I'm kind of going through a rediscovery phase with video games these days. It's probably due to the fact that I now own an XBox 360, but that's beside the point. For a long, long, long time I pigeonholed myself into only playing Halo and Halo 2 for the shooter genres. I figured that 1) Halo and Halo 2 were just damn good games that couldn't be beat by another game developer and 2) I just didn't have time to sink into another campaign-style game at home. I ended up being wrong on both counts.

After getting the 360, I picked up Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and I also got Gears of War for my birthday yesterday. My goodness - either the 360 has allowed game developers to finally do some cool stuff in video games, or other developers have improved on what Halo and Halo 2 brought to the table. For example, both GRAW and GoW make you feel like you're really getting shot at and that you'll die if you run out and engage an enemy in the open. Both games force you to use cover, and there are controls built in that allow you to use objects in the game environment as cover. In other words, taking cover is a significant part of gameplay. In these two games - there's no jumping around or goofy physics. Just closer-to-reality warfare.

I hope that Bungie has taken note and will be incorporating some cool combat features (like taking cover) into Halo 3. H3 doesn't have to be GRAW or GoW, but I hope it evolves beyond what they did in H2. I admit it, I'm a Halo fan, and I hope the game is good... I really hope it's as good as what I've seen in these other games. When I go back and play H2 now, it seems like a very simple, cartoon-ish game. I suppose that's partly due to the graphics capabilities of the original XBox platform, but the gameplay just doesn't feel like in-your-face warfare.

tags: xbox videogames console shooter