All gamers have gaps in their gaming histories, those classic games or
consoles that they never got around to playing for one reason or another. Most of
us could probably name three or four games we’ve never played that are
considered to be absolute stone cold classics by the gaming community at large.
There are a few in my pile of shame that I’m happy to admit fall into
that category. Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are both
considered super, legendary classics. There was also God of War that I recently
crossed of my list, having missed it for some reason when it first came out.
But over the last week or so I have been tackling a game that I considered to
be a big, round, gaping hole in my gaming history: Halo.
I never properly played Halo because I didn’t ever own an Xbox. I had a
few goes of it way back when, but there weren’t too many people that I knew
that owned them, so that limited my exposure. But now that they’ve released
Halo: Anniversary I’ve had the chance to travel back in time and finally
experience this legendary game.
In fact, the ability to time travel is one of Halo: Anniversary’s most
intriguing features. The game has had a graphical overhaul to bring it into line
with today’s standards, but with the simple press of the ‘Back’ button
(appropriately), the game reverts to the original graphics that it featured
when released in 2001. This makes for a fascinating glimpse into the past, and
whenever I came across a visually interesting section I would switch back to
the original graphics and play that way for a few minutes to experience it as originally
intended. Of course, I always came back to the future to play using the current
graphics as they were much more easy on the eye, but I appreciated the
inclusion of this feature, and I think you’d get even more out of it if you’d
played this back when it was first released.
Being a fan of shooters and sci-fi in general I’d been looking forward
to this, and overall it was good fun in a tactics-free, blast-a-thon sort of
way. Shoot, retreat, pop out again blasting, that was all you needed to know
really. The graphics were colourful and fun, and I never tired of blowing up
those annoying little Jawa type dudes. I did find that the sound levels were a
bit off, the guns were massively loud, but the voices in the cutscenes were so
low that I’d miss what was said for the first ten or fifteen seconds as I
hunted around for the remote to turn it up. But it didn’t seem like there was
really much that I missed, I got the gist of what was going on. Kill those
things, follow the arrow on the screen. Repeat.
When a game’s been out for years you can’t go without hearing a lot
about it, the talk of classic characters, favourite moments, and of course, the
gripes. I’d heard a lot over the years about the dreaded level, ‘The Library’,
with ‘annoying’ and ‘repetitive’ being the main complaints I’d heard. So when I
finally came to play The Library I was surprised that I found it a tight,
intense, and exciting level. I enjoyed the fight against the relentless enemies,
even if their ranks contained one of gaming’s most annoying and overused enemy
types, the big fat one that bursts into lots of annoying little ones. I
couldn’t understand what everyone had been moaning about with this level. Did
they not play the level just before this one, ‘Assault on the Control Room’?
Fuck me, now there was a repetitive, annoying, and seemingly endless level. I
hated that level so much that as I was playing it I was thinking to myself, “So
this is that Library level they all bitch about, boy, they were right, this
sucks!” But then it turned out it wasn’t even The Library. “How have I not
heard about this particular piece of horrible level design?” I wondered as I
played through Assault on the Control Room, “How bad is The Library going to be
after this nightmare?”
So when I got to The Library for real I was pleasantly surprised. I played
through it, got to the end of the level, watched another mumbly cut scene, and
then started the next level. I ran down a hallway, through some doors, into
some corridors, corridors that started to look a bit similar to, hold on, what’s
through this door, isn’t this... the Control Room?
At this point the game announced that I needed to destroy three exhaust
vents, or something. I dunno, I was too busy staring in disbelief at the TV as
I was told that I was supposed to do this by retracing my steps back through
the entirety of the aforementioned and hated level ‘Assault on the Control
Room.’ Oh, goodo.
It was like some cruel trick. The level I was supposed to hate hadn’t
been that bad, and now I was being forced to revisit the one that had irked me
the most. Had I gotten it wrong? Had I been mishearing it all these years, like
the person whose eBay listing I saw for “a Chester drawers”? Like that stupid,
short, fat woman at work who did a PowerPoint presentation of upcoming events under
the heading “What’s in stall?” Was I like those retards?
Possibly.
The rest of the game was then a retread of the early levels, done in
reverse. How unbelievably lazy is that? It was the game design equivalent of a
palindrome. They made half a game and then just flipped it for the second half.
I was rather unimpressed.
Then to top it off there was the final level where you had to navigate the
practically undriveable jeep thing down an obstacle course in a certain amount
of time to make it to the escape pod. I appreciate a challenge, and the sense
of accomplishment that comes with overcoming that challenge, but I really don’t
appreciate it when game designers make something so frustratingly difficult
that it’s not even fun. I’m pretty sure my neighbours didn’t appreciate the
amount of loud swearing that this final level induced, either.
21 down, 29 to go.
