My Strange Experience with Halo

Every FPS is the same, but...

At the beginning of the XXI century, the only First Person Shooter I played was Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 and it was fun, but I could only enjoyed it for a short while. Shooters were never my jam, specially in a time when all I played was platformers. But then 2001 came by and the whole world went insane with the launch of a "new kind" of FPS: Halo: Combat Evolved.

A few years later, one of my friends got his original Xbox with the game, and he fell in love with it. We would play together whenever he invited me to his home. He loves the franchise so much he's played every single Halo game there is! And of course, he continues to invite me to his home to play.

Honestly, I'm not a big fan of First Person Shooter games, I find them repetitive and rather predictable with no real end goal other than "Kill everything that moves". Now that I think about it, the only FPS I really enjoy is Star Wars: Republic Commando and just because it's a Star Wars game with heavy emphasis on strategy and team work when ordering your squad around... but mainly because it's Star Wars. My point is that I do not enjoy FPS that much; just when I'm playing with my friends.

I spent a lot of hours playing Halo with my friend. And I had so much fun to the point where I bought a bootleg copy of Halo 2 for my original Xbox. I have so many good memories playing this game, but it wasn't because of the story. It was because of the crazy futuristic weapons, the aliens and the fact that you have to jump inside a super alien weapon and destroy it from the inside. I love that mission! But I never got attracted to the franchise like my friend and other people did. Maybe it was because, for some reason, my bootleg copy was in French and Je ne parle pas français, pour le moment. I never felt attracted to its story. I just wanted to kill something.

Sequels and prequels came out. Books and comics. The Halo lore grew far beyond the videogames, and the fans loved it. My friend used to explain to me the whole story of the creation of the UNSC, every alien race and their religious beliefs, the weapons and their upgrades, and pretty much everything about Halo but I found it pretty lame and simplistic.

Nevertheless, I bought Halo, Master Chief Collection on Steam for dirt cheap a while back and some warm feelings have being growing inside of me for this weird, horrible, fun franchise.

Something about the story

You gotta understand that I love when a videogame tells me a story with crazy twists and turns (the Metal Gear franchise is my favorite one, so you probably know what I'm talking about), but when the story is only about a super soldier who has to kill and destroy an alien race that wants to activate several galactic weapons that will destroy the whole universe because of their religious beliefs... well, it's just a convoluted way to say "kill the aliens". The books and other media may have very compelling stories set in the Halo universe, but I really don't care about them because it's all the same. Super soldiers, galactic 'murica, good aliens and bad aliens... that's it.

I have played Halo 1 through 4, ODST and Reach and the story is pretty much the same in each one! The only thing that changes are the weapons and a few details of the enemy's design and that's it. Nonetheless, I think that's fine because very few people actually play Halo because of its story... at least that's what I tell myself. 

Not all games have to tell a story. Think of Super Mario: an Italian plumber has to rescue the princess of a magic kingdom who was kidnapped by a dragon turtle, again. In the same way, I think of Halo as a game to lay back and enjoy the ride. That's the reason why I play it. Yet the fact remains that I think its lore is just a bunch of cash grab.

Fans hyped about the new story and characters and whatnot, but all of it was just terrible fanservice. Every "ending" in the main games is a cliffhanger so they can keep taking money from their fans. It's kinda sad. Yet most of them will defend and fight for Halo's "original and awesome" lore. They will die trying to tell the world that this franchise "is the best ever".

I know a lot of Halo fans like the "story and lore", but most of them love it because of the online multiplayer... And that's when everything fell down. Halo was the franchise that created "the Squeakers" also known in Spanish as "niños rata".

It got worse

As time went on, online multiplayer became a necessity in videogames. Even though Halo is rated M "for MATURE audiences", Squeakers (kids between 11 and 14 years old who would constantly insult and annoy everyone) were the first kind of players you would face when playing online multiplayer. They would play awfully and yet tell you "You suck" when you die once.

Playing videogames with friends is fun. You can insult them and make fun of them during the match, but nobody cares because they are your friends. Now, playing with strangers on the internet it's (almost always) the definition of "Hell on Earth". Most people will stress way to hard because of their results on the game. There's a lot of "very competitive" players who think it's your fault their team is losing, and they will make sure you know. There's no "fun" for them in every match, there's just selfishness and jealousy.  

As I mentioned before, I believed Halo online is the birthplace of the Squeakers. For quite some time, I really believed there could be nothing worse in the world of videogames than a little kid (even +30 years old players who act like kids) getting angry at others for an online multiplayer match... I was so wrong.

More and more videogames have tweaked a bit of the online multiplayer formula to bring something new that you can play with people from all around the world. As we all have seen throughout history, some of them have endure the test of time, some others only lasted a few months. No matter the genre, gimmicks of the game or console, you can always find a squeaker ruining your experience.

It all got worst when someone created a game made specifically for squeakers: Fortnite. And that's all I'm going to write about it because it's not worth to waste more time with this crime against humanity. The point here is that Halo online gave birth to the worst type of gamer there is, but eventually became a great experience because all the Squeakers moved to the aforementioned piece of shit game.

Getting good

I played a lot of Halo as I grew up. Funny enough, I do not consider myself a fan of the franchise, but I spent a lot of time playing with my friends and by myself. Way to much time. Like I mentioned before, I played a lot with one of my friends, who utterly loves the franchise. He taught me some tricks and tips to be kinda good at killing other players and finish every campaign on Legendary difficulty (For the record, I haven't finish any campaign on the max difficulty). 

Even though my friend and I have played a lot of times every campaign and a lot more online multiplayer matches, I still consider myself a noob (or a N00B). My friend loves the sniper matches and he is really good at it. But when he plays with me in his team... Let's just say it usually ends poorly. It's fun!

I used to hate this entire franchise, nonetheless I've always had fun playing with friends. I really don't care about the lore nor the characters. I only play it because it's fun to kill anything that walks in a videogame. Most die-hard fans made me hate it, but I've started to enjoy it a lot in the last couple of years.

I play Halo for fun, not to get good; but I think I'm actually getting kinda good. I spent several years without playing any of the games, but eventually I bought the Master Chief Collection on Steam (for dirt cheap). Since then, I've played a lot of online matches and, I have to say, my skills have improve. Every now and then I face against very good players and I get to hold my ground.

At the beginning, I had a lot of trouble getting used to playing with a Switch controller layout. I have a wired HORI Pad controller but I'm to lazy to change the button layout, so I just played the game until I got used to it. Now, I don't think I would be able to play it with a Xbox layout.

As I mentioned before, there was a point in my life when I hated Halo with my whole soul. FPS and shooters in general became a very popular and lucrative game genre, and as time went by, new franchises milked way too hard the basic idea behind "shooters" to the point that "new" videogames, even full franchises, have become lame cash grabs that are just clones of old ones with a few tweaks here and there. 

Halo has been an important part of my gaming life, even when I didn't want to. The more I play Halo, the more I enjoy its rich history as the father of modern shooters, not its own lore. There something very special about Halo that no one has been able to replicate and that's what I have learned to love about it. 

I might not be a shooters fan, but I definitely love a good Halo game.