Halo (FPS Game)

Halo: Combat Evolved, also referred to as Halo: CE, or simply Halo, is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The first game of the Halo franchise, it was released on November 15, 2001 as a launch title for the Xbox gaming system, and is considered the platform's "killer app". With more than five million copies sold worldwide as of November 9, 2005, Microsoft released versions of the game for Microsoft Windows (ported by Gearbox Software) and Mac OS X in 2003, and the surrounding storyline was adapted and elaborated into a series of novels and comic books. The game was later released as an Xbox Original for download onto an Xbox 360 HDD. Halo is set in the twenty-sixth century, with the player assuming the role of the Master Chief, a cybernetically enhanced supersoldier. The player is accompanied by Cortana, an artificial intelligence who occupies the Master Chief's neural interface. Players battle various aliens as they attempt to uncover the secrets of the eponymous Halo, a ring-shaped artificial world. The game has been praised for elements such as its story, the variety of strategies players can employ, and its multiplayer mode; however, the repetition of its level design was frequently criticized by reviewers. Many game magazines have praised Halo as one of the best and most important games of all time. The game's popularity has led to labels such as "Halo clone" and "Halo killer," applied respectively to games either similar to or anticipated to be better than it. 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 (the technique of using real-time 3D engines, often from video games, to create animated films). Two sequels, Halo 2 and Halo 3, a side game, Halo 3: ODST, and a prequel, Halo: Reach, were released in 2004, 2007, 2009, and 2010, respectively. A remake, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, was released in 2011, on the 10th anniversary of the original game's release. Halo 4, by 343 Industries, is planned to release on November 6, 2012. Gameplay As a first-person shooter, the gameplay of Halo: Combat Evolved is fundamentally similar to that of its peers, focusing on combat in a 3D environment that is viewed almost entirely from a character's eye view. The player can move around and look up, down, left, or right. The game features vehicles, ranging from armored jeeps and tanks to alien hovercraft and aircraft, many of which can be controlled by the player. The game switches to a third-person perspective during vehicle use for pilots and mounted gun operators; passengers maintain a first-person view. The game's heads-up display includes a "motion tracker" that registers moving allies, enemies, and vehicles in a certain radius of the player. The Master Chief fires his Assault Rifle at a pack of Grunts on the level "Halo." Ammunition, health, and motion sensor displays are visible in the corners of the screen. The player character is equipped with an energy shield which absorbs damage from weapons fire and forceful impacts. The shield's charge appears as a blue bar in the corner of the game's heads-up display, and it automatically recharges if no damage is sustained for a brief period. When the shield is fully depleted, the player is highly vulnerable, and further damage reduces the hit points of a secondary health meter. When this health meter reaches zero, the character dies and the game reloads from a saved checkpoint. Health can be replenished through the collection of health packs scattered around the game's levels, but the game's introduction of a regenerating shield mechanic represented a departure from FPS games of the time. Halo's arsenal consists of weapons from science fiction. The game has been praised for giving each weapon a unique purpose, thus making each useful in different scenarios. For example, plasma weapons need time to cool if fired too rapidly, but cannot be reloaded and must be discarded upon depletion of their batteries, whereas conventional firearms cannot overheat, but require reloading and ammunition. In contrast to the large weapon inventories of contemporary FPS games, Halo players may carry only two weapons at once, calling for strategy when managing firearms. Halo departs from traditional FPS conventions by not forcing the player character to holster its firearm before deploying grenades or melee-range blunt instruments; instead, both attacks can be utilized while a gun is still equipped, supplanting or supplementing small-arms fire. All weapons may be used to bludgeon enemies, which allows the Master Chief to silently kill opponents without alerting other nearby enemies. The Chief can also carry up to eight grenades at a time: up to four fragmentation and four plasma grenades each. Like the game's other weapons, the two types of grenades differ; the fragmentation grenade bounces and detonates quickly, whereas the plasma grenade adheres to targets before exploding, sometimes with blackly comic results. Combatants The game's main enemy force is the Covenant, a group of alien species allied by belief in a common religion. Their forces include Elites, fierce warriors protected by recharging energy shields much like the player's own; Grunts, which are short, cowardly creatures, usually led by Elites, and who often flee in terror instead of fighting in the absence of a leading Elite; Jackals, who wear a highly durable energy shield on one arm; and Hunters, large, powerful creatures with thick armor plates that cover the majority of their bodies. A secondary enemy is the Flood, a parasitic alien life form that appears in three main variants. Infection Forms, the true form of the Flood, are fragile and do little damage individually, but often travel in swarms of several dozen. Combat Forms result from humans and Covenant Elites who have succumbed to the Infection Forms, and have hideously deformed bodies. Bloated Carrier Forms are the result of an aged or unused Combat Form and serve as incubators for