Halo is incredible. Awesome. Amazing. The best game ever. Add your adjectives here.
It's been some eight months since I bought my Xbox. It's an awesome little machine, especially after you hack it. There are a surprising number of good games available, and having emulators and homebrew apps like Xbox Media Player make it quite the package. Heck, that's the reason I bought one in the first place. But it wouldn't have been the primary reason had I known then what I know now: Halo is one of the most fun games I've ever played, and it alone is reason to own an Xbox. And no, I'm not kidding.
Halo is the triumph of the little things.
That's about as well as I can describe it. Yes, it has great graphics -- they were incredible for its time and still hold up well -- great music, great positional sound, and a pretty darned good story as far as first person shooters are concerned. But none of these things is so far beyond everything else that it alone would crown Halo the king of games. Its greatness is more distributed; smaller individual things that add up to one heck of a whole. And its these little things that I'm going to talk about the most.
The rechargeable shield. Probably Halo's biggest innovation, and it's a fantastic one. Halo's developers have said that without the shield, it's just not Halo, and they're right. The shield might seem minor at first, but it provides for all sorts of benefits. For example, not sure if that fire is interactive and will hurt you? Go ahead and touch it; it won't end up hurting you because even if it damages you, it will only damage the shield, and it will recharge. Want to peek in and scope out a potentially hazardous area? Go for it. Moreover, in multiplayer, it gives near-death players an incentive to escape, and an opportunity to survive (for a little bit, at least). And if you're attacking someone, it gives you a big incentive to finish the job. It removes the penalty for taking small chances and provides incentive for more aggressive action, and that leads to more exciting gameplay.
The AI. It may not be the best you've ever seen (I think Half-Life still takes the cake for me), but in the single player missions, the enemy AI is pretty decent, and more impressively, the AI of your fellow soldiers is rather good. Driving the Warthog? These guys will jump in shotgun and the gun in the back to help. Attacking an area? They'll actually help. In most games of this type I've played, the friendly AI has a tendency to be as much an annoyance as a help, and that's simply not the case with Halo. Again, it's not amazing enough to make the game great on its merits alone, but it's solid.
The vehicles. Both single player and multiplayer are a whole lot more fun because of the vehicles. The Warthog just handles so well. It's fun just to drive the darned thing around, even, or smack it into the other team's Warthog. The physics are that good, and the inclusion of them completely changes the nature of capture the flag, to boot. And the things are balanced so well, too! Sure, the Warthog might be fast, but it's loud, so you can't sneak in or away in it. Also, it's pretty succeptible to the rocket launcher and grenades, and even the sniper rifle and the pistol. Similar things can be said of the tank and the Ghosts. Sure the tank can take five of your guys in for an assault, but it's slow as hell and really succeptible to having the driver picked off. The vehicles are all well-designed, with fun controls and physics and great balancing.
The weapons. None of the weapons in Halo is particularly different or innovative; it's just how well they all work together. The pistol is surprisingly deadly. The rocket launcher can instantly kill, but is dangerous for you, too (especially on the run) and the rockets move very slowly. Or there's my favorite, the sniper rifle. I don't think any gun in any video game has been quite as satisfying as the sniper rifle in Halo. It just feels so right. What's even better, it leaves a smoke trail when you shoot, so people know where you are. It's such a seemingly minor thing that has such a major impact on the gameplay. Yes, you can effectively snipe, but unless you're discreet about it, people will find you pretty fast. And the one "weapon" that Halo really innovated was being able to smack people with your gun. Not only is it immensely satisfying, but it gives you options when you're low on ammo or simply fighting an enemy with a better weapon.
The maps. Ok, so not every map in Halo is an instant classic. But there are a few treaures in there that you'll want to play time and time again. Battle Creek and Blood Gulch are almost certainly the best, but there are many other great ones like Prisoner. Blood Gulch alone will consume hours and hours of your time, and is amazingly fun both for Capture the Flag and for single player. Yes, it would be nice to have more incredible maps, but I'd rather have a few that are good enough to play time and time again than a lot of lesser maps. Blood Gulch in particular has probably gone down in multiplayer game history.
