Remember, Remember the 14th of September

*Warning Spoilers

With Halo: Reach out, we're now full circle on the kick ass Halo saga which has pretty much defined an entire generation of gamers and a new way of changing the way video games are viewed.  Now I haven't played the game and have missed playing Halo: ODST as well and Halo Wars. It's something that would bother me alot more if I didn't have the ability to watch the cutscenes and clips from the game which is what I love most about the Halo series.  Firefight mode is great and multiplayer-deathmatch-skullbomb-capture-the-flag are all great little options to play in the game but as always, it would be empty without the core of the characters and the story. 

Now I loved ODST because we finally got some characters behind the people we played as.  Nothing wrong with Master Chief but the problem was that he didn't really have any personality.  Strong, silent type are guys you can respect but the problem is that you don't really get to know them.  I'm not saying Chief is a bland character but he's like a white envelope against a snow storm (HI OH!)   Roast time...gotcha Chief.  But seriously John-117 did have some great moment of dry humor and wit and a stoic confidence that made you stand up straighter if you looked at your reflection in that gold visor of his.  However most of the Chief's personality shined through his actions, such as jumping out of high places and through the supporting characters like Sgt. Johnson. 

But ODST gave us something new: distinct personalities.  Now Halo felt like something out of the dirty dozen or Predator (don't laugh...that movie had some great personalities and kicked ass).  Not only did every element of the game play and story improve but also also the story telling and cinematics, which as the story progressed, became even more dramatic and more advanced that most of the time they could easily place most of the Hollywood blockbusters.  But it wasn't until Halo Wars did you really get a sense of distinct personalities.  Again, Chief had some personality but nothing that shined through and all the other Halo games did have distinct voices for the supporting marines with actors and actresses such as Michelle Rodriguez and Nathan Fillion but they were very briefly seen and most of the time killed.  Halo Wars gave us Sgt. Forge, Capt. Cutter and Scientist Anders as well as the sarcastic and dry witted A.I. Serena.  All were welcome edition to the franchise and us a sense of connection to characters outside of the stoic Spartan and the gruff Avery Johnson.  But it wasn't until ODST where we got a real array of fleshed out characters that were completely distinct from each other and gave the game a real human touch that seemed to come out of war movies.  But although it was awesome to play kick ass sci-fi special forces Marines, we still wanted to be Spartans. 

But we never saw what Spartans looked like under their lids?  Were they freaks?  Did they have hair?  Are they just robots?  Is it really George Clooney in his dreamy charm hiding under that helmet?  A hint of the answer came to us during Halo: Legends where we got to see the Spartans without helmets on and well...they looked like us.  Just bigger grant it from all the human growth hormones pumped into the crap we eat.  Damn you Foster Farms.  No artificial my ass!  But we couldn't really take into account if this was official cannon or if it was something that Hollywood anime people came up with. 

Finally we got our answer in Halo: Reach where not only did we get to play as a Spartan but a Spartan that's not Master Chief.  We got Noble 6 who is far from the strong silent type.  But we also have Jorge, Jun, Kat, Carter and Emile and we all saw that they had distinct faces, personalities and even armor specialties.  True we did have hints of Spartan III's and Spartan II's in the Halo novels but those again were novels.  Not exactly cannon.  So it was nice to get the news straight from the XBOX's mouth that yes, everything that we've read, seen and experienced outside of the games is official.  So now we had Spartans each with distinct personalities, looks, specialities, armor, accents and psychological traumas.  Some may argue that playing as the quiet Chief or the Rookie from ODST are probably the best examples to give us the full experience in gaming which allows us to imagine ourselves as the character in the game, but we lose the personal touch in that we get to respawn as many times as we want to.  Sure it's frustrating but we know we're going to come out on top since we hold the power of the controller in hand.  ODST gave us a sense of some danger since we were not sure if the character we were playing was going to actually die in the game so we would experience a sense of loss and again, personality gave us a connection to the characters. 

Halo: Reach was a story in which we all knew the ending to.  Every Spartan was going to die. Now technically not ALL Spartans were killed so that gave Reach a sense of the opposite of what we experienced in ODST which was a sense of hope, hope that one of our favorite Spartans from Noble Team may actually live.  Now some cynical types may just say that we can already just expect everyone to die but with each Spartan having a distinct look, speciality and personality, it gave us an attachment that we couldn't avoid because being a jack of all trades isn't a bad thing, it does leave us at a loss for identity.  Here we could identify ourselves with the job of being the big gun heavy weapons specialist or the lone wolf killer or the stalwart leader.  We could as well connect with certain characters as the game progressed since we do have the experience of fighting alongside Noble Squad since it allowed us to It was brilliant of Bungie to leave Noble 6 faceless yet not without personality since well giving us another silent Spartan to play as would a redundant as hell.  But it also made sense to have each Spartan able to talk with each other since there really is a sense of bond and brother(sister)hood between these soldiers who grew up, trained and bleed with each other.  I swear that when I watched each Spartan die on screen that I felt a level of sadness.  I even got a bit choked up and in awe of the last scene involving Noble Six's last stand. 

