Halo: Combat Evolved

From Xboxic

Developer: Bungie Studios Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios Available on: Out now Release date: Achievements: none Achievement Points: none

Summary

Halo is a sci-fi shooter that takes place on a mysterious alien ring-world. Packed with combat, Halo will have you battling on foot, in vehicles, inside and outdoors with Alien and Human weaponry. Your objective: to uncover Halo's horrible secrets and destroy mankind's sworn enemy, the Covenant.

Halo: Combat Evolved, or simply Halo, is a science fiction first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie Studios. It was released on November 15, 2001 as a launch title for the Xbox gaming system,[1] and is considered that platform's "killer application".[5] With more than five million copies sold worldwide, Halo is second only to its sequel, Halo 2, in sales for the Xbox video game console.[6]

The titular Halo is an enormous, ring-shaped artificial space habitat, and, according to Bungie Studios, has a diameter of either ten thousand kilometers or miles.[7] Halo sits at a lagrange point between a planet and its moon; this arrangement gives the station rotational gravity.[8] In the game, the player assumes the role of the Master Chief, a cyborg "super-soldier" with battle armor. The Master Chief is accompanied by Cortana, an artificial intelligence who occupies the neural implant between the battle armor and the Master Chief's brain. Players battle various types of aliens on foot or in vehicles as they attempt to uncover the secrets of the Halo. The game has been called "easy to learn,"[9] and has been praised for its "engaging story".[10]

Widely considered to be one of the best, and most influential, first-person shooters of all time, Halo's acclaim rivals that of GoldenEye 007 and Half-Life. For example, Edge gave Halo a full score of ten out of ten, only the fourth such designation in the magazine's 12-year history.[11] Nevertheless, Halo has its critics. The game was tenth on GameSpy's "Top 25 Most Overrated Games of All Time"; one reviewer stated that the game "recycl[ed] the same areas over and over until you were bored to tears."[12]

The game's popularity has led to labels such as "Halo clone"[13] and "Halo killer", applied to games either similar to, or anticipated to be better than, Halo.[14] In addition, the game inspired and was used in the fan-created Red vs. Blue video series, which is credited as the "first big success" of machinima[15] — the art of using real-time 3-D engines, often from computer and video games, to create animated films.

Contents [hide] 1 Gameplay 1.1 Allies and enemies 1.2 Multiplayer 2 Synopsis 2.1 Setting 2.2 Characters 2.3 Plot 3 Audio 4 Development 5 Reception 5.1 Legacy 6 Novelization 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Gameplay As a first-person shooter, Halo's gameplay is fundamentally similar to that of its peers, thus focusing on combat almost entirely in the first-person perspective. The player can move around and look up, down, or to either side.[16] Halo is credited with presenting one of the first successful sets of controls for a first-person shooter on a video game console.[17] The game features vehicles, ranging from technicals and hovercraft to giant tanks and aircraft, several of which can be controlled by the player; the game switches to the third-person perspective during vehicle use.[18]

The player character is equipped with a damage-absorbing energy shield, a substitute for hit points. Its charge appears as a blue bar in the upper-right corner of the game's heads-up display. When the shield is fully depleted, the player is highly vulnerable, and further damage reduces the character's health level.[10] However, the shield will recharge if no further damage is sustained for a brief period of time.[19]

The Master Chief fires his Assault Rifle upon a group of Grunts.Halo's arsenal consists of weapons from science fiction. The game has been praised for giving each a unique purpose, thus making them useful in different scenarios.[20] For example, plasma weapons need time to cool if fired too rapidly, but require no reloading. Instead, players are forced to discard them after depleting their batteries.[19] In contrast, human weapons cannot overheat, but require reloading and ammunition.[19] All weapons may be used to bludgeon opponents,[19] allowing players to kill enemies stealthily without alerting their allies.[21] Players may carry only two weapons at once; thus, strategy is required when using and selecting firearms.[22]

The player can carry up to eight grenades at one time: four fragmentation and plasma grenades each.[2] Like the game's other weapons, the two types of grenades differ; the fragmentation grenade bounces and detonates quickly,[23] whereas the plasma grenade adheres to targets and takes longer to detonate.[24] A button dedicated for grenades obviates the need to holster firearms before throwing.[19]

