Friday, February 8, 2008

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.

1 comment:

Waffle Girl said...

The nice thing about Douglas Adams is that you can misquote him. He wouldn't have minded. He often changed things around himself on purpose when he changed medias so its really just keeping the spirit of things.