Halo Reach

As the marketing tag line for the game says: "From the beginning, you know how it ends."

Before it was released, I wasn't sure what to make of Halo Reach's story. The Fall of Reach is not the most optimistic story and while we know that the war against the Covenant will ultimately be won, I was curious to see how the first major defeat of humanity first hand would work as a game plot.

And though Halo ODST already paved the way for this next change, the other major change was that for the first time you're playing as a Spartan that isn't John 117. Before the Master Chief, there was Spartan B312:

Noble 6 to his friends.

The difference being this time, you get to customise Noble 6's appearance and gender. The character is pretty much a blank slate apart from a few details about his or her background. Otherwise Noble 6 is left entirely to the player's imagination - even more so that the tight lipped Master Chief.

Gameplay

The game is pretty much classic Halo, though it's in it's 5th incarnation now and shows all the signs of having learned from the mistakes previous games. So it's no surprise that it's probably the best Halo yet as far as the gameplay goes. If you like Halo, you'll love this.

The only really new thing in here apart from a few weapons are the armour abilities, so that's pretty much all I'll comment about really - they don't alter the game all that much, and I think there were only maybe two I really used a lot, but these are a nice addition to the game. The ability to run faster (meh), cloak (always useful), temporary invulnerability (at the cost of not moving - has it's uses I guess) and my two favourites the drop shield (Halo 3's shield bubble with added healing powers) and the awesome jet-pack.

Admit it - you've always wanted a jet-pack in real life, but video games are probably the closest we'll get. And the ability to fly over your enemies heads raining death down on them is far too much fun to pass up. Though the campaign only lets you have jet-packs at a few places, I certainly enjoyed every second of it - even going so far as to bypass a whole section of a level by jet-packing up into the air to hijack a passing enemy fighter and flying that straight to my destination.  :)

The other minor new additions are the commendations and challenges. Commendations are medals tracking how much you've done of something - such as headshots, killing in a vehicle, destroying vehicles and so on. Each time one of them gains a rack, you gain some credits to spend on armour and move a little closer to the next player rank.

Challenges are a bit more interesting. Every week, there's a new weekly challenge to complete for a usually large amount of credits. So far, we've only seen two - both requiring some amount of work. There are also 4 daily challenges that change every day. A minor addition to the game, but it's kind of fun having new short term goals to aim for every time you start the game up.

Other than those new additions, Halo is as Halo does. Chances are everyone considering buying Halo Reach already knew if they would like it or not with a high degree of accuracy.

Story

The broad outline of the story of Halo Reach might already be well known to Halo fans or anyone who's read The Fall of Reach, but I was still eager to find out the role Noble Team played in the last defense of Reach and, given that most Spartans died in the events preceding the original Halo, how Noble Team died and just what they did that was commemorated with the Noble Team Statue.

And the story delivers pretty well. There are plenty of heroics for the team to engage in, and the fight against overwhelming odds means that there's no shortage of exciting story developments, despite the Space Alamo ending the game is locked onto a path towards from the beginning. There are a number of points in the game where you are left feeling like you've just accomplished something big - usually followed by something equally big and equally disastrous happening to raise the stakes.

And for the Halo fanboys there's plenty of cameos from established characters - Cortana, Gunnery Sargent Buck and a kind of hidden blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from the Chief himself. Also quite cool to this Halo fanboy was the way that Jorge - the one Spartan II on Noble team - is so much larger and physically imposing, even to the Spartan IIIs (of which Noble 6 is one) as they overshadow the normal marines. It really helps convey how big John 117 must have looked to the normal humans in the first 3 games.

Overall, despite being a somewhat depressing ending the story is well written enough so that Noble Team's heroism and Noble Team's sacrifice still actually mean something and contribute significantly to the Halo franchise's storyline. It's well worth the trip even if the story is not that original and hardly award winning material, but it's very entertaining and well told.

Mutli-player


Normally, I don't play a lot of multi-player and when I do it's usually just co-op with my friends. So I wasn't too keen on Halo Reach multi-player, even after trying out the Halo Reach Beta Test earlier this year. But I gave it a try in order to try to complete some of the Daily Challenges.

