Jaw-Dropping Insanity

By: Reach for the Sky

Allow me to rant about Halo: ODST. I rented ODST a couple months ago, and returned it after three days. Here's the sum total of what the game offered as an expansion pack to Halo 3:

-a 4-hour campaign
-"firefight" mode
-slightly altered gameplay

There you go. That's everything. a short campaign with a trivial story attached to it, a new multiplayer-mode, and a couple of changes to character ability. No new weapons*, enemies, or vehicles. Firefight mode is pretty shallow considering it's the games biggest feature. You're still killing a bunch of enemies, but, get this, you aren't moving forward at all. It's hours of added content without actually needing to design an expansive level! Brilliant! as for gameplay, the character can't jump as high, take as much damage, regenerate health, or dual-wield weapons. These changes would, at the absolute most, take a day for a competent modder to create if they had provided a public SDK. It also came with all the multiplayer maps for Halo 3, rendered useless if you already had them or bought it second hand.

Reviewers ate it up of course. Almost every "major" video game source gave it 90% of their maximum score. Either bribery was involved, direct or otherwise, or these websites and magazines are run by drooling monkeys. I'm starting to think it's because Microsoft has its fans on its own yardstick, keeping their standards down with deliberately minuscule innovation in order to make every new shiny toy they give seem like the greatest piece of art since whatever number the madden games are on now**. I have a feeling that if the average halo fan knew about the massive amount of fan-made content that was available for, say, Counter-Strike, his brain would simply drip out of his nose after being blown to smithereens***.

*No, "silenced SMG" does not count. Especially when the silencer has no effect in the actual game.
**One of these days I'll write about that too. All in due time.
***I actually tried to convince a hardcore halo fan that there were hundreds of developer-quality maps for any given source game, and he simply would not buy it. I've long since given up this method of debate.