Genre: First Person Shooter
Year: 2007
Developed by: Bungie
Published by: Microsoft Game Studios
Platforms: XBOX 360
#81
Feeling Like: Finishing the fight
The Halo 3 trailer was unnecessary, and phenomenal. It’s a work of art, one of the best commercials for a video game ever. No room for debate. The amount of work that went into creating the models and diorama must have been staggering. There’s no dialogue. There isn’t a voice over explaining who the Covenant are, who Master Chief is, what new abilities await you. Just Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude Op. 28 No 15 accompanying a seemingly hopeless situation. Humanity is being overrun. The threats are everywhere, and overwhelming. Then, the lighting up of a grenade, a head tilt and BELIEVE hitting you right between the eyes. How can you not want to run through a wall after seeing this? If you don’t get chills, you don’t like video games and what the hell are you doing here anyway?
Halo 3‘s marketing campaign could have been put on milk cartons and drawn with crayons and we would have bought in on day 1. It was the last launch of a game I remember being like a party. In retrospect, it was the last time Halo felt culturally significant. Scott bought the premium edition, complete with Master Chief helmet and commemorative hat. We organized an all night session in my parent’s basement. Since you could hook up two XBOX 360’s together, as long as you had two TVs you could do a four player campaign run. I’d never done anything like this before, or since. This wasn’t quite a LAN party, it wasn’t quite competitive multiplayer, but it felt a bit like both. I only played Halo 3 once, but that night alone made it one of my all time favorite gaming experiences.
Ian, Scott, Dave, Dobbo and myself hunkered down and committed to ploughing through every level, every wave of enemies, every enemy spaceship and every obstacle in our way. On the hardest difficulty, naturally – there isn’t any other way to play when you’ve got this many human brains going up against enemy AI. It’s Legendary or bust. Because had a substitution, we would frequently pass the controllers around while snacks, or bathroom breaks tugged us away from the screen. It was a very athletic organizational method for the least athletic activity imaginable.
It’s hard to appreciate the nuances of game design when you’re constantly hollering into your buddies’ ears with requests for backup, or shouting with glee when you snipe a hunter from long distance. I’m sure a bigger Halo fan could tell you what a massive deal it was for Halo to be on a new system, how the graphics were sharper, or the colors were clearer, or the audio hardware was improved, or the worlds were more detailed. At this point, the Halos have kind of blurred together for me, like a high quality milkshake from space. I don’t know if Halo 3 is the best in the series from a gameplay standpoint, but it sure felt like the best from a spectacle point of view.
The soundtrack is masterful, properly evolving on Halo: Combat Evolved’s moody and atmospheric score.
“Luck” uses quiet flutes at the beginning to evoke a true sense of wonder, and mystery.
“Infiltrate” is a fantastic little tune, it would be right at home in a Metal Gear Solid.
“Never Forget” feels like it could be the denouement from a war film.
“Finish the Fight” builds and builds until it reveals itself to be the Halo theme at 1:20. My goodness.
We had to play it loud, and I’m not sure how we handled audio for two different outputs, but the score frequently pushed us when we waned.
We got stuck a few times, but the benefit of having five sets of eyes is that delays are generally short. It’s not as if Halo 3 was a puzzle game, but there was one part involving an enemy ship on a beach and I’m confident we spent the better part of an hour circling around in our vehicles before figuring out what to shoot, or where to exit. Getting lost is a much more enjoyable experience in a consequence-free, group setting.
The final level is burned into my memory as an exercise in what driving instructors must feel like every moment of their day. It involves escaping a collapsing ship or something, but you’re not on foot; you’re in a Warthog. Hey, that’s great! Halo’s most iconic vehicle, built for two and can really floor it. The turning can be a bit touchy, but for Halo veterans like ourselves, it should be no problem!
Maybe we were just trying to delay the inevitable end, but we must have died fifteen times. TURN LEFT! LEFT! Dead. LET ME DRIVE! LEFT!!!! Dead. And so forth. The first few times we perished, it elicited fits of giggles. A few more times, exasperated shaking of the heads. The next eight or so were followed by brutal silence and frustrated comments. We almost didn’t finish the fight.
But, of course, we did. “Tribute” is a perfect way to cap off the trilogy. It’s got some militaristic drums and a sense of peace. The use of strings may be peerless when it comes to gaming, and you can see why this series blew up at the time it did. Co-operative opportunities are always special, particularly if you’re lucky like me and have a great bunch of friends to share them with. Adding another two yields another level of rare enjoyment. Back 4 Blood benefitted from this enormously, and was the core reason it ended up in my Top 10 of 2021.
When it came to Halo 3, the third time was most definitely the charm.
The 500 