[General Discussion] Terrible taste in games? Guilty secrets and you

I'd say for every two or three games I can make a really good argument for - theres one or two I cannot even fathom why I played them as much as I did.

Example? Superman Returns. My comic nerd child enjoyed this rather broken game for one very simple reason - flying around was fun as hell. You can do it in a billion other games, but this was Superman, so there was something much more "important" about it. I liked the game - it wasn't a lost work of art nor was it the worst thing for the 360 - but it was an entertaining aside for $15. It is also one of the two games I have a complete 1000/1000 gamer score for (the other being CoD2).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Kimchi

Halo: ALL. I couldn't get in the game...

God's honest truth: the reason Halo is popular isn't because its a good game, but because its a generic shooter. This is the direct reason its fanbase is annoying as it is: because its filled with college meatheads and teenagers who want something for nothing - which is the base building blocks the game sets its self on.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg

Referring to it with terms like "mediocre" and "generic" is horribly nebulous, and comparing it to needlessly convoluted PC shooters is a major case of apples-and-oranges.

I'll put this simply: I think Halo is a game designed to appeal to idiots.

I don't like the setting. It has just enough 'story' to convince stupid people that it's really clever. The entire thing is a pastiche of dumbed-down placeholders from a variety of obvious sources - a space fleet, a ringworld, a holographic assistant, space marines, a masked space hero, etc. etc. I defy any educated science fiction fan previously unfamiliar with the game to play through the first part of the first game and not immediately complain that the guys at Bungie must have really liked Aliens... and Star Wars... and StarShip Troopers... and Larry Niven... and Metroid in very, very unsubtle ways.

This would be fine, in and of itself... after all, my favorite PC game of all time - Wing Commander - does exactly the same thing on exactly the same scale. In Halo, though, it became clear pretty quickly that the developers and the fan were taking it all incredibly seriously and believed it to be high art. Where Wing Commander went off to have some of the most enjoyably pulpy tie-in novels ever written, Halo went on to explain in an intricate fashion just how brilliant it was that the guy who wrote it saw a bunch of movies. I think it completely snapped for me when I saw elaborate official histories about how and why a girl Halo robot appeared in one of those girls-in-bikinis-beat-up-eachother fighting games (see, she's actually TK-422 and she's the friend of Halo Robot Alpha 5 who was mentioned in the pre-release fiction printed on the lanyards they gave out at E3...).

And speaking of terrible stories, remember the lauded 'ilovebees' ad campaign for Halo 2? Ugh, ugh, ugh - it was the most pretentious thing in the universe, with pointless nonsense websites being 'tracked down' to 'prepare' everyone for the epic story behind Halo 2. I wanted to strangle John Halo very, very hard every time I heard someone stupid enough to fall for that crap raging about how wonderful it was. It was a whole campaign designed to make stupid people feel smart about playing an arcade game.

(In that light, let me give a rare kudo to Halo 3 - the advertising was truly magnificent. I'm the kind of guy who loves tie-ins and merchandising, and Halo 3 did that beautifully. Halo 3 Slurpees, Halo 3 action figures, Halo 3 Cars, disgusting Halo 3 flavored Mountain Dew, etc. I know it annoys some folks, but I wish to heck it was a game I didn't grit my teeth thinking about. And an unkudo - that terrible 'museum' advertisement is a brilliant concept that is done so poorly that it makes me angry beyond my ordinary angry-that-Halo-halos anger.)

Now, these pretenses and other nonsense weren't necessarily enough to turn off old LeHah - maybe the game itself was as brilliant as everyone insisted. Maybe it really would change the way we would play first person shooters and the way stories would be told in video games and so forth and so on.

Nope!

Halo is an ordinary game, simplified so that everyone can play. That would actually be an honorable design concept, mind you, if I believed for a minute that they went in thinking 'everyone' would mean mom and dad and little sis and Dusty the cat rather than as many teenage boys looking to scream 'cocksucker' at each other over and over as possible. But... I'm not anti-cynical enough to convince myself of that.

I was never one of those 'FPS games are destroying gaming!' cubes. I think they're fine, they're fun and there's a lot to be built on with them. Some special games, like the first Ghost Recon, take the basic concept in a new direction in exactly the way art builds upon itself. Others, even more rarely (like the original Half Life) are literally earth-shattering - they're games that change how things like narrative itself works. Still others are just DooM with a new hat, and they're usually just as fun as their august predecessor. Halo is that type of game wearing the rotting corpse of the previous two.

The big developments in Halo just aren't. Wow, you hold two guns at once - somebody call Lara Croft! Wow, you can drive a car - somebody call Cybermage! Wow, you can play it in split screen - somebody call every Nintendo 64 game ever made. Halo is a bunch of good ideas that already existed in a pleasant balanced package (literally a pleasant package - the art design works in exactly he same way as the other 'dumbed down' aspects of the game... maps and baddies and characters who are literally as inoffensive and designed not to have a particular style to them as possible.)

It really seems for all the world to me to be a game made to sucker idiots - the story, the gameplay, the art, the ease of the thing... so, I feel bad about it. Several of my friends - people I respect more than anyone on this Earth - love Halo 3. They were playing when I started writing this. I see that and it hits my gut - how do people I really love like something so stupid? Maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe I'm unable to have fun for some reason, maybe I want attention... but I just can't feel it. The franchise bothers me on a very personal level that I find myself completely unable to write off. I do feel somewhat bad being an asshole about Halo, in light of people having fun with it and people I believe in loving it, but it is how I feel regardless of anything else.

(Is Halo just plain fun? Maybe - but certainly not for me. I drove three meters in the stupid Halo car and got stuck in a hole... Cybermage's stupid box tank worked better and that game had strippers! I played multiplayer games that were exactly the same as CounterStrike fort-levels with a Star Wars Bounty Hunter skin. It just didn't do anything for me and occasionally veered into incredibly tedious territory.)

So yes - if you like Halo, you are a horrible person.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg

Besides, since when do people who criticise a video game for setting and storyline... have any credibility at all?

Ever since people took gaming far too seriously.

You're one of those people who say "Why do you have to be so critical about everything?" aren't you? One of those people (emphasis mine, slur insinuated) who takes immediate insult the moment someone bothers using their brain outside of a classroom or their Stephen King Book Club.

Thats fine. Live your life how you see fit, I suppose. But heres the long and short of it: You asked, I answered, you took offense and then couldn't bother to retort, so you replied in generic prosody fashion and emphasized general feeling instead of empirical material I already wrote.

Or since you're of shorter attention span: You just failed at everything.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by wvlfpvp

Hey now. ilovebees is the only part of Halo I gave any shit about, but that's because ARGs are awesome, and have been ever since the flawed inception of the genre that was Majestic. ARGs as advertising are really nice ways of doing things, as I see it.

To reply to this one element would start topic drift. I'm interested to see how someone can... agree... with this idea, so if you wanna start that conversation someone else, I'll gladly follow.

I was speaking idiomatically.