The Great Journey

I just finished Halo 2 and it feels like a great accomplishment.

The game itself wasn't that difficult. I played through on the normal setting. Heroic is supposed to be more of a challenge, and Legendary is said to be near impossible. I don't know if I'm going to try to go through it again any time soon. I'll probably stick to the online part of it now, but I wanted to finish the story.

And what a story it was.

I really loved the story from Halo. Video games (and first person shooters in particular) are notoriously short of story. Mostly it involves going from point A to point B, killing everything in your path and picking up some key cards on the way. The plots tend to be as deep as a short story written in a 13-year-old boy's wide ruled notebook.

Halo was different in so many ways. There was a war going on, but it's not your job to win it single handedly. Your enemy is about to set of a weapon of mass destruction, but they don't even know it. I liked it for the same reason I liked the game. It was simple, yet extremely detailed.

Halo 2 was everything a sequel should be. It took the elements of the first game and expanded on them. There wasn't much in the way of invention. But they went into great depth on almost all aspects of the first story.

Patrick has been talking lately about video games becoming an art form. I'll let him expand on his theories there if he chooses to. I agree that video games are reaching the point where something is going to happen. At some point in the foreseeable future, a corner will be turned. Right now, video games are mimicking action movies. Halo 2 stands out to me because it shows that video game makes have mastered the skills of filmic story telling. They have those tools under their belts. But video games need to find their own path. Trying to mimic movies, that's the best video games will ever be. A copy. Video games must learn to embrace their own strengths and limitations and become something of their own.

Movies were considered mindless entertainment, but they've had their Citizen Kane and Godfathers.

Television is the opium of the masses, but there has been Twin Peaks (Patrick's suggestion) and All in the Family.

Comic books were trash collected by preteen boys, but then came Watchmen and the Dark Knight Returns.

I'm sure that in my lifetime there will be a video game that can be counted as a piece of literature.

I can't wait to see it.