Dear Halo: I Hate You, Please Die!

Dear Halo,

I really thought that you should know something that has been going around my thoughts for awhile, but I simply could not express these feelings until now. This may be difficult for you and those around you to hear, but I really feel that all parties involved will be improved upon once my words and thoughts come to life via the ancient forgotten methods of letter writing.

For years, those in the outermost ring of the gaming community (made up of males who look like they were the offspring of an Aeropostale catalog, a hookah shell necklace, violent degenerates who were kicked out of the military for drug use, and the socially inept), have looked upon Halo as an overrated piece of waste that never should have seen the light of day a guiding light for the first-person shooter genre, bringing multiplayer gaming to the mainstream where the rest of us are forced to deal with the fact that our beloved hobby has been converted into a marketing fad not unlike the grunge movement, skate clothing brands, or the 90s.

So allow me to be concise. Halo: I hate you, please die.

Don’t mix me in with those that simply hate Halo for the sake of hating what is popular. Sure, I may also hate the Yankees, Lakers, Jersey Shore, and any show that talks about “baby bumps,” but I certainly don’t hate any of these because of popularity. So goes my case against one of the single most generic shooting games of all time.

And yes, I’m even taking into account every army shooting game in the last decade.

My complaint is threefold. Halo has sinned against us all for being a very average game hidden beneath the Microsoft hype machine, for pretending that the series has somehow innovated in any way, and by making the rest of us that play games look like complete goons.

Allow me to point out the error of your ways.

Apparently the gaming community suffers from high grade amnesia, because they ALL must have forgotten that while Halo has voice chat, multiplayer matches, the ability to play locally, ranking and matchmaking, and a large amount of weaponry, SO HAVE A BILLION OTHER GAMES ON PC! So quickly people forget the boon of gaming treasure that has and still exists on the PC platform.

INTERLUDE #1: Will’s Top Five PC Shooters Better than Halo!
5) Tribes
4) Team Fortress 2
3) Tribes
2) Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast
1) Halo TRIBES

"BRING IT BACK!"

Honorable Mention: Tribes 2

“But, Will! This is on a console! It’s different!” Allow me.

INTERLUDE: Will’s Top Five Console Shooters Better than Halo!
5) Timesplitters 2 (Any game involving monkeys with guns is AWESOME!)
4) Battlefield 1943
3) Team Fortress 2 (Even if they don't update the console version, it's still better)
2) Fallout 3 (I play in first person, screw you)
1) Tribes: Aerial Assault (SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!)

Okay, so maybe my list is a bit biased towards a game none of you have ever played, BUT TRIBES WAS AWESOME AND I WANT IT BACK.

Where was I? Oh, right, the senseless complaining.

I’m not going to lie: a lot of my grudge against Halo is due to the fact that the single player has always been poorly constructed and laughable. Of course, I know many (i.e. all of you) pretty much just care about the multiplayer. And that is okay. But, you’re stupid and wrong. Here is why.

The players of online shooters are the dredges of society. In the olden days of zone.com and LAN parties we could at least hide these silly freaks from embarrassing the majority, leaving the rest of us plenty of time to play Myst and Scrabble. The drones could yell and scream and curse and teabag to their heart's content because nobody gave a crap about them.

Then some marketing wizard had to go and give them a banner — GAMER! — making the rest of us look just as silly and pathetic.

Now being a gamer is considered a marketing genre akin to fashion trends or fads, even moreso than before when at the very least they hoped to sell our nerdiness and retro nostalgia back to us in small doses like key chains, belt buckles, and t-shirts.  Thanks to Halo making these frat boy goons and loser stoners our state representatives, we have to deal with stupidity along the likes of all girl clans, major league gaming, and “gamer grub,” food designed to be only consumable by the poor, poor souls who think they are being heard.

                             

                       "Lame!"                                                                                                   "Lamer!"

                                                                                   

"LAMEREST!"

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t ask to be patronized. I’m happy be to pathetic, but only on my own time, in my own way, thank you very much.

Most importantly, I feel like the gaming cycle has gotten lazy because of Halo. Developers and publishers now feel that in order to make a game that sells they simply just have to throw in some guns, gore, and special armor and everything is hunky dorey. Certain developers who won’t be named here (due to my apathy towards finding a proper citation) have even admitted that they design their shooters for sales and not quality.

Why? Why not!

But fear not, Halo. You aren’t all bad. Your disgusting trail of disgustingness did produce Halo Wars, a series of halfway decent comics and novels, and a flavor of Mountain Dew I actually liked.

BUT I’M NOT LETTING YOU OFF THE HOOK, AND NEITHER IS LADY AMERICA!

So, from the bottom of my heart I wish to tell you with the most sincere sincerefulness I can muster…

I hate you, Halo. Please die.

Love,

William Harrison

DISCLAIMER OF IMPARTIALITY: Because I saw this coming, and for those of you with the inability to figure out sarcasm, satire, or any kind of lightheartedness in the internet, I give you the following. While the main points of this article are my TRUE opinion (Halo sucks, Tribes is awesome, girl gamers don't have implants, I was playing Myst in the 90s, etc.), the rest falls under a little thing called "creative writing".

So, calm down, eh?