The greatness of multiplayer Halo

Above: Blood Gulch, site of many fond memories. There's a shotgun in that building on the bottom screen!

The original Halo has a very special place in my heart. Not only was it one of the first games that I owned for the first Xbox, way back when it came out in 2001, the multiplayer was also a staple of my entire college career. After the massive popularity of the online-enabled Halo 2 and Halo 3, it's easy to forget how unlikely it was that the multiplayer in the original became a phenomenon in its own right. Halo, however, came out at a time when splitscreen was the only game in town. You could theoretically get up to 16 players into a game by networking four consoles with four controllers each, but who the hell would have the space and the resources to pull that off? When I first got the game, I had all of two controllers to work with, which meant that my friends and I were limited to one-on-one deathmatch. Mind you, Halo was not designed for one-on-one, most of the maps were actually targeted for 6-12 players. It should have been mindnumbingly boring. Instead, it was glorious.

     
Playing a multiplayer shooter with only two competitors dials the pace way back. With Halo, it turned a chaotic blastfest into a tactical affair, where long periods of mutual stalking build up to an explosive flurry of moves and countermoves. This worked so well in Halo for two reasons: the regenerating shield system, which is now an industry standard but was completely innovative and new at the time, and the fact that the default spawn loadout included a cache of grenades and a remarkably effective scoped pistol. In Halo, you can hold your own even if you wind up in a fight before you can find a better gun, and if an opponent gets the upper hand and starts inflicting damage, you have the option of falling back and recouping. Compared to other shooters of the time, Halo had a unique and fluid rhythm that fluctuated constantly between defense and offense, with no one tactic guaranteeing success at any moment. Not only was it fun to play, it was fun to watch - which was important, because with only two controllers, somebody would always be watching and waiting for their turn.

Later, when I bought some more controllers, we started played 3 and 4 player matches, which brought back some of the chaos and randomness of the game. One thing we did semi-regularly is setting up King of the Hill matches (where you score points from standing in a random spot on the map that moves every 30 seconds) where every player spawned with a rocket launcher by default. This turned the game into a kind of Warner Bros. cartoon, where within 5 seconds of getting into scoring position, you'd be nailed by multiple explosions that left you staring at your corpse as it pinwheels across the map through the third person death camera that's one of Halo multiplayer's subtler pleasures. Even though this was probably the least skill-intensive permutation of Halo competition, it was hilariously fun to play.

I skipped Halo 2 multiplayer, mostly because the game came out when I was in grad school and didn't really have online access or anyone to play splitscreen with. I did play quite a bit of Halo 3 online, which I enjoyed. Since that game concluded the story arc begun in the first game, I figured that it would wind up being the apex of the series and basically assumed that any subsequent games would be less inspired or more minor entries, which seemed to be born out by Halo 3: ODST, which was a lot of fun, but hewed pretty closely to the basic gameplay formula of the parent game. So when the two-week multiplayer beta test for this fall's Halo: Reach opened up to ODST owners, I figured that I'd download it and play a couple matches to check out the graphics and new weapons and that would be that.

You can guess how that turned out. I've been totally hooked on Halo: Reach. It's probably a good thing that the beta ends on Monday, because I'd probably keep playing it into the forseeable future, even though the selection of maps for the base game is limited to two (there's a couple other maps that are devoted to specialized modes, one of which is a kind of variant on the Assault gametype from Unreal Tournament). Reach is a chronological prequel to the existing Halo games, although it's not going to feature the same characters, and it seems pretty clear to me that Bungie's using the opportunity to bring back some of the feel of the original Halo multiplayer: there's no more dual-wielding mechanic, no more grenade types beyond frag and plasma, and the scoped pistol is back in slightly modified form as a default weapon. More importantly, they've tuned the game down substantially away from Halo 3's emphasis on close combat - the default strategy of running straight at an opponent while firing the shitty default assault rifle until you're close enough for a melee blow doesn't work nearly as well now, and the grenades are substantially more effective. There's also a mechanic where rapid-firing precision weapons reduces accuracy. All in all, the feel of the game is a lot closer to the tactical balance of the original Halo, and I love it. 

There's also a lot of new stuff, with the most significant addition being the substitution of persistent abilities (jetpack, sprint, invisibility, or power armor) picked from a class-selection menu that replace the temporary power-ups of previous Halo outings. I was skeptical about this when I first heard they were doing it, but it's amazing how well-implemented it is in giving you more options to alter the flow of combat without breaking the game. I tend to favor the sprint ability, which lets me close into medium range more quickly to better use the pistol, but I've seen other players use each of the other powers in smart ways, and you're free to equip an different one between lives a'la the Call of Duty class system. The new weapons are also very cool and surprisingly substantial in terms of differences from Halo 3 - pretty much everything has been rethought or replaced. Below is a shot of me, captured using the Theater mode that's been brought over from the last game, in the process of taking out somebody with the new grenade launcher:

So I'm seriously impressed by Halo: Reach: it's much more of a new-feeling game than I was expecting given the wide acclaim and huge sales figures of Halo 3. The design choices evoke some serious nostalgia for the first Halo and all the good times I had playing it back in college, while also adding a bunch of new and modern wrinkles to the gameplay. This is definitely a must-buy for me when it comes out later this year, and based on the small taste available through the beta, I can see myself getting more than my money's worth out of the online multiplayer.

