halo

Overrated game that shipped with the original XBox, played by people who can't afford a good gaming PC. Venerated and worshipped as a god of the gaming world.

Involves playing as a supersoldier in the year 2552, fighting for Humanity's survival against the genocidal alien consortium known as the Covenant.

Initially developed to be a Mac game, Microsoft acquired Bungie and retooled the release for their upcoming Xbox console.

In my eyes, Halo is a pretty good game, fun to play for a while, but it suffers from one key weakness:

The complete inability to modify the game aside from using an entire third-party shell (also known as Halo CE) -- with the exception of the third game.. but come on now, it took you this long to begin to realize that user-generated content is key to replayability, Bungie?

Ever hear of Half-Life and Counter-Strike? I'm sure most Halo players have not, so I'll fill you in.

Half-Life was released in 1998, using a modified Quake 1 engine. Yes, Quake 1. You know, that ancient relic with the nailguns and the square heads.. Anyway, Half-Life -- with its stunning graphics and engaging storyline (for its time) -- in itself received more than 50 game-of-the-year awards and catapulted Valve from being a simple IT company to one of the top games developers literally overnight.

Well, a couple of university students cooked up Counter-Strike while messing around with more mods for Quake. Counter-Strike was such a massive success that one teenaged gamer hosted the Beta 6 release on his ISP's webspace. Unfortunately, the release was downloaded so much that it disabled his entire ISP -- losing them thousands of dollars and landing the unfortunate perp in JDC. I haven't heard of Halo causing anything like this.

Jess Cliffe himself (one of the original developers of CS, who was later hired by Valve themselves to work on more games) mentions this in the book HL2: Raising the Bar.

I've played both Halo and Half-Life extensively, and I keep going back to Half-Life because it's just so simple to create anything for the game. Look up 'HL Rally' sometime -- you'll see that with a game like Half-Life almost anything is possible.

It is my opinion that Microsoft (and their subservient Bungie), in refusing to allow modding of Halo, have doomed the series to abandonment far sooner than what should have been, unless they can keep pumping out sequel after sequel (much like EA and the Sims series) and keep things fresh and interesting enough to retain their fanbase.

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graphics

The most important part of any game, even more important than the gameplay itself

At least, according to today's youth, who tend to forget decade-old games that had pioneered the ideas made popular by these new games.

See also: crysis

Crysis is touted as having "the first real time Predator like gameplay" when in fact there was (gasp) an Alien vs. Predator PC game tied into the franchise, released in 1999 -- Crysis just has better graphics.

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