And I had a surprising amount of fun. Halo Reach - like ODST before it - borrows from Gears of Wars 2's Horde mode to create Firefight. Reach includes Firefight 2.0. This time around there are more variants like Rocketfight - Firefight played with rocket launchers with infinite ammo - to liven things up. Unlike Horde mode, matchmaking games are short - usually just 5 waves of enemies - so that you van move onto a new map or new variant of the rules quickly.

Longer matches can be set up in the dedicated Firefight section of the game. And in custom matches, players have a huge level of control over the rules, down to the enemies spawned, how they arrive, the weapons used, infinite ammo, player shields, invulnerability and even if the weapons need to be reloaded at all. It's easy to come up with odd but fun versions of the game type. I played one game where everyone was hovering around with infinite jetpacks floating over the battlefield raining down explosive death with their infinite ammo, never reloading rocket launchers. :)

Slayer games are much the same as always - first side to a certain number of kills - but also come with similar variants where everyone is armed with sniper rifles and infinite ammo. Capture the Flag is the same as always too.

Invasion is new and the next type I plan to get into. A team of Spartans tries to fight their way into a facility to steal a computer core while the Elites defend it, and if they don't win the teams swap sides and try again. I enjoyed that a bit during the beta and it seems like fun - if, and this is a big if an Halo matchmaking - you can find a team that can actually work together. I think it would work a lot better if you got some friends together in a Party and stuck together as a team during an Invasion match.

Overall, there's a lot of options for multi-player games to keep people playing and earning credits towards that distant Colonel rank for some time.

Conclusion


I'm not going to say anything about graphics because there's nothing really requiring comment. The game looks great as you'd expect from any top level title these days. Nothing that makes it stand out from all the other AAA games though.

But overall, it's a great game as long as you like FPS. It's Halo done better than Halo's ever been done. Not a bad way for Bungie and the Halo franchise to part ways. Here's hoping 343 Industries can carry the torch for the future Halo games that are inevitably coming.

Gears of War

So I'm a bit late to the part on this one but I only got around to playing Gears of War about a month ago. I'd seen that the gameplay was pretty cool but the characters and the graphic style of the game didn't really appeal to me. I especially didn't like the steroid ridden characters that seem to come with the Unreal engine.

Like this guy for example.

But these games have gotten cheap and I wanted to join in on the multiplayer fun my friends were having so I bought the first 2 games. So far I've played through the first game.

Gameplay

Given that this game practically reinvented the cover based shooter to the point where all the others mimic Gears these days, it's obviously doing something right. I think that the key to their success is that it's kept pretty simple. It's a basic 3rd person shooter with a simple cover mechanic. But every part of it is done right. They didn't overreach and try for too much - they just stuck to what the game needed and implemented it very well. So you get a simple, extremely satisfying shooter.

Can't speak to what the multi-player is like in this one as I only played with it for one evening before moving onto the Horde mode in the sequel.

Graphics

Not to much to say on this front - it looks about as good as every AAA title does these days. Two points against it though are the overuse of the "Real Is Brown" style to the graphics, and the ridiculously muscular characters that seem to be in most Unreal Engine games. Though you do meet some Stranded NPCs which don't have that look so I guess it's possible to have normal looking people in these games.

Story

Gears is an odd beast on this point. Leaping right into an "in media res" opening, the plot hits the ground running. But in doing so, it's skipping details to the back story like how the war started and who the enemy are. But it actually works really well. You don't need to know any of that beyond what you pick up from context, and it scores major points for following the "Poeple don't talk about how cars work" principle and no cast member engages in any "As You Know" speeches.

And as the game goes on you very quickly learn what you need to know about the characters immediate goals and mission and probably because I found the character's behaviour more realistic than expected I found myself actually pretty invested in how the mission played out. The games ends with a fairly satisfying outcome and still manages to leave it on a suitably dramatic cliffhanger for the sequel. So even after the game never really gets around to telling you what came before, it certainly left me wanting to know what came next.