Teenage Angst Has Paid Off Well

If you haven't seen it already, this video of Kurt Cobain as an unlockable character performing various non-Nirvana songs in Guitar Hero 5 has been making the rounds on music and gaming blogs over the past couple days:



The user who created the video tagged it with "spinning grave" and "courtney love is fucking bitch." I think that watching the virtual Kurt aping Flavor Flav at the beginning of the video is the most jarring, but the creator of the video seems to focus mostly on Bon Jovi's "You Give Love A Bad Name." That's understandable, not only because it's a sort of clever fingering of Courtney Love, who controls the right's to Cobain's likeness and is almost certainly the responsible party for him being a playable character in this game, but also because Bon Jovi essentially epitomizes the 80's stadium rock aesthetic that Nirvana is so often portrayed as being the antithesis of. I have a feeling that the real insult to the Cobain legacy contained herein is having "him" front "Comedown" by Bush, a shameless, talentless grunge also-ran that ranks among the more inexplicable bands to achieve popularity in the early to mid-90s.

When I first started to become a music fan as a kid, Nirvana was one of the first bands I gravitated towards. I was too young to be aware of Nevermind when it blew up and conquered the world, but I flipped for "Heart Shaped Box" when it came out on the radio. I talked my parents into getting me a copy of In Utero on cassette for an Easter present by claiming that "Rape Me" was an instrumental track. Kurt Cobain committed suicide around a month later. So my visceral reaction to this Guitar Hero video was to cringe in disbelief at this affront to his legacy. If you clicked on the video above, you probably did the same.

But that's a dangerous reaction. And it's one that, if we knew what was good for us, we probably shouldn't be having.

Generation X, the cohort of 1990s teenagers and young adults for whom Kurt Cobain will perpetually be identified as a patron saint, was never more united in anything than it was in rejection of baby boom generation in general and their romanticization of 1960s culture in particular. Gen X saw the baby boomers as a stifling hegemony of deluded narcissists bent on enshrining their salad days as the perpetual sine qua non of American culture. They pointed out the baby boomers were still blithely celebrating 1960s social rebellion even after they'd all gotten corporate jobs and elected Ronald Reagan twice. Generation X's message to the baby boomers was that their values were bullshit, and their heads were too far up their asses to even realize it.

And they were right, and they're still right. But the march of time is a motherfucker, and in 2009, we stand in serious danger of history repeating itself. There's been a push toward establishing 1990s "classic rock" as a radio format. There's been a barrage of reunions and tours over the past five years, from the Pixies to Rage Against the Machine to Smashing Pumpkins (kind of). Lollapalooza came back in 2003, albeit as a festival rather than a tour, and Lilith Fair is returning next year. Looming in the foreground is Weezer's 2001 reunion and subsequent recorded output, which stands as a case study in "be careful what you wish for, because you might get it."

I don't begrudge any of this; Perry Farrell's heroin isn't going to buy itself, and I'm sure Sarah McLaughlin can't cover her mortgage by licensing music to the SPCA. Clearly, there's a demand for 90s nostalgia, and there will be supply to meet it. That's OK.

What isn't OK is taking a moralistic and self-righteous stance about the values of the 1990s, "selling out," and all the rest of it. That ship has already sailed. We've already seen Liz Phair reinvent herself as an aging-hooker version of Avril Lavigne and Billy Corgan putting "Today" in a Visa commercial. Even Kurt Cobain's been worked over: we can buy a collection of his personal journals (which I'm ashamed to say that I own, having been given them as a gift - I've flipped through it but never read it cover to cover) and he's even showed up as an angel in heaven to sell us Doc Martens:


But you know what? None of that changes the fact that In Utero is an amazing album (I prefer it to Nevermind by a considerable margin, and am in fact listening to it as I write) and none of it dishonors or invalidates anything about the 1990s. The past is always with us, but it's the past for a reason, and we don't have to let a romanticized version of it dictate how we see the present. It's easy and seductive to believe that Kurt Cobain would never have let himself be put into Guitar Hero 5 to sing Bon Jovi and Bush. Maybe he wouldn't have. Then again, maybe he would. We won't ever know for sure, because Kurt Cobain perforated his head with a shotgun on April 5, 1994.

I was 11 years old when that happened. Now I'm 27, and two weeks older than Kurt Cobain ever lived to be. I'll be widening that gap, day by day, as I live my life. And it's got me thinking that perhaps idol worship and nostalgia aren't all they're cracked up to be.