Master Chief Rumbles Closer..

If you live in America, next Tuesday brings you probably the largest day in videogame entertainment history: Halo 3 launch day.

Our friends across the pond haven’t been able to move for the last few months without seeing an image of Master Chief emblazoned across anything with a surface large enough for his armour-clad persona. Special “Game Fuel” Mountain Dew, Burger King tie-ins, Pontiacs, and probably t-shirts, mugs, a Covenant brand of spaghetti sauce and Cortana slippers.

Here in good old Blighty it’s a different matter. Videogames haven’t quite attained the cash drawing status that they have in the US and Japan (there’s a lot less of us for a start), but I have hardly seen any advertising for H3.

I will readily confess that I tend to steer clear of the mass media. I don’t watch the news (I read it online) and haven’t watched anything live on a commercial TV station in months (I PVR everything and skip past the adverts). A large advertising board at the cinema last weekend was the first time I’d seen anything about the game.

The problem with anything that garners this level of hype is that it hardly ever lives up to it. How many times have you seen a movie or TV show hyped to oblivion and then fails to deliver? Ironically when you take the videogame of a big name movie they seem to sell million of copies regardless of quality (hello Spider-Man 3). Epic’s Gears of War last year was the largest exception to the rule so far. The game received a lot of hype, mainstream press coverage, merchandising (without going too far) and stepped up and delivered the best looking game on any console so far that also played well. The single player campaign was a little on the short side, but the multiplayer was solid and it went on to sell millions of copies, knocking the behemoth of Halo 2 off the top spot for the most played game on Xbox Live.

Gears of War was always going to be the warm-up for the main event, and even Epic knew this. Halo 3 was going to be the ten ton juggernaut that obliterated everything in its path. Microsoft want you to finish the fight drinking Mountain Dew, wearing your Master Chief armour playset, holding your special edition controller playing the game on your Halo brand Xbox 360 while your cat wears the helmet from the Legendary edition of the game.

To my mind, I think Microsoft have shot themselves in the foot somewhat with this advergasm because by now most of America is sick of Halo 3. I’M sick of Halo 3 and I don’t even live there! The game was always going to be massive, there are already over two million copies of it pre-ordered and from the initial review scores in Famitsu (10/9/9) it looks set to be as good as we were hoping.
Did it really need the marketing hype machine turned up to eleven to make so many people aware of the game? Perhaps they could have left it at ten and given the extra point to us and remind us the game is coming out here next Wednesday.

Despite all this shameless self-promotion, I’m still looking forward to playing the game and completing the trilogy. Time tends to make people forget how the first game revolutionised first person shooters on consoles, and a lot of the now de-facto features such as recharging shields and the “carrying two weapons only” rule came from Halo. Halo 3 will not be a revolution, but definitely a pumped up evolution and one that will guarantee that everyone on my friends list will be playing it next week.

Four-player co-op me up! I’ve got a Legendary edition on pre-order.

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Category: Videogames