So, Halo 3 came out today.

I used to play First Person Shooters (hereafter FPS), back when Castle Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom first came out. I really enjoyed them, there was just a bit of visceral joy to running around and shooting the enemies in the first-person perspective.

Fast forward to now.

These days, I can’t play FPS games to save my life. After a few short minutes, I get a headache. If I persist, they get worse, to the point that I get a migraine. I’ve learned to live without FPS games, but I have to admit, a day like today makes me wish I didn’t have to.

Halo, as a series, has been interesting to watch over the years. While many FPS purists would decry the game as “polluting” the genre, I disagree. Admittedly, the controls are nowhere near as fine-tuned as they are on a PC, and the limits to the number of people who can be in a single match is quite low comparatively.

But at the same time, not that many games have brought so many people into gaming in general as the Halo series has. While these same purists might say that this influx is also a bad thing, again, I disagree. More gamers means more money in the industry. More money in the industry means more money to make games, which hopefully means more good games.

Up until today, the Halo 3 campaign has been working full force to make sure everyone knows that it’s coming out. From television commercials to tie-ins with various companies, Microsoft is coming at this like it was a major motion picture. And they’ve even said that they hope to make this launch as big, if not bigger, than the Spider-Man 3 release. We’ll know soon enough if they met their mark.

But think about it – something of this scale wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago, for any game. Gaming was, even at the height of the PlayStation 2, a niche hobby. Now, almost everyone knows about it, and chances are strong that everyone you know has at least tried a game.

I’m not foolish enough to say that this is all because of Halo, but games like it, games that appeal to a larger audience than just the ‘gamers’, have brought the whole industry pretty far.

Onto the second half of the post’s title, the second season of Heroes began yesterday. I am a huge fan, and have been since the first episode of the first season. I’ve always preferred serial dramas to episodic stories (for example, I prefer Babylon 5 to the Star Trek series because of B5’s set story arc), so the idea that Heroes has a set (albeit large) number of arcs appeals to me.

I’m also a big fan of the largish ensemble cast, which means that there can be several mini-arcs going at once, in addition to the major season arc. And the characters are more than just cookie-cutter templates; each is different enough to make me remember who they are.

Like Halo, Heroes and other shows like it (Lost, 24, etc.) have brought about a renaissance to television. Granted, this is a renaissance that has been around before, but it’s nice to see it again. With luck, it’ll last a good long while before the next wave of comedy/reality shows/episodic dramas/whatever comes and kicks it off of the top of the hill.

 Okay, enough fanboyishness from me. Go and enjoy, folks!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 1:15 am and is filed under Television, games, Richard Kim. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.