Finish the Fight!

Wow, so two weeks and nothing from the lunatic. Bad monkey! No biscuit!! Sorry about that, I'll try to be better in the future.

It's been busy. Relatively. Work, unpacking, arranging finances. All kinds of fun stuff. Then this little thing over there popped up.

I'll proudly proclaim from any rooftop that I'm a geek. Geeking has earned me years of entertainment, and it's helping to supply me with an affordable lifestyle, so I will never bash it, and will openly admit that I am geek.

That being said, I am nowhere near as bad as some of the people in this world. I've never stood outside a movie theater waiting for the next installment of the Star Wars series(which one of these days I'll get around to blasting). I've never theorycrafted about the uber amounts of damage that a gnomish berzerker on steroids can do in the freezing rain outside of Ravenholm, or whatever the newest "flavor of the week" module D&D comes up with(although I have done it in the Camarilla...and believe you me, my "what if" cheese is infinitely better than anyone's!) And I've certainly never sat in line at a Gamestop or EB Games waiting for a midnight sale for a video game.

I love my video games, don't get me wrong, but that level of blind fanaticsm is just over the top. That level of...something or other, ceases to be geekiness and turns into sheer fanboi(yes..with an i, fanbois are the spawn of satan, fanboys are alright) obsession. While I can respect, to a certain extent, people being fanatical over something they enjoy, there comes to be a point where you have to step back and say "What the hell am I thinking?"

How many people, would you say, ditched work, family members, loved ones, and god knows how many other responsibilities, so they could camp out at a game store, and be the first one in line to get a silver shiny dvd with some computer code on it? I'd wager a lot. And when all is said and done, is that shiny little disc going to make you a better person? Is it going to solve all your life's problems? Probably not. It's just going to put a small dent in your wallet, and give you some entertainment. Granted, it's some good entertainment, but beyond that, it's not very important in the grand scheme of things.

So, if the end result is a smaller nest of money, and you won't gain any long-term benefits, why do it? I have yet to have anyone be able to give me a viable reason on this, other than something involving 1337-speak, and lots of excalamation points and typoed ones everywhere.

But, all fanboi-bashing aside, the game in question, for those of you who are totally in the dark, or in this case, just ignorant in general, is Halo 3. Master Chief is back for one last hurrah.

I've never been a huge Halo fanatic. I remember when it was first talked about. The game was going to be a PC franchise, and then Microsoft threw their hat into the console ring, and Halo suddenly became the flagship game for the upcoming Xbox. Cue Jason's sad tears.

While I'm not a huge Halo fanatic, I am a huge FPS fanatic. I love my shooters. It always amuses me to hear Playstation fanbois screaming that the Xbox360 is a FPS-one-trick-pony, when basic fact of the matter is, FPS-based games sell systems. Especially well made ones, like Gears of War, or in this case Halo 3. The old saying does apply, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Suffice to say, I've had quite a long history with FPS games. Doom, DoomII, the Quake franchise, ok basically any game put out by iD software, the Unreal franchise, Call of Duty 1 through 237235, Battlefield 2, and it's sequel "Battlefield: We're really Mechwarrior, but we won't tell anyone", etc etc etc. The list is pretty lengthy. In a nutshell, if it has explodey things, and it's first-person, I've probably played it.

Now, not to contradict myself, which I do from time to time, deal with it, I haven't had much experience with the Halo franchise. I dabbled with the first Halo a little bit, but never could get really engrossed in it. I never was a huge fan of campaign stories in FPS games, because the AI was typically too predictable, and the game itself was too repetitive for the most part. Most of my time was spent playing online. Playing against a human adversary is a much more painful beast than playing against a computer. While you can sometimes predict how players might react to something, it's not a given.

With that in mind, I picked up Halo 3 this week. No, I didn't sit in line waiting for a copy. I went to Best Buy the day after release, and was shocked to see a stack of Halo 3 copies on sale. The clerk said they got something like over a thousand copies shipped in. Color me surprised. So I picked up my Collector's Edition copy with the special little tin(I'm also a "special edition" freak...I love having something other than the generic standard release, especially if the case is metal...see my copies of Gears of War , Prey, heck, even my Appleseed movie is a metal tin), got a second controller to knock out some local co-op, and headed home. I think I heard the sounds of my bank account weeping as I left the store.

I got home, and myself and one of my buddies knocked out the first few chapters of the game, and I must say I'm impressed. The game is beautiful without being overbearing. You're thrown right into the thick of combat right at the getgo, and the pace is frantic. Combat is smooth, very fluid, and intelligent. Enemies actually have some resemblance to tactics. It's nice to play against a computer that thinks somewhat like a human.

We blew through a little bit of the game, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. After that, I broke out some of the Live gaming, and ran through some matches, and was blown away even more. Multiplayer is just silly. I didn't see any lag anywhere, and the game was visually stunning on a whole new level. Suffice to say, me likey.

The only thing that bugs me is probably attributed to my own lack of experience. I would unload an entire clip into someone, and yet I would be the one to die. It got a little frustrating on more than one occasion, but I'm sure a few nights of running through matches will fix that.

The multiplayer modes are pretty slick. I've only tackled the solo stuff so far, Slayer, Oddball, and Crazy King. Slayer is typical blow people up. Crazy King, king of the mountain, is definitely quality. Pain in the neck as it is, I like it a lot. Oddball, on the other hand, I'm not a big fan of.

It's a twist on king of the hill, whereas instead of the capture point being a static location, the capture point is a skull that you gain points for while in control of. When you kill the skull-runner, it drops, then you can pick it up and start running. The few games I've played with it, ends up being one person being really good at running their ass off, and it ends up being a 30 second match. Kinda boring in my opinion. But again, this is more likely attributed to lack of experience on my part.

All in all, it's a quality game. While I don't get all of the ridiculous hype the game gets, it's definitely one of the top 5 games fot he 360. Although, it still won't replace Bioshock for me. That game makes me feel funny on so many different levels. It's absurd.