Conclusion

I thoroughly enjoyed this game - so much as to play it through again on a higher difficulty as soon as I'd finished. It's not perfect but I can definitely see why so many games copied it's mechanics so much. The combination of action and cover based tactics worked well, and even the vehicle based Unexpected Gameplay Change doesn't detract from it. I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in shooters.

Now I've got to get into the story mode of Gears of War 2 to see what's next. :)

Star Trek TNG - Lonely Among Us

Originally aired: November 2nd 1987

We begin with a diplomatic mission to try to get two races sharing a solar system to make peace with each other and join the Federation. And while the aliens are still humanoid - and obviously just actors in masks, at least they're humanoid snake people and not just more normal people with a bit of funny make up. The snake aliens are assholes complaining and making demands the moment they come aboard. The crew seems to think neither race are all that suitable for Federation membership.

Before long the ship finds yet another weird floating energy cloud weird thing. The galaxy must be full of this kind of weird shit. The crew don't seem to be able to make any sense of the weird energy cloud and go in for a closer look. Worf gets zapped by an energy discharge from the sensor controls when they do this and I have to ask myself - given how often consoles explode or discharge energy on this ship, has anyone in the Federation ever heard of Health & Safety? Worf seems to become very aggressive and violent after the incident and is taken to sickbay. Given his repeated snarling on the bridge I wonder how they could tell he was acting abnormally.

So it's no surprise to me when the energy discharge passes into Doctor Crusher. It seems to affect her less as she seems to act normally around Troi enough to avoid raising her suspicions. Picard acts like a proper Captain and pushes the Enterprise onward to it's mission rather than investigate the energy cloud as Data wants to. Crusher starts to act odder and heads to the bridge where she is supposed to use the computer to help work out what's wrong with Worf. For once a crew member spots she's up to something and Data asks her why she's accessing helm control but it;s too late. God, the crew of this ship is a little naive - they always realise too late when someone is possessed by an alien.

The energy passes out of her into the computer and she has no idea why she's on the bridge. And now it's too late and the entity is in the computer, from the science stations to the engine room to the transporter. Whoops! Some of the recurring crew members that we'll never see again after Season 1 - Singh, Argyle - are asked to look into the malfunctions before the ship reaches it's destination. I'm already bored waiting for the plot to get going. In the meantime the alien delegates are just itching for an excuse to start killing each other. And the ship drops out of warp and loses communication with the rest of the galaxy. Guess they're in trouble now! Riker thinks the Ferengi must have bribed one of the diplomats to sabotage the ship. How cute! They're still acting like the Ferengi are a credible threat.

While talking about the mystery of the sabotage, Picard and Riker talks about Private Investigators and Sherlock Holmes, and inadvertently kick start Data's obsession with the fictional detective. How awesome would it have been if they'd been talking about Batman instead? :) Down in Engineering, Wesley is coming up with ideas to fix the ship that Singh is eager to steal and take credit for so he bundles Wes off to class. But no matter how smart he is he still hasn't realised that people are being possessed.

And now I finally remember why we never see Singh again - the energy zaps him and kills him for no real reason other than to make the threat more serious and immediate. And he wasn't even wearing a red shirt. There's a lot more that's not really worth commenting but the crew think the engine's fixed and start to head off again. The crew start to interrogate the aliens to see if they have alibis for the murder of Singh. The doctor starts to put two and two together about memory blackouts. God, people - this episode is dull. There's no hint yet what the hell the energy thingy is or what it wants and the characters are taking forever to work it out and I'm BORED. When it is this one going to pick up the pace? Troi offers to hypnotise the doctor and Work to help them recover memories.

Data livens things up by channelling Holmes - even to go so far as to smoke a pipe. He puts on quite a how as he deduces (incorrectly) why the aliens are responsible for the death. But Brent Spiner is given a chance to flex his acting muscles and it's refreshing to see it after a few episodes of the emotionless Data. The hypnotism reveals both crew members were possessed - which the audience has known for 20 minutes now. Jesus - show us something we don't already know. And the crew finally agree that as unlikely as it sounds something is possessing the crew and that no-one amongst the aliens or crew is guilty.