new Infection Forms; when wounded or near a potential victim, they explode to damage other nearby life-forms and to release their spores, thus perpetuating the Flood life cycle. Battling the Flood, Covenant, and human forces are the Sentinels: robotic drones designed by an extinct race called the Forerunners. Sentinels lack durability, but use powerful beam weapons and are immune to infection by the Flood. The artificial intelligence in Halo has been favorably received. Enemies take cover and use suppressive fire and grenades.] Some enemies retreat when their superiors are killed. The player is often aided by United Nations Space Command (UNSC) Marines, who offer ground support, such as manning gun turrets or riding shotgun while the player is driving a vehicle. Plot Setting Halo: Combat Evolved 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 faster-than-light travel have caused the human race to colonize other planets. A keystone of these efforts is the planet Reach, an interstellar naval yard and a hub of scientific and military activity. A secret military endeavor, dubbed the SPARTAN Project, was established on Reach to create an army of biologically engineered, cyborg "supersoldiers." Twenty-seven years before the beginning of the game, a technologically advanced collective of alien races, the Covenant, began to attack human settlements, declaring humanity an affront to their gods. The United Nations Space Command experienced a series of crushing defeats, and, although the supersoldiers of the SPARTAN-II Project fought effectively against the Covenant, they were too few in numbers to turn the tides of war. To prepare for a mission to discover the location of the Covenant's homeworld, SPARTAN-II soldiers were recalled to Reach for armor upgrades. Two days before the mission was to begin, Covenant forces attacked Reach and destroyed the colony. A starship, the Pillar of Autumn, survived the onslaught with the lead SPARTAN-II, Master Chief, on board. The ship initiated a random jump to slipspace (similar to hyperspace), hoping to lead the enemy away from Earth. The game starts with the Pillar of Autumn encountering Halo. The titular Halo is an enormous, ring-shaped artificial space station/planet, which (according to Bungie Studios) has a diameter of ten thousand kilometers. Halo sits at a Lagrange point between a planet and its moon. Centrifugal force created by the rotation of the station provides the ring's gravity. Characters Main article: Characters of Halo The player character is Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, one of the few (see Halo: The Fall of Reach and its sequels for more information) surviving supersoldiers 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, codenamed MJOLNIR Mark V. The Pillar of Autumn's captain, Jacob Keyes, is also a major character, with Staff Sergeant Avery Junior Johnson as a supporting character. Playing a mainly antagonistic role in the game's events is 343 Guilty Spark, an eccentric artificial intelligence responsible for monitoring and maintaining Halo's systems. Story Beginning immediately after the events of Halo: Reach, the game opens as the Pillar of Autumn exits slipspace near a mysterious ring-shaped space station, called "Halo" by the enemy of the game, the Covenant. A Covenant fleet attacks and heavily damages the Pillar of Autumn. Captain Keyes initiates "The Cole Protocol," a procedure designed to prevent the Covenant from learning the location of 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. Cortana and the Chief are the only ones who survive the impact of the escape pod crash. Keyes survives the Autumn's crash landing, but is captured by the Covenant. In the second and third levels of the game, the Master Chief and Cortana gather human survivors and rescue Captain Keyes, who is imprisoned aboard the Covenant ship Truth and Reconciliation. Once rescued, Keyes orders the Master Chief to beat the Covenant to Halo's control center and to discover its purpose. The Master Chief and Cortana travel to a map room called the Silent Cartographer, which leads them to the control room. There, Cortana enters the systems and, discovering something urgent, suddenly sends the Master Chief to find Captain Keyes while she stays behind. While searching for his commander, the Master Chief learns that the Covenant have accidentally released the Flood, a parasitic alien race capable of spreading itself by overwhelming and infesting other sentient life-forms. Keyes falls victim to them while looking for a cache of weapons. The release of the Flood prompts Halo's AI monitor, 343 Guilty Spark, to recruit the Master Chief in retrieving the Index, a device that will activate Halo and prevent the Flood from spreading beyond the facility. After the Master Chief retrieves and prepares 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, which the Flood requires to spread, a revelation which Guilty Spark confirms. Faced with this information, the Master Chief and Cortana decide to destroy Halo to prevent its activation. While fighting the Flood, the Covenant, and Guilty Spark's Sentinels, Cortana discovers that the best way to accomplish this is to cause the crashed Pillar of Autumn to self-destruct. However, Captain Keyes' authorization is required to destroy the Autumn, forcing the Chief and Cortana to return to the now-Flood-infested Truth and Reconciliation to search for him. By the time that they reach Keyes, however, he has been infected beyond the point of no return by the Flood. The Master Chief retrieves Keyes' neural implants directly from his brain and retreats to the Autumn, where Cortana activates the ship's self-destruct sequence. However, 343 Guilty Spark reappears and deactivates the countdown, discovering the record of human history in the process. The Master Chief manually destabilizes the Pillar of Autumn's fusion reactors, and he and Cortana narrowly escape the destruction of the ring via a fighter.