Shooting My Mouth Off

So, I got into a bit of a snarky flame-war on the MageKrew forums today after making the following statement while slightly tipsy (the ninja waiter that served me at dinner kept filling my damn wine glass whenever I turned my head. I must have down 2/3 of a bottle of wine without even noticing.):

I'm going to say it here: TF2 is better than Halo 3.
That's right. My line in the sand? It's been drawn.

I know, I know...this is just begging for a flame war. Of course, things quickly degenerated into an argument of TF2 versus Halo. Things weren't helped by the fact that I'm suffering from allergies, and thusly feeling a bit punchy. At least one of my friends is a pretty hardcore Halo fanboy, so this statement very much rubbed him the wrong way.

After thinking about it I realized that, as with most other things, it's a matter of perception. In this case, it's my general attitude of disdain that I level towards Halo. I think that the love that the Halo series gets (and which I feel is completely undeserved) stems from the fact that it's a console game. And consoles, in general, don't have access to a large number of quality titles from the FPS genre, at least compared to the PC.

When Halo first came out for the XBox in 2001, it was the first real quality title, let alone FPS, the system could claim. As such, it gained much praise. It was not, however, the best console FPS available at the time. That award goes to Timesplitters for PS2, which had more multiplayer options, comperable graphics, a map maker, and was available more than a year before Halo reared its head. A year before that, Unreal Tournament had been released for the PC, and it was a far better game than both Timesplitters and Halo. Oh, and Counter-Srike, which is still the most widely played FPS in the world, with over 6.177 billion minutes played!

This seems to be typical of the FPS cycle. Halo gets a great deal of praise because it has a much higher marketing budget than its competitors. The Timesplitters games, while almost always better, are doomed to become sleeper hits due to a smaller budget and lack of hype. In the mean time, the PC crowd just shrugs their collective shoulders, since they've had a better game for a year or two now.

Most FPS I've played have been for the PC, so I've never quite understood the Halo hype. I purchased Halo 2 to try and understand. It was pretty entertaining, but I found myself going back to Jedi Knight 2, Battlefield 1942, and various Half-Life mods...which didn't require an XBox Live account to play online. Hell, you can download Counterstrike for free!
My Halo 3 purchase was spurred by a party I was helping to throw, and due to the insane hype it was given regarding its online play. I am not, despite my occasional protests, immune to hype; I am, however, resistant to it, specifically after being greatly dissapointed at one point in my life. After playing a few hours of it online, I have found that the cycle of pain continues: it's a solid game, but it's far from the best.

I realize this game has been getting an undue amount of blog-time, so this will be my final word on the matter here: Halo 3, while a good game, is not the best FPS out there by any stretch of the imagination. It's single-player campaign is sub-par when compared to current titles, and it's multi-player, while entertaining, pales in comparison to a multitude of other PC FPS games.

In short: Halo's okay.