Halo: Combat Evolved

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 super-soldier. 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 called "easy to learn", and has been praised for its "engaging story".
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).
==Gameplay==
As a first-person shooter, Halo: Combat Evolved has a gameplay fundamentally similar to that of its peers, focusing on combat in a 3D environment, and taking place 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 the third-person perspective during vehicle use for pilots and mounted gun operators; passengers maintain a first-person view.
The player character is equipped with a damage-absorbing energy shield, in addition to hit points. The shield's charge appears as a blue bar in the upper-right hand corner of the game's heads-up display. When the shield is fully depleted, the player is highly vulnerable, and further damage is applied directly to the character's health level. Critically, the shield will recharge if no further damage is sustained for a brief period. This regenerating shield is a departure from FPS games of the time which force the player to rely upon pickups of health and armor.
Halo's arsenal consists of weapons from science fiction. The game has been praised for giving each weapon a unique purpose, thus making them 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 battery. In contrast, conventional firearms cannot overheat, but require reloading and ammunition. In contrast to contemporary FPS games which provides players with a large inventory or slot for each type of weapon, Halo players may carry only two weapons at once and thus a strategy is required when using and selecting firearms.
Halo departs from traditional FPS conventions by not forcing the player character to holster their 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: 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 unless an Elite is present; Jackals, which wear highly durable energy shields on their arms; 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 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.
===Multiplayer===
As Halo was released before Xbox Live, online multiplayer games were not officially supported. The game instead uses local Ethernet or "system-link" that supports a maximum of 16 players. This setup was a first for a console game, but was often deemed impractical by critics. As Halo lacks artificially intelligent game bots, LAN parties are needed to reach the game's 16-player limit. In addition to five customizable competitive multiplayer modes, two players may co-operatively play through the game's campaign. Halo's multiplayer components were generally well-received by critics and is widely considered one of the best multiplayer games of all time.
Although the Xbox version of Halo lacks official support for online multiplayer play, XLink Kai, GameSpy and XBConnect's packet tunnelling software provide unofficial ways around this limitation. The Windows and Macintosh ports of Halo support online matches involving up to 16 players and include multiplayer maps not in the original Xbox release. However, co-operative play was removed from the ports because it would have required large amounts of recoding to implement. On March 15, 2004, Gearbox Software released Halo: Custom Edition for Windows, which enabled players to use custom-made maps and game modifications.
==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 "super-soldiers". 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 super-soldiers 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, onboard. 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 habitat/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===
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 super-soldiers of the SPARTAN-II project, and the main character of the story. Accompanying the Master Chief is the Pillar of Autumns feminine artificial intelligence construct, Cortana, who resides in a neural implant connected to his battle armor, codenamed MJOLNIR Mark V. The Pillar of Autumns 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.
===Cast===
*Steve Downes as the Master Chief
*Jen Taylor as Cortana
*Pete Stacker as Captain Keyes
*David Scully as Avery Johnson
*Tim Dadabo as 343 Guilty Spark
*Tawnya Pettiford-Wates as Foehammer
*Chris Wicklund as Pvt. Jenkins
*Mike Madeoy as Pvt. Bisenti
*Mark Dias as Pvt. Mendoza
*Andrew McKaige as Pvt. Chipps Dubbo
==Development==
On July 21, 1999, during the Macworld Conference & Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Halo would be released for Mac OS and Windows simultaneously. Before this public announcement, game industry journalists under a non-disclosure agreement had previewed the game in a private showing during E3 1999, and were reportedly amazed.Bungie Studios later stated an even earlier development build of the game centered on real-time strategy and was "basically Myth in a sci-fi universe."
At E3 2000, the first trailer of Halo was well-received. The version shown there differed greatly from the one exhibited previously, marking the first major overhaul in the game's development. At this point, Halo was a third-person action game, in which a transport starship crashlands on a mysterious ring world that orbits a star. Early versions of Covenant aliens appear in great numbers and loot what they can, and war erupts between them and the humans. Unable to match the technologically advanced alien race, the humans on the ring world resort to guerrilla warfare. This version of the game featured Halo-specific fauna, which were later dropped because of design difficulties and the creatures' "detract[ion] from the surprise, drama and impact of the Flood."
As rumors had predicted, Microsoft announced on June 19, 2000 that it had acquired Bungie Studios. Halo became an exclusive game for Microsoft's Xbox video game console, and Bungie Studios rewrote the game's engine, heavily altering its presentation and turning it into a first-person shooter. Originally a key element, the game's online multiplayer component was dropped because Xbox Live would be unfinished at the time of Halo's release. While a playable demonstration of the game at Gamestock 2001 was well-received, critics had mixed reactions to its exhibition at E3 2001. The game was released in North America simultaneously with the Xbox, on November 15, 2001; the "Combat Evolved" subtitle was an addition by marketers at Microsoft, who felt that Halo alone was not a descriptive enough title to compete with other military-themed games.