The ship continues to malfunction and the energy jumps into the captain. This time Geordi sees it happen, but Picard convinces him it's all okay. Though that doesn't carry very far when the ship starts playing along with Picard's commands and suddenly works when he says it will. He orders the ship to reverse it's course and go back the way it came. He justifies it by saying he needs to take another look at the energy cloud. He points out that a starship captain shouldn't have to explain every order - you'd never know it going by the amount of questions these guys get.

Okay - skipping ahead past more boring bits. Hey! It's O Brien! He gets a scene trying to keep the aliens happy when they cross paths looking for a crew member to explain the course change. While he tries to stop the aliens killing each other, the bridge officers discuss their options for handling Picard. They're thinking of relieving him of his command but can't unless they have medical evidence of incapacity. They take steps to prove he's incapable, and they approach him. He puts them on the spot and demands a decent explanation from them for the tests and turns their own arguments back on them.

And now the aliens are loose on the ship hunting each other. This diplomatic mission is doomed I tell you. Doomed. Crusher comes back with exam results on herself and the senior officers proving they are all fit for duty. But she gives up all pretense and asks him flat out if he's still the captain. The 'captain' admits that Jean-Luc is in there, and he and the alien are going on an adventure. And we get the long overdue exposition dump about how they accidentally picked up an energy being who's been working to get them to take it home to the energy cloud. And that the death of Singh was an accident.

And Picard is going to beam out into the energy cloud and go floating around the universe exploring together. But the crew don't want to go along with it so he zaps the lot of them with lightning and legs it to the transporter and beams out. After he's been out there over an hour, Riker decides it's time to leave before Troi detects Picard floating out there on his own - having been split from the alien energy thing. They manage to scoop Picard up in the ship's circuitry the way that they caught the original entity, and the letter P appears on the helm. They use the transporter to re-integrate the captain into his body since that pattern is still in the transporter. They get him back, but he doesn't remember anything that happened to him as a free floating energy being.

The aliens are still killing each other around the ship so Picard hands command off to Riker and goes to sickbay to relax. And what a waste of time that episode was. Jesus. A not-half-bad sci-fi idea with a piss poor execution. Other shows over the next decade will explore the idea of mixing human conciousness with energy beings in far more interesting stories and maybe those wouldn't be quite so goof if this story hadn't been here to try and fail first. But this was still pretty poor.

Next up: Justice. A Wesley heavy episode that's not particularly good. May whatever God can find it have mercy on my soul.

Star Trek TNG - Where No One Has Gone Before

Originally Aired: October 26th 1987

This one gets off to a dull start with some engine specialist coming aboard to try some experimental new engine stuff on the Enterprise. The enlightened future society of the Federation can't be all that enlightened as everyone starts chatting about how this guy's theories are all nonsense. And when he gets aboard, he's all arrogant about how he's right and they're all too dumb to understand. Riker and the specialist argue a bit and Riker agrees, in a very condescending manner, to allow him to try it.

Meanwhile, Wesley Wonderchild is comparing notes with the Traveller - the specialist's alien assistant - who even to my 13 year old self was obviously the real source of the improvements to the engine technology. The alien seems impressed that this 15 year old kid knows warp field theory pretty much as well as he does.

Predictably the experiment goes wrong, as Geordie announces that they pass Warp 10 - which is pretty much infinite speed - and you see whole galaxies whizz past, as Star Trek Continuity, both past and future, gets a kick in the nuts. First, Kirk's crew established there was a near impenetrable energy barrier enclosing the Milky Way galaxy. How did Picard's Enterprise get through it? Second, years from now USS Voyager will claim to be the first ship to break the Warp 10 barrier. Suck it Janeway! Picard got there first. Convenient you forgot that. :)

When they manage to stop the ship, they're two galaxies away and 300 years travel from home. And Janeway whined and bitched about a 70 year trip! It took her 7 years to do a 70 year trip home. I bet Picard gets his ship across the 300 light years home by the end of the week. Janeway really does suck.

