to impress me one little bit. As an FPS it’s boring. As a Game, it’s completely dull.

Oh, and that Multiplayer my friend was talking about? It consists of super soakering your enemies until they get close enough to you, then you melee them so they die. That’s how you play it. Seriously.

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