[edit] Allies and enemies The game's main enemy force is the Covenant, an alliance of alien species. Their forces include Grunts, which are short, cowardly creatures who often flee in terror instead of fighting; Jackals, which have highly durable energy shields attached to their arms; Elites, fierce warriors protected by recharging energy shields; and Hunters, large, powerful creatures with thick armor plates that cover the majority of their bodies.[25]

A secondary enemy is The Flood, a parasitic alien life form that appears in three main variants.[26] Infection Forms, the true form of the Flood, are fragile, but often travel in swarms. Combat Forms result from humans and Covenant Elites who are infested by Infection Forms, and have hideously deformed bodies. Bloated Carrier Forms serve as incubators for new Infection Forms. When wounded or near a potential victim, they explode suicidally to damage other nearby life forms and to release their spores. Battling both the Flood and the player are the Sentinels, robotic drones designed by a race called the Forerunners. Sentinels lack durability, but use powerful beam weapons and are immune to infection by the Flood.[26]

The artificial intelligence in Halo has been favorably received.[27] Enemies take cover and use suppressive fire and grenades.[20] Some enemies retreat when their superiors are killed.[28] The player is often aided by United Nations Space Command (UNSC) Marines, who offer ground support, such as manning gun turrets or riding shotgun with the player in technicals.[20]

[edit] Multiplayer Because Halo was released before Xbox Live, online multiplayer games were not officially supported.[29] The game instead uses a network hub system that could link a maximum of sixteen players. This setup was revolutionary for a console game, but was often deemed impractical.[21] Because Halo lacks artificially intelligent game bots, LAN parties are needed to reach the game's sixteen-player limit.[16] In addition to competitive multiplayer modes, two players may co-operatively play through the game's campaign.[16] Halo's multiplayer components were generally well-received by critics.[30][11][18]

Although the Xbox version of Halo lacks official support for online multiplayer play, XBConnect and GameSpy's Xbox Connect packet tunnelling software provide unofficial means around this limitation.[12] The PC port of Halo supports online matches involving up to sixteen players and includes multiplayer maps not in the original Xbox release.[31] However, co-operative play was removed because it would have required large amounts of recoding to implement.[32] On March 15, 2004, Gearbox Software released Halo: Custom Edition for the PC, thus enabling players to use custom-made maps and game modifications.[33]

[edit] Synopsis Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

[edit] Setting Main article: Halo universe Halo takes place in a science fiction universe created by Bungie Studios specifically for the game. According to the story, the overpopulation of Earth and the realization of superluminal travel have caused the human race to colonize other planets.[19] A keystone of these efforts is the planet Reach, an interstellar naval yard responsible for building starships, and a hub of scientific and military activity.[19] A secret military endeavor, dubbed the SPARTAN-II Project, was established on Reach to create an army of biologically-engineered, cyborg "super-soldiers". Thirty-two years before the beginning of the game, a technologically advanced collective of alien races, the Covenant, began to attack human settlements.[19] Declaring humanity an affront to their gods, the Covenant launched a holy war against the human race.[19] The United Nations Space Command experienced a series of crushing defeats, and, although the super-soldiers of the SPARTAN-II Project fought impressively against the Covenant, they were too few in number to turn the tides of war.[19]

To prepare for a mission to discover the location of the Covenant homeworld by boarding one of its starships, SPARTAN-II soldiers were recalled to Reach for further augmentation.[19] Two days before the mission was to begin, Covenant forces attacked Reach and destroyed the colony.[19] A single starship, the Pillar of Autumn, survived the onslaught and initiated a random jump to light speed,[34] hoping to lead the enemy away from Earth.[35]

[edit] Characters Main article: List of Halo series characters The player character is "Master Chief John-117",[36] the last known (see Halo: The Fall of Reach and its sequels for more information) surviving super-soldier of the SPARTAN-II project, and the main character of the story. Accompanying the Master Chief is the Pillar of Autumn's feminine artificial intelligence construct, Cortana, who resides in a neural implant connected to his battle armor. The Pillar of Autumn's captain, Jacob Keyes, is a minor character. Playing an antagonistic role in the game's events is 343 Guilty Spark, an eccentric artificial intelligence responsible for monitoring and maintaining Halo's systems.