On July 12, 2002, a Halo port for Windows was announced to be under development by Gearbox Software. Its showing at E3 2003 was positively received by some critics, with skepticism by others. It was released on September 30, 2003, and included support for online multiplayer play and featured sharper graphics, but had compatibility issues that caused poor performance. Halo was later released for Mac OS X on December 11, 2003. On December 4, 2007, the game became available for the Xbox 360 via download from the Xbox Live Marketplace for 1200 Microsoft Points.
===Audio===
Halo's soundtrack was created by Bungie Studios' audio director, Martin O'Donnell, and received enthusiastic praise from many critics. O'Donnell has stated that his goal was to provide "a feeling of importance, weight, and sense of the 'ancient'." He designed the music so that it "could be dissembled and remixed in such a way that would give [him] multiple, interchangeable loops that could be randomly recombined in order to keep the piece interesting as well as a variable length". Development involved the creation of "alternative middle sections that could be transitioned to if the game called for such a change (i.e. less or more intense)."
O'Donnell has remarked that he "sat with the level designers and 'spotted' the level as though it was a movie, with the knowledge that the music would have to be malleable rather than static.... [T]he level designer would tell me what he hoped a player would feel at certain points or after accomplishing certain tasks". Based on this information, O'Donnell would "go back and develop appropriate music cues, then have the designer script the cues into the level, and then we'd play through it to see if it worked as desired." He explained that the use of music in Halo is sparse because he believes that "[music] is best used in a game to quicken the emotional state of the player and it works best when used least", and that "[if] music is constantly playing it tends to become sonic wallpaper and loses its impact when it is needed to truly enhance some dramatic component of game play."
==Reception==
On its release Halo broke sales records; by April 8, 2002, one million units had been sold: this pace was faster than that of any previous sixth-generation console game. During the two months following Halos release, the game sold alongside more than fifty percent of Xbox consoles. Halos retail price remained at US$49.99 until November 30, 2003. By July 14, 2003, the game had sold three million copies worldwide, and by January 28, 2004, it had reached four million copies. As of November 9, 2005, Halo has sold over five million copies worldwide.
Halo was critically acclaimed and received an overall score of 97% on Metacritic. Electronic Gaming Monthly observed, "This game has me totally mesmerized ... [It] engages your intellect on a whole different level". Edge praised the game as "the most important launch game for any console, ever" and commented, "GoldenEye 007 was the multiplayer standard for console first-person shooters... It has been surpassed." GameSpot claimed that "Halo's single-player game is worth picking up an Xbox for alone", concluding, "Not only is this easily the best of the Xbox launch games, but it's easily one of the best shooters ever, on any platform." IGN remarked similarly, calling Halo a "can't miss, no-brainer, sure thing, five star, triple A game." Among the specific aspects that reviewers praised were the balance of weapons, the role of drivable vehicles, and the artificial intelligence of enemies.
The game received numerous Game of the Year awards, including those of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Edge, and IGN. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded Halo "Best Console Game", and Rolling Stone presented it with their "Best Original Soundtrack" award. According to Xbox.com, the game received a total of 48 awards.
Although Halo's overall reception was largely positive, the game received criticism for its level design. GameSpy commented, "you'll trudge through countless hallways and control rooms that all look exactly the same, fighting identical-looking groups of enemies over and over and over…it is simply frustrating to see a game with such groundbreaking sequences too often degenerate [into] this kind of mindless, repetitive action." Similarly, an article on Game Studies.org remarked, "In the latter part of the game, the scenarios rely on repetition and quantity rather than innovativeness and quality." Eurogamer concluded, "Halo is very much a game of two halves. The first half is fast, exciting, beautifully designed and constantly full of surprises. The second half is festooned with gobsmacking plot twists and great cinematics but let down by repetitive paint by numbers level design." Halo was released prior to the launch of Xbox Live, and the lack of both online multiplayer and bots to simulate human players was criticised by GameSpy; in 2003 GameSpy included Halo in a list of "Top 25 Most Overrated Games of All Time".
Halo's PC port garnered mixed reactions and received a score of 83% on Metacritic. GameSpot stated that it was "still an incredible action game ... [and] a true classic", awarding it 9.0 out of 10. It received a score of 8.2 out of 10 from IGN, who stated, "If you've played the game on the Xbox, there's not much for you here." Eurogamer called the game "a missed opportunity", but stated that the online multiplayer component was "a massive draw ... for Halo veterans".
==Links==
*"Halo: Combat Evolved for Xbox". GameRankings.
*"Halo: Combat Evolved for PC". GameRankings.
*"Halo Review". Eurogamer.
*"Halo: Combat Evolved review for the XBOX". Game Revolution.
*"Halo: Combat Evolved Xbox Review". TalkXbox.
*"Best Launch Titles". GameSpot.
*Official website
*Halo at Bungie.net
*Halo at Xbox.com
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