Halo 3 vs. The Orange Box

"The hours are good, but the actual minutes are pretty lousy." —Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy

That might be a misquote; I can't find my copy of the book at the moment.

One of the problems with the way video game reviews work—and movie and book reviews as well, though I think the problem is worse with games— is that market forces exert pressure to release the review simultaneously with the game, but (at least for me, and I suspect for many people) the real quality of a game sometimes becomes apparent only after weeks or months of interaction with it. The video game industry is hardly mature in the same way that the movie industry is at this point, but we have had many years of observing game releases, and reviewers have become skilled at predicting whether a given game will have a lot of replay value or not, and gamers do need advice as to whether a game is worth perusing immediately upon release, a job reviews do serve, so it's not a big problem. But neither is it inconsequential.

I thought Halo was great, and found Halo 2 disappointingly lacking in replay value (though I enjoyed my first time through it). Upon Halo 3's release, I liked it a great deal—enough that I bought it, even though I'd completed it during a rental. In fact, I bought it before the rental was due back. At the time, I had no Live connectivity, so I didn't buy it for the multiplayer, and indeed from the time I finally got my free month of Live Gold working to the time my free month of Live Gold expired, I played no Halo 3 multiplayer. I bought it for the single-player campaign.

After completing The Orange Box (my fourth time through Half-Life 2 and my third through Episode 1), I began to look upon Halo 3 in a different light. I decided I'd given it too much credit. It was, I decided, a bit crap. Then I played through Episode 2 one more time and Portal four more times, which reinforced my opinion.

That was four months ago. So, since that time, what game have I keep returning to whenever I have fifteen minutes free and really want to play some excellent FPS action?

Halo 3, of course. Crow's Nest for preference, or the entire Arc arc. Special credit to the dogfighting with the hornets, and any sequence involving one or more scarabs or a room full of brutes and a lot of cover and variety of available weapons. Boo to the Flood.

The Douglas Adams quote isn't entirely accurate. The Orange Box's hours are great, but I'd never call the actual minutes lousy. They're pretty good. Still, Combine AI has nothing on Brute AI; there's nothing like braving a bit of fire to take out a pack leader, then watching pack cohesion fall apart while I mop up the underlings. While the hours of Halo 3 aren't great, the minutes are excellent.

So which is the better game?

Well, by what standard? I have, in the past, enjoyed The Orange Box much more than I've enjoyed Halo 3, but I will, in the future, enjoy Halo 3 much more than I will enjoy The Orange Box. Halo 3 is more valuable to me at this moment, but if someone asked me which of the two to rent, having played neither, I'd say rent The Orange Box. Compounding this problem of which to recommend, I'd never suggest Halo 3 to someone who hasn't enjoyed the first two, but someone who has enjoyed the first two almost certainly is going to seek out the third already and doesn't need any recommendation from me at all.

Putting numerical values on them is like comparing apples and, er, orangess. See, the apple is Halo 3 because the Master Chief's armor is green, and the orange is... never mind.

Mainstream reviews stand forever, because you can access their archives alphabetically. Forum posts and blog entries are dust in the wind. (Er. By the standards of the fast-moving game industry, anyway.) Months after a game is released, people will still go to the reviews published in the days following the game's launch to see if they should check it out, yet by that time, those reviews are obsolete, and the reviewers may have completely changed their opinions in retrospect.

The amount of effort it would take to fix this fault in the review apparatus is, I suspect, far greater than the pressure that exists to fix it, assuming there's any pressure at all and I'm not just tilting at windmills. And I still don't know which of Halo 3 and The Orange Box is the better game.

Thoughts on Zelda

(Man, I need to remember to update this thing.)

So. Twilight Princess.

For many reasons, I found this game unimpressive enough that I stopped playing it shortly after picking up the first mask, or shadow, or whatever those things Midna's telling me to collect are. Fused shadows? The gorons were the breaking point (they seem superfluous, being newcomers to the franchise that just kept showing up again and again after their introduction), but really, it just felt done. I liked Wind Waker. Wind Waker was full of things no Zelda game has done before, amongst them the end of Hyrule. The ending impressed me a lot, not just because Badass Pirate Zelda was a participant in the boss fight but because the king of Hyrule decided it'd be egotism to try and bring his kingdom back at the expense of the folk above and their not-very-Hyrule world. More and more I've become fond of stories that end, and Wind Waker works well as the last of all Zelda stories. Seeing the series return to ground thoroughly covered years ago was depressing.

After I put down Twilight Princess I picked up the original NES The Legend of Zelda on Wii Marketplace, and it made me realize Shadow of the Colossus is the best Zelda game I've played in years. Hear me out: large, empty landscape to explore; horse; kid in green with sword. Obviously it's not actually Zelda, but it's a lot closer to the sort of Zelda game I want to be playing than anything Nintendo's doing, and in a few ways that appeal to me, it's more faithful to the original Legend of Zelda than any of the NPC-rich sequels. Miyamoto famously doesn't care about story, but if your game is going to have minimal story then I'd rather play through a good story minimalistically told than have to deal with a bunch of cruft optimized for exposition-laden storytelling without any story that makes wading through the cruft worthwhile.

I figure this post about marks the point at which I should give Twilight Princess another go, so maybe I'll have to eat a bunch of crow in a big "I was totally wrong and should have stuck with it for longer!" post next week or month or whatever.

The one thing I'm looking forward to is more Midna. There's something appealing about taking the annoying quest-giving NPC who's always telling you what to do and making her fully cognizant of how annoying and bossy she is, so she can revel in it. But then, I don't identify strongly enough with Link to feel anything more than amusement at his misfortune.