The alien assistant seems weak after the trip and only Wesley seems to give a shit. The rest of the crew seems to be occupied with their predicament, while Wesley seems to be making realisations about the nature of the universe hundreds of years ahead of his civilisation's best scientific minds.  While the crew take the chance to explore this new area, and the douchebag engineer takes credit for an accidental discovery, Wesley tries to fill in the adults on the truth. But this is TV where adults never listen to kids, so they blindly trust the engineer to take them home. Whoops!

The attempts to go home doesn't work and the alien nearly vanishes during the flight. The ship travels through countless galaxies and ends up in a completely ridiculously distant part of the universe, over a billion light years away. Almost immediately strange things start to happen on the ship - pets from home appear and disappear, lift doors open into space, people flashing back to their past, string quartets in crew quarters and so on. There's even an appearance by Picard's dead mother - who unlike him even sounds French!

As a pleasant surprise Picard quickly works out that it's what they're imagining or thinking about starts to happen for real, and warns the crew to control their thoughts. In Engineering, they all finally catch on that the alien was behind it all. And as if to make up for the clichéd ignoring of the child earlier on, Riker points out to Picard that Wesley spoke up twice earlier to tell them but he didn't listen. Damn it Riker! Didn't Picard make it clear in the first episode that it was your job to talk to the kids, not his? The alien has passed out and Picard orders the doctor to wake him up to take them all home before they all imagine themselves to death.

The alien is pretty much a hitchhiker who trades engine upgrades in order to bum around the galaxy. He and Picard waffle on about the nature of thought and space and reality for a while, before the alien reveals to Picard that they are in a part of the universe which is pretty much pure thought and they better get home before it all goes to hell.

And then we get the Tinkerbell solution to take them home - the whole crew is ordered to imagine the well being of the alien or on their duty. And with the crew ordered not to think of Pink Elephants, they try to re-create the accident once more.  I'm surprised the Pink Elephant factor didn't screw them over by one or two crewmen imagining the ship being ripped in half. The Traveller gives it everything he's got and disappears in the attempt, propelling the ship clear across the Universe one last time to arrive right back where it all started. And straight away they head off onto their next assignment. I guess that being lost billions of light years away isn't any excuse for missing the Enterprise's scheduled arrival at whatever planet they're off to. :)

As they go, Picard humorously draws out a conversation with Riker for the sole purpose of making Wesley feel nervous. Then he grants him a field commission of Acting Ensign to reward him for his contribution to the crisis. In general, the Wesley plots in this episode are done awkwardly with no subtlety, but they do get his character arc moving - something which they have yet to do for any other character of the cast. Wesley 1, everyone else SUCK IT.

I really like this episode. As badly executed as it was, it's a wonderful sci-fi idea, of the kind that is all too rare on this show. Looking over the episodes so far, there's one real sci-fi idea - an omnipotent being puts our species on trial to see if we deserve to be exploring the galaxy, and it's hardly that original. The others are either not really sci-fi (Code of Honor is basically a political intrigue story, and Naked Now a medical crisis) or they are sci-fi but just repeating a really unoriginal story (Last Outpost, where a member of an ancient powerful civilisation judges the younger races of the galaxy as they try to explore the ruins of his planet).

But here we have what Star Trek, and Starfleet, is at it's core - the best our society has to offer out there, pushing back the frontiers and exploring somewhere so different, we are literally incapable of understanding where we are or how it all works but are left with the impression that one day, we will be back and work it all out. I have to wonder if this wouldn't have made for a better pilot episode and this accidental travel across the universe was the ordeal which Q used to test humanity. In just a few years after this Deep Space 9 started with a strong sci-fi concept (explaining linear time to a race that exists outside of time and has no frame of reference) and hooked me from the first episode.

