Mood: Gearing Up...
Music: Ready Steady Go, Paul Oakenfold
Tonight, at midnight, Tuesday, 12:01am, stores like EBGames will be handing out their initial copies of Halo 2.
Now, frankly, I'm not all that excited about it. I know people are screaming blasphemy and all that...but that's not really important. You can't consider yourself a videogamer of any serious stripe without acknowledging that this launch is undoubtedly the single biggest console event, and arguably gaming event, since the XBox was released.
Halo, at its core, is simply a first-person shooter. FPS, we tend to call it. It follows the trials and tribulations of one "Master Chief," a human-android-cyber hybrid-Marine in space armor. He never speaks, he never does anything, really...except pick up and use increasingly bigger weapons in the dispatching of literally thousands of comical and not so comical aliens hellbent on wiping humans out of space. This happens on ships and on planets, in vehicles and on foot, with fellow AI computer controlled Marines, and on your own.
As it was created by Bungie, it bore no small resemblance to Marathon and Marathon II...but there's no real crime in paying homage to the greatest game ever played on a Macintosh.
Halo, arguably being the biggest seller on the XBox, and being the launch-defined FPS, naturally became the must-have title...but there was one small problem: It wasn't Live!-enabled. You needed to have all the people you wanted to play against in your living room...and you played mainly on the same TV, in split-screen.
Yes, it's true that you could link XBoxes up and use multiple TVs...but very few people had several XBoxes and TVs lying around (although I did...) and if you did bother to link them, you could play four people to each TV-XBox combo, thus increasing the mayhem.
Halo was such a hit, that someone actually wrote an IP-Tunnel for XBox, so that you could run Halo over the internet, by using your computer as a router. It worked pretty good, but wasn't great...but it kept people going.
Even years after launch, people still got together weekly to play a little Halo.
Now, all that's coming to a screeching halt. Halo2 is Live!-Enabled...and it's supposedly a lot more of the same, with more weapons, more vehicles, smarter AI, bigger levels, and so on and so forth. It's still an FPS...but it's supposedly the FPS that the world has been waiting for. I predict, confidently, that this game will sell half a million copies this week without breaking a sweat.
At the end of the day, it's still an FPS...and it's on a console. Personally, I play my FPSs on PCs...but you can't have everything. It'll be good to get back on the couch and play with all the old Live! friends, whom I've been pretty much ignoring...but this will get them all back online, and we'll have a good time...probably.
Oh, and a little game called Everquest 2 comes out tomorrow, as well. If one nuke wasn't enough, might as well drop the other on the Massively-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game world as well. (MMORPG for you rookies.) I'll go into that one tomorrow.
Yes, I'm getting both of them...and World of Warcraft in a few weeks. November always is videogame month....