Halo

So I finally got around to playing half an hour of Halo 3: ODST last night, and while I'm not planning to write a review of it any time soon, I wanted to comment on the weird experience I had with the game.

I was playing a friend's game, so I just sort of dropped in medias res, and had no idea what was going on plot-wise, so I'm not going to bother commenting on that aspect. What I will say is that for the first fifteen minutes of my playtime I had a blast. So much fun that I couldn't remember why I'd hated Halo 3 as much as I did (by which I mean "not really that much at all").

Yay.

Meh.

Nay.

Don't care.

Another video I've been wanting to post for a while.

There must be tons of women out there who hate Halo. Yeah, World of Warcraft gets all of the attention for being addictive, monopolizing a gamers' time and causing all sort of marital problems. But other games do that too. One of those games is Halo. What are the ladies to do when a series is so rampantly popular and shows no sign of slowing down? You stop the problem at its source of course!

Parental discretion very STRONGLY advised! NSFW!

"...there is a kegger down the hall. We can go as soon as I desecrate this corpse. I'm sorry Marge, where are my manners? Did you want to taunt my kill also? Press the "X" button."  - Homer Simpson

If you're like me, on the one hand you're thrilled to see The Simpsons parodying videogames... outside of its own videogames (The Simpsons Hit & Run and The Simpsons Game). On the other hand, you sigh sadly with the realization that the masses are seeing one of the less savory sides of interactive play. Why couldn't the writers lampoon Shadow of the Colossus or Flower? Ah well, it was a pretty funny clip.

Just as English literature buffs should be knowledgeable about the heavyweights of the Western canon—Macbeth, Huckleberry Finn, Ulysses, etc.—so too should videogame critics be acquainted with gaming’s megahits, games like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and, yes, the Halo series. So, like the English lit student who struggles to wrap his or her head around Ulysses, not because it’s enjoyable but because it’s important, I decided that I should at least try to understand Halo.

Game Description: Halo 3 is the third game in the Halo Trilogy and the thrilling conclusion to the events begun in Halo: Combat Evolved. Master Chief returns to finish the fight, bringing the epic conflict between the Covenant, the Flood, and the entire human race to a dramatic, pulse-pounding climax. The Covenant occupation of Earth has uncovered a massive and ancient object beneath the African sands—an object whose secrets have yet to be revealed. Earth's forces are battered and beaten. The Master Chief's AI companion Cortana is still trapped in the clutches of the Gravemind—a horrifying Flood intelligence, and a civil war is raging in the heart of the Covenant. It's all been building to this—a desperate, final war that leads to a soul-shattering climax of epic proportions. Take control of Master Chief to defeat the Covenant and destroy the Flood to prevent the annihilation of the human race.

The advertisements for Halo 3 promise an epic tale of tragedy, sacrifice, and heroism that Halo 3 really had no hope in hell of ever delivering. More troubling, however, is the fact that after playing the game, I can say with some certainty that they promised a game that Bungie didn't even bother trying to produce.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Blood and Gore, Mild Language, Violence

With all the recent debate about whether or not videogames should be consider (good or bad) art, would it not be of cultural significance and a sign of the times (no pun intended) if the venerable news institution declared that videogames was indeed worthy of being covered alongside the paintings by artist Willem de Kooning, the singing of soprano Natalie Dessay or comedic *genius* of Dane Cook in Good Luck Chuck?