Beating a dead horse: Halo Edition

Welcome to the first edition of "Beating a Dead Horse". These articles will discuss and argue my point over games and other media that has been overly hyped, overly publicized and just plain is getting old. In this edition I will talk about the Halo video game series.

I won't go into how Halo got started but I will say it grew very popular because it was the "killer app" for the XBOX console. Why was it the killer app? Because it was the only playable or palatable game that the original XBOX launched with. The other duds that launched with the XBOX could hardly be considered games at all. So Halo was really the only choice you had in terms of a recognizable game genre.

It never was visually impressive to me, heck it didn't even have a semi-original story. I realize ideas are essentially built on another idea that you make your own but come on, aliens versus space marines, how many times have I heard that? The Halo series carries the normal assortment of un-original and brainless weaponry. Each weapon essentially comes with an alien counter-part so I won't go over those.

The marine weaponry consists of a rifle, pistol, machine gun, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, etc. You see where this is going. What we end up with is Quake with shields and dual wielding. Note you couldn't dual wield swords, the only thing I'd expect anybody to dual wield efficiently on a battlefield. If you dual wield weapons in real life one of two things happens or even both: 1.) Depending on the caliber of the weapon you could potentially break both of your arms and 2.) It's incredibly inaccurate and more likely to hit some random pigeon than the actual target.

People seem to love Halo but not one of these people seems to be able to give me a good reason why. That's because more than half of the Halo fans are composed of bandwagon people that like it because their one crazy friend does. People play the game and seem to have this false idea that it's actually fun. What's so fun about a game that consists of only one routine: Find the power weapon and completely bowl over the other team. Note the power weapon, that's all that people go for first.

If there were an out and out firefight it'd be intense but instead it consists of: Find rocket launcher, jump around like a complete dipshit and rain hell down on the other team. Or you can go with scenario B: sneak around like some wimp and cut people down with a plasma sword that homes in on people. Now they've got Halo: Reach coming out, when Halo: Reach was announced I couldn't care less whether it sold well or some redneck used the disc for target practice. People are going all gaga over it and there were all these ads plastered all over XBOX live about it.

It gives me a fucking headache even thinking about how hyped this series really is. Halo 2 failed to live up to expectations and so did fucking Halo 3. So now all the fanboys are throwing fist pumps around saying "YES FINALLY THIS WILL DO HALO JUSTICE!" and that's what they did with part 3 after part 2 completely canned out. The first thing I hated about Halo was how fucking high people can jump, it's just ridiculous and you look like an asshole doing it. Now it's got jetpacks and some other pussy features I can't even be bothered to look up. So in addition to jumping around and looking like a complete asshole you can look like an even bigger douche flying around with a jet pack.

I like when I see some Halo fanboy in other games trying to bunny hop but he ends up skipping because no other game has ridiculous physics like Halo does. Whoopedefrickindoo, I could give a fuck less about your stupid jet pack or anything even Halo related. Please let this stupid franchise die and drown in the toilet where it belongs. Stop milking a franchise that should have ended at part 1 and most of all stop beating a dead fucking horse.