Horizon Zero

Happy Evil European Invader Day

The most non PC day of the year? Columbus Day, of course!

Now We Know Who To Blame When SHODAN Enslaves the Earth

The Austrians.

Neurotic AI's are never a good idea. Oh, they'll start off just playing practical jokes or insisting that two plus two is five but eventually they turn rampant and start conducting twisted biological research. That, or they nuke the planet and sic Terminators on the survivors.

Beep Beep Beep

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the Sputnik launch, which kicked the training wheels off of the Space Age and in conjunction with Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human in space spurred the American drive to put a man on the moon.

The history of the Space Age post-Apollo has been less epic, but there are still plenty of frontiers to conquer, if we're willing to actually pay the price in blood and treasure.

A Weekend Made of Win and Awesome

So I finished both Halo 3 and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion this weekend.

Halo 3 took about nine or ten hours to play straight through (Well, the 360 stayed on that whole time. I took a couple of breaks for food and stuff) I only played on Normal, so I guess I can't pat myself on the back too much. I might go back and play on Heroic sometime later, but I can't imagine making it through Legendary anytime soon. I'm just not into the genre enough to withstand that kind of brutality.

So what did I think? It plays wonderfully, the inclusion of specialilzed equipment like the bubble shield or stealth field provides new tactical options, and it'll always be fun trying to take down those massive Scarab tanks. Also, the SPARTAN Laser is really nifty.

But.

From a storytelling point of view, Halo 3 kind of disappoints. Yeah, I know, "Who plays a FPS for story?" I do, for one, and as you can see from my pre-launch love note to Master Chief I think there's a really great story just waiting to be told in the Halo setting. Only they didn't seem to get around to it, or even worse occasionally got close to it only to dance away.

There were all sorts of things I thought were going to dovetail together that seem to have been left dangling. How is it Cortana was able to blindly jump the Pillar of Autumn to Halo 04? Why did 343 Guilty Spark seem to recognize Master Chief's armor as Reclaimer design? Why is Cortana so good at interfacing with Forerunner and Covenant technology? What about her limited lifespan and the feeting signs of rampancy we saw in Halo and Halo 2? If the Forerunners wiped out all of the Flood by firing the array way back, and the Flood requires a critical mass of intelligent life to form a Gravemind then how was there a Gravemind on Delta Halo?

Maybe some of these will be covered in the various tie ins. But darn it, I wanted the solution to involve more than "run down this corridor, turn this switch, kill some more Flood."

Still and all, don't let my narrative gripes make it look like I didn't have a blast playing.

Also, Elder Scrolls IV is the first XBox360 game in which I earned all the available Achievements. (Caveat: This isn't counting the ones added by Shivering Isles. I'll get to those later.) Yay me.