Now I have to say that JUST from what I've seen and read, Halo: Reach looks to be the best of the bunch.  It's got a ton of new features with firefight mode and unlockable but it finally allows you to stab people for close quarters combat and the armor lock option looks to be another fun option in battle that one could do some gleeful violence with.  It also gives you another feature which allows you to play in your favorite armor type and color so it's really come a long way from the 5 color choices you had in the original game in multiplayer (and it is pink....not lightish red).  And I really do have to say it's nice to see the Spartan side of the games expanded so that now it's much more based on actual military forces since military forces have specialties and armor for such specialties.  It is something which the main series seemed to lack a bit since all we got was Arbiter and Master Chief and they were the jack of all trades. 

Halo also brought about an interesting outlet and parallel which may have foreshadowed the current military crisis in today's climate.  If we look at the factions in Halo we have the UNSC, a military branch made up of people of all nations who are fighting the Covenant, an alien religious hegemony who are on a quest to wipe out humanity since they believe us to be a blight on the universe.  Sound sorta familiar? 
It should since the current war on terror involves the allied nations of behind the US, in game are represented by the UNSC and Al Queda, a group of religious extremists, in game are represented by the Covenant.  It even has the element of a horror movie in the Flood, a group of parasitic spores that turn the infect into zombies.  Again, this is part is revving up for another post...hopefully I can get to since I am lagging a bit on the other posts I plan to do.  I'd love to go into it more but it's really for an in depth review that I'm sure you few believers will read. 

But while touching upon the topic of the Flood, Halo gave us that interesting twist which was a complete surprise element.  And added a sense of terror to the game.  It lended a horror element to the game much like Doom or Dead Space without it being the primary focus of the game.  The Flood added an interesting slant to the story so Halo truly became a focal point, taking from many elements of science fiction.  It borrowed story and style elements from Ringwold, Enders Game, Aliens, Event Horizon, Alien Mind, Starship Troopers and Man-Kzin Wars and even Avatar to name a few (yes I have slept with a girl...and seens some naked even.  Why do you ask?  I CHOOSE to be home alone on Friday nights reading.  Really I do?  Really.....I'm so lonely...).  Halo also incorporates from war movies with elements from the Dirty Dozen, Serenity, Predator, and Platoon.

Reach does suffer from a brief stint of the Star Wars Syndrome as I call it, meaning that as the series jumped back in time, it became technologically cooler and more advanced.  But this is a minor quibble considering how good the game elements are.  Halo I may even say has changed the way game advertising is done.  Look at every Halo game and you receive a live action trailer.  It really isn't the typical way to market a game at all and feels much like a movie advertisement or viral marketing.  It even implements a documentary and employs the use of real soldiers and veterans as actors.  You can see the recent wave of advertisements over the past few years and how they attempt to copy Halo's advertising strategy in the recent advertisements of another cyborg armor suit game, Metroid: The Other M. 

Of course we know this is all building up to a Halo live action movie but I say why even bother.  I'd just as soon as show the clips from the game all tied together intercut with some actual gameplay.  It'd turn out a hell of alot better then most Hollywood movies.  I'd even go all out and do a full CGI Final Fantasy style Halo movie since the in game cinematics are so well done and contains genuine moments of drama, action and comedy all rolled into a large sandwich of actual substance, which annihilates movies such as Resident Evil: Afterlife, Doom and even some other action or video game movies. 

Hopefully Bungie's creative staff will be on hand for the Halo movie.  I unfortunately have doubts about it being so true to the original source material or even resembling the live actions commercials.  I do know that Peter Jackson is the big director producing it and even names like Steven Spielberg have been rumored to direct it but I still have to wait and see since Hollywood's track records with videogame movies have been damn spotty at best.  So go out and get Halo: Reach and see how it all started.  If not, then I really really recommend getting on YouTube or the net and watching the quality cutscenes as a movie.  I know I haven't played the recent games but hell..I don't need to tell you that it's good.