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It seems to all the other game reviewers have put me in an awkward position, bunch of cocky twats they are. Most if not all of them seem to have played a jewel encrusted game from the treasure vaults of Xerxes, but I played a game that I probably would only consider renting had it not been for my large quantities of Best Buy gift cards that were burning a hole in my wallet. Part of the problem might be that I’ve never actually played a Halo game up until now and maybe you need all the back story to get the experience all the other reviewers were having or maybe Microsoft was paying someone to stand behind them jamming dopamine into their spinal columns every half-hour. All I knew going into the game was this: there’s some guy called master chief who wears a suit of armor that’s probably in dire need of some odor-eaters by now and X-box owners have been tossing each other off with glee in anticipation of this third installment. I picked up a few things as I played through the game like how the earth has been conquered by evil aliens except some aliens are good by some arbitrary designation and there are these other aliens who are basically just the head crabs from half-life in disguise and there are big rings in space that make things die somehow and master chief has a friend who is basically the black guy from Predator, but I gave up the plot by the time I was in a base being ordered around by a twelve year old girl and pretty much remained in the dark from then on which is ironic choice of words because the game constantly vomits brightly colored bloom in your face. If you ask me to summarize Halo 3 in one word I’d tell you to stop being such a t**t, but if pressed I’d probably go for schizophrenic. It can’t seem to decide on a tone. Sometimes it goes for the horror route with the aforementioned head crab malarkey but at other times you’ve got enemy midgets running around sounding and acting like retarded ewoks making fingerquotes “wacky” dialogue. And it’s hard to take things seriously when all the guns look and sound like they were manufactured by Matel. The difficulty was also rather inconsistent which probably comes from a design team large enough to found a small island nation, the difficulty curve waves up and down like the lace on the knickers of an indecisive whore before plunging down into a stroll down easy street for about an hour or so. There were sequences near the beginning that kicked my a** so much that I wound up wearing my buttocks like a hat while the closest thing to a final boss fight was basically you versus a wheelchair riding, cross-eyed hobbit and you were armed with the BFG-9000. One thing I did like was the vehicle sections where you can choose to either drive, man the turret, or sit in the passenger seat waving to passing chicks while the friendly NPCs did all the work. It’s great in theory, unfortunately it’s let down by all the NPCs being pants-on-head retarded. On one occasion it was my jeep versus an enemy tank, but the clueless pilock at the turret seemed more interested in shooting down nearby butterflies. Eventually I got out and took the turret myself and ordered the passenger to take the driver’s seat whereupon he immediately smacked us into a wall and sat there picking his nose while the enemy leisurely blew us to Narnia. As well as being blighted by the above issues the single player campaign is criminally short and takes about 8-10 hours depending on the difficulty setting and ham-handedness, but the people tell me that the multiplayer excuses it. Unfortunately I don’t give a flying s**t about multiplayer and neither do a lot of people. I didn’t pay 50 dollars to a game who’s feet reviewers have been throwing perfect scores like bunches of roses to a bull-fighter. A game that is supposed to be perfect wouldn’t need anything to excuse it. Quote erat demonstrandum said I like the big literary f** that I am. Before all the Microsoft fan boys come to my house to take turns to whittle through my letterbox let me qualify my statements by saying that Halo 3 is in no means bad. What it is is average, boilerplate, run-of-the-mill. A competent shooter who’s main distinguishing feature is the degree to which it’s stuck up it’s own a**. Everything it does has been done and better, it’s definitely not as good as bioshock in fact it’s made me look back on those 15 hours of objecterous falderol more charitably so in other words, Halo 3 is what it took to finally lower my standards and I hope it’s proud of itself. But really, I don’t know what I hope to achieve with all this, Halo 3 is already more popular than god and nothing I can say will stop Microsoft from making enough money to buy Switzerland and reinforce the notion that all gamers want is brightly colored dross with the death of a spoon. So if in the future we find ourselves playing “Captain Bland’s Monotonous Adventure” in what moments we can spare in toiling the Microsoft over mines off world mining complex that I want you all to know that I ******** called it.
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