[edit] Plot The story is presented through an instruction manual, scripted events and conversations during the game, and in-game cut scenes. The game begins as the Pillar of Autumn exits light speed near a mysterious ring-shaped space station, called "Halo" by the Covenant.[37] A Covenant fleet attacks and heavily damages the Pillar of Autumn. Jacob Keyes initiates "The Cole Protocol",[38] a procedure designed to prevent the Covenant from learning about Earth. While Keyes prepares to land the ship on Halo, the Master Chief and Cortana escape via an escape pod, which crash lands on the ring.

Captain Keyes survives the Autumn's crash landing, but is captured by the Covenant.[39] In the second and third levels of the game, the Master Chief and Cortana gather human survivors and rescue Captain Keyes, who then orders Master Chief to beat the Covenant to Halo's control center and to discover its purpose.[40] The Master Chief and Cortana travel to a map room called the Silent Cartographer, which leads them to the control room.[41] There, Cortana enters the systems and, discovering something urgent, suddenly sends the Master Chief to find Captain Keyes, while she stays behind.[42] While searching for his commander, the Master Chief learns that the Covenant has accidentally released the Flood, a parasitic alien race capable of spreading itself by overwhelming and infesting other sentient lifeforms. Keyes falls victim to them while looking for a cache of weapons. The release of the Flood prompts 343 Guilty Spark to ask the Master Chief to help him to prevent the Flood from leaving Halo by retrieving the Index, a key that activates Halo and prevents the Flood from spreading.

The Master Chief (left) converses with 343 Guilty Spark (right).After the Master Chief retrieves and begins to use the Index, Cortana re-appears and warns him against the activation. She has discovered that Halo's defense system is a weapon designed to kill all sentient life in the galaxy, thus effectively starving the Flood.[43] When confronted with this information, 343 Guilty Spark states that the installation technically only has a maximum radius of twenty-five thousand light years, but that its pulse would trigger other similar installations as well, killing all sentient life in the galaxy.[44]

With Cortana's help, and while fighting the Flood, the Covenant, and Guilty Spark's Sentinels, the Master Chief attempts to destroy Halo before 343 Guilty Spark activates it. Cortana discovers that the best way to destroy Halo is to cause the crashed Pillar of Autumn to self-destruct.[45] However, Captain Keyes' authorization is required to destroy the ship.[46] By the time that they reach Keyes, he has been infested and turned into a Brain Flood. The Master Chief retrieves Keyes' neural implants directly from his brain, and Cortana activates the Autumn's self-destruct sequence. However, 343 Guilty Spark reappears and deactivates the countdown, discovering the record of human history in the process.[47] The Master Chief manually causes the Pillar of Autumn's fusion reactors to begin to melt down, giving him and Cortana only fifteen minutes to escape.[48] The Master Chief and Cortana flee in a small starship before Halo explodes. The ending reveals that 343 Guilty Spark survives the explosion of Halo, and the story is continued in Halo 2.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Audio Main article: Halo Original Soundtrack Halo's soundtrack was created by Bungie Studios' audio director, Martin O'Donnell, and received enthusiastic praise from many critics.[18][17][20][22][10] O'Donnell has stated that his goal was to provide "a feeling of importance, weight, and sense of the 'ancient'."[49] He designed the music so that it "could be dissembled and remixed in such a way that would give [him] multiple, interchangeable loops that could be randomly recombined in order to keep the piece interesting as well as a variable length". Development involved the creation of "alternative middle sections that could be transitioned to if the game called for such a change (i.e. less or more intense)."[50]

O'Donnell has remarked that he "sat with the level designers and 'spotted' the level as though it was a movie, with the knowledge that the music would have to be malleable rather than static.... [T]he level designer would tell me what he hoped a player would feel at certain points or after accomplishing certain tasks". Based on this information, O'Donnell would "go back and develop appropriate music cues, then have the designer script the cues into the level, and then we'd play through it to see if it worked as desired."[50] He explained that the use of music in Halo is sparse because he believes that "[music] is best used in a game to quicken the emotional state of the player and it works best when used least", and that "[if] music is constantly playing it tends to become sonic wallpaper and loses its impact when it is needed to truly enhance some dramatic component of game play."[51]

[edit] Development

The first official screenshot of Halo.On July 21, 1999, during the Macworld Conference