Power Glove Love

I’ll be the first to admit it. I succumbed to the Halo 3 hype sirens. Their song was enticing. What can I say? Forge sounded delicious and I needed something to beat away the loneliness of sitting around in my parents’ house on a Friday night. So I went and pre ordered the game and was one of those sad, sad people that got in line hours early to pick the game up at midnight. And here I am.

Browsing around the internet like I always do because I don’t really have a life, I noticed that all the big sites were throwing perfect or almost perfect reviews for Halo 3. The only logical reason for this, I deduced, is that Microsoft gave these reviewers a harem of 13-year-old-Natalie-Portman-from-Leon robots. What? Don’t look at me like that. Statutory rape doesn’t apply to filthy robots. It’s in the Patriot Act. Look it up. I might need to go watch Hotel Chevalier now (Google it, dicks).

Excuse me.

Alright, that was refreshing. Back to Halo 3. I didn’t really bother much with the single player. Basically all you do in it is fight a bunch of fat, retarded children who waddle everywhere and have cute little quips, a race of cave-monster-from-the-first-Lord-of-the-Rings replicants who now wear fancy armor and can talk, a couple fucking annoying snipers who carry gaily colored shields and space-zombies. Throw in your occasional boring cut scene that advances the boring storyline (I don’t know, something about a bunch of big space-rings that can blow up the universe or whatever and some space-zombies) and a dude that floats around in a high-tech space wheelchair, and you got yourself a game! I like adding the word ‘space’ in front of a noun. It just makes it that much more humorous.

Once in a while they’ll break up the action by throwing in a scarab, which I am convinced was engineered by the fat, waddling retarded children. Sure, it looks big and scary, but shoot a couple spitballs at its legs and it falls down, allowing you to hop onboard and blow up the conveniently unprotected power core. Huraaaaaaaaaay. The single player is pretty much what I expected it to be: yawn-fest 2007. Whatever. The main reason I bought the game was for the multiplayer, anyway.

I’ve been called a faggot more times in the few weeks that I’ve been playing matchmaking then I have in my entire life. But that’s just Halo. You learn to deal with it. The more hilarious Xbox Live idiots are the ones that send you a message saying “1v1 MLG” after losing to you. For the uncultured, that means they are challenging your manhood through a one on one match with MLG style rules, which I think means you spawn with a Battle Rifle/Pistol and there’s no radar. Don’t really know, don’t really care.

Playing for a couple weeks has shown me that people at Bungie are fucking lazy. Just take a look at the matchmaking playlists. Play it for a half hour and count how many times shotty snipers pops up. I’ll give you a hint. A LOT. It’s very annoying because I’m a terrible sniper, so basically every shotty snipers game involves me running around and getting shot in the head every 10 seconds. Fun, right? They fixed this in an update, but it’s just so when you veto a match, you won’t get shotty snipers twice. I’ll just stick to custom games until Bungie gets off their asses and spices up the playlists a bit.
The maps themselves are all pretty fucking lazy too. They’re all just rehashes of maps from Halo 2. Guardian? Lockdown in the jungle. Valhalla? Coagulation with shinier graphics. By the way, for those of you keeping track, Coagulation was a Halo 2 remake of Blood Gulch from Halo 1. So basically we have a copy of a copy of a copy. Wonderful! Zanzibar? …Zanzibar. There are a few maps that I don’t think are rehashes, but that’s probably because it’s been a long time since I played Halo 2 and don’t remember. Any lifeless Halo nerds out there that care to educate me, be my guest. These maps are pretty unfortunate too, however. They mainly consist of one, big outdoor area connected by a bunch of underground tunnels. Isolation and Snowbound, for example. These two maps are the exact same fucking thing, but just in different settings. Bra-fucking-vo, Bungie map designers. You guys officially suck.

And Forge? A big ball of “meh.” You can modify any setting you want, sure, but you can’t actually change the geography of the shitty map you’re playing on, so who cares? Wow, you can make one team run faster than the other. GREAT.

Despite all this, I do have fun playing online with friends. It’s a good little gaming community, I guess. That’s the thing about this game. It’s a huge package, but all the components are average at best. It’s like getting a lifetime supply of socks for Christmas. Sure, you got a lifetime supply of socks, but… they’re socks. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go play with the 6 other people that still play Team Fortress 2 on Xbox Live.