Next up, whenever I get to it is Lonely Among Us. I can honestly saw that I don't even remember this episode. But before I watch and blog that episode, I have a few other things I want to get around to blogging, so don't hold your breath.

Movie Double Bill - Prince of Persia / 2012

So I wasn't in the mood for anything too challenging tonight so I dug out some movies I hadn't yet got around to seeing. There will be spoilers for these movies - consider yourself warned.

Prince of Persia

No, not this guy.

Not this guy either.

But this guy.

So let's start with the things this movie did right.

It looks great. The visuals are fantastic start to finish. The action scenes are pretty cool too. The casting... well, it shouldn't work but it does. The leads are not my problem here - they both suit the roles they were given well. They are asked for anything too demanding and they deliver with some style. They're both pretty easy on the eyes for whomever may find them attractive too.

No, it's the supporting cast and their collection of oddly British accents that puzzle me. Even Gyllenhaal seems to be putting on a British accent at times. Ben Kingsley is pretty much obviously the villain from the first moment he's on screen. But most puzzling / entertaining of all is Richard Coyle as Prince Tus. I had trouble accepting Jeff from Coupling as a Prince of Persia.

The other major thing they did right was to keep the inevitable release of the Sands of Time to the very end of the movie. While turning all other characters except for one into a sand monster early on worked for the game, it would have sucked for the movie. And it made for a suitably tense confrontation at the end of the movie.

So, onto the bad things. There are only two things I really didn't like. One is somewhat minor but it bugs me. Dastan is warned that if the Dagger is inserted into the Sand-glass and the gem pressed, then the Sands will be released and destroy everything. But when this actually happens, the Dagger's magic also rewinds time and when it's all over everything's fine. So other than the Big Bad's plan depending on reversing time why is the release of the Sands such a big deal? It automatically got rewound!

The other is just the lack of direction in the movie. Until the last act when the lead characters have a clear purpose again, they spend most of the movie wandering from action scene to action scene. Sure, they occasionally talk about what is they're trying to achieve but it's not until they finally set out to stop the bad guy from pulling off his Grand Rewind that it feels like the movie has finally gotten into gear for the first time since the opening battle.

Overall, it was an enjoyable film but a forgettable one. It did successfully avoid the usual mistakes of a video game movie for the most part which is a major point in it's favour.

2012

Not too much to say about this one. Your standard run of the mill disaster end-of-the-world movie. Again, wonderful visuals - the best end of the world natural disasters that Hollywood render farms can provide.

I'm not even going to talk about the science of the end of the world - the dodgy science in movies like this and The Core are the basic concepts you have to give them for free, no matter how stupid they are. You shouldn't even be watching these movies if you can't give them that.

But it also suffers from a lack of direction really - you watch characters escape over the top natural disasters one after another while vague hints of where this is all headed get dropped. But it stills feels like a waste of time really - if the entire planetary crust is shifting and  collapsing, where can they go? I have to give the writers some credit for trying the Ark Spaceship fake-out though. And some credit for the fact that the actual way out for humanity is much less far fetched and somewhat more realistic in the giant ark ships they build to wait out the apocalyptic weather in, so they can repopulate the Earth after the dust settles. I did feel a little cheated since the earlier parts of the movie made me think that the planet was irrevocably fucked, but movies like this need their happy ending.

But until they arrive at the Ark, the movie just wanders. At least in some movies of this type - Deep Impact, Armageddon, for example - there's a clear task to attempt to save the world: blow the shit out of that asteroid. By the way almost all asteroid movies ever? If you've left it get that close, then it's too fucking late to blow it up.

Anyway, the movie gets it's suitably heroic ending and everything's as happy ever after as it can be on a totally thrashed, plate-shifted, magnetic-pole flipped planet. Only the unrealism of Hollywood allowed anybody at all to survive a disaster of this scale really. But it's as good a planet as any to start up human civilisation I guess.

To sum up, its a natural disaster movie that sets out to outdo any natural disaster movie you've seen before and pretty much succeeds. It's still yet another natural disaster movie though so it's slightly better than average at best.