Split screen. For playing co-op or multiplayer, Halo supports split-screen play. Now, I realize that a lot of people scoff at the notion and think that LAN parties are the only way to go. Well, I see their points, but not once in my life thus far have I been able to get people together for a LAN party. By contrast, we routinely have four to six people playing Halo, and we've gone up to ten. A game that is already awesome with a few friends in the room is even more fun with a bigger group, and being able to throw up to four people on one TV/Xbox makes it actually possible to get a big group together to play. Maybe at some point with laptops LAN parties will get easier, but for now, I'll happily take my quarter-screen and be able to yell at my buddies sitting a few mere feet away.
The controls. Again, some people scoff and think that first person shooters can only really be played on your PC with a mouse and keyboard. Certainly, you get better control that way, but Halo has the best FPS controls I've ever seen. All the buttons are in the right places, and it just feels natural. Every button is used, but nothing is confusing; it only takes a few minutes to learn. And the added difficulty of mastering the controller makes it a bit more rewarding of a learning curve. With a mouse, anyone can pick it up and be sniping in no time. With Halo on the Xbox, anyone can pick up the game and have fun in no time, but certain things like sniping require a bit more skill. It's a better learning curve than the PC side which tends to emphasize crazy jumping and other tricks to differentiate between players who can all use a mouse quite effectively.
So there you have it. A bunch of "little things" that add up to one of the best games ever made -- in my eyes, Tetris is the only possible competition. A great single player (even more fun with co-op!) and an amazing multiplayer mean that you'll play it over and over again, and have you'll have a ton of fun doing it.
My god! For the first time in 14 years, it's a really good Simpsons game! As with most Simpsons games before it, The Simpsons: Hit & Run blatantly steals its formula from a successful game that came before it. But this time, it works. The setup for Grand Theft Auto is an absolutely perfect one for a Simpsons game, because ultimately what you want from a Simpsons game is to be able to expore Springfield, interact with the hundreds of supporting characters the fans have grown to love, and in general exploit the license as much as possible. It's not the most technically impressive game on the block, but it succeeds in spades when it comes to delivering on these things.
First off, let me say this: I'm not crazy about the graphics. I still think cel-shading or some such technique would be more true to the show, and look better, to boot. Also, the engine isn't exactly fantastic, sometimes suffering from camera problems and you-can-see-the-repainting sync issues. And although the animation used when you run over people looks ok as you're driving, the same animation is used when you punch someone, and it looks downright weird. That said, however, they are certainly good enough to not really detract from the game — they simply don't really add to it. Thankfully, all of the characters are rendered fairly well and have a bevy of animations, so that's a saving grace.
The real reason to get the game, though, is the amazing number of references contained within it, which easily overshadow the technical limitations. For example, in the first level alone, you'll drive over the Springfield Tire Fire, through Tomacco plants and the Stone Cutters secret tunnel, and under such landmarks as the Lard Land Donuts boy and "Don't eat beef — eat deer" billboards. And it's not merely references; there are plenty of funny new jokes, such as the newspaper on the loading screen for level one that has the story "Fact: 90% of all video games start with easy tutorial level." It's Simpsons humor by Simpsons writers; what more could you want?
Moreoever, the game is simply loaded with dialogue from the real Simpsons voices, providing just tons of laughter. Sure, some of them are a bit repetitive, but they're so good overall you won't even mind. Make Homer run too much and you'll get, "Must...never...run...again!" Run over some random pedestrain and you'll hear, "It's a bad day for generic bystanders everywhere!" You get the idea; it's good stuff. Even better, although it's not advertised on the box, the Xbox version really seems to have Dolby Digital 5.1 support, which makes the audio all the better.
The gameplay is extremely similar to GTA3, which probably comes at no surprise. It works pretty well — if you're going to copy a game completely, copy a great game. And the beauty of it is that it really lets you experience Springfield, which has always been the goal for a Simpsons game, I would think. You get to interact with all the characters and see all the places as a backdrop for the game. It's exactly as a TV show based game should be. As far as gameplay, it's pretty much straight GTA3. So you have races, "destroy the other car" missions, "find these item" missions, and so forth. Navigation is made simpler by arrows inlaid on the road, but other than that, you're getting pretty much the GTA3 experience with a Simpsons skin. And that is more than fine with me.
The bottom line is that it's fun gameplay that will consistently have any Simpsons fan grinning from ear to ear because of the clever dialogue, funny jokes, and simply incredible number of references. There are so many, and some are so subtle, that I couldn't help but be blown away. No, it's not perfect, but taken as a whole, this is the game Simpsons fans have been waiting for.