To quote Bertrand Russell: The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Which is a saving fucking grace of a quote to consider, if this person’s art (or this article) is anything to go by

In a continued effort of both thoroughness, and to increase the chance that when all is said and done, I may yet end up having a lukewarm opinion of Halo: Campaign Evolved (H:CEv), as opposed to freezingly ice cold, as has been the case overall, thus far. Maybe not sheer frigidness, mind you, but we started out at a pretty low place, and only just recently slightly climbed our way out of a fairly steep incline, so it has been a less than perfect, bumpy ride.



Speaking of which, due to a number of marvelously disjointed, and wonderfully disparate elements coming together in just the wrong way, my schedule this evening has fallen woefully behind, so I am now in the 11th hour of needing to get this article written before there simply is time no more for an article to be written in. With that said, it is going to be more or less go time from this moment on until the bulk of the content of this article is finished, with almost zero wiggle room for consideration or second guessing, which means this may turn out to be one big, sloppy, stream of consciousness mess, (more so than usual), but at the very least it will still be something, all things considered, so let’s get to it.

Though, I guess as an aside, and to pull back the curtain a little bit, my fierce need to maintain deadlines when it comes down to the wire, ends up benefiting greatly by my usual approach to how I structure my writing, as I always just have loose plans when I’m gearing up for an article, as I feel as if it keeps my options open. The way I see it, if one sat down every time with an unflinching resolve about this one, rigid, immutable idea of what one is going to write about and not leave any chance of changing one’s mind as an option on the table, there is going to be this great existential threat to ones very inherent creative abilities, and that level of self-sabotage makes absolutely no sense to me. I’m not sure if its some strange coincidence, or if my brain is trolling me or not, but the times I have attempted to “stay on track” with a structured idea premise for an article, I inevitably fall down a much more interesting rabbit hole, and just never stop tumbling. Anyways, thought that behind the scenes tidbit was worth a mention. With that said, on with the Haloing.



Roughly speaking, in an extraordinarily reductionist nutshell, Halo: Campaign Evolved (H:CEv) has been a fairly mixed bag. A lot of the reasons for this boil down to what I perceive as metaphysical problems, as opposed to legitimate issues with the game itself, save for one big caveat. These metaphysical issues are mostly real world collateral that effect the title, and what seems to me (at this point) as being a rough development cycle, and Halo Studios doing the absolute best they could with the time they had, but sometimes, time is just not on one’s side.



So, where I stand by the notion that this sits in an uncanny valley of nostalgia, as so much has changed from Halo 1, it puts the game into some weird territory in terms of nostalgia servicing, the delivery mechanisms of how this game came to be vs what likely would have been a better idea in terms of content transference, is once again an IRL problem vs a game issue, though that leads to multitudes of issues thereafter. However, the one big way that H:CEv irrevocably drops the ball, and one that is just nigh impossible to glaze over in the justification of the game being a saving grace, is a complete lack of competitive multiplayer, which nearly breaks the mind, when one thinks about the lack of inclusion of such a make or break mode for this series, for more than three seconds.



From there, we look to the couple of scraps of new inclusions for H:CEv, in anyway to help save the good name of Halo, before just tossing this one in the proverbial bin. To that point, there luckily does remain a couple of points of interest that save it from being a complete dumpster fire of a project. As I detailed the other day, the Campaign Remix mode ends up availing itself to downright absurdist scenarios, in all ways, shapes, and sizes, in terms of where replayability, challenge, absurdism, and good old fashioned co-op gameplay is concerned, which was one of the first unabashed moments it was a sigh of relief on H:CEv’s behalf to interact with, instead of an exasperated huff of frustration.



Where we currently stand now, is at the second of three bonus missions, one entitled “The Most Dangerous Game”, which were included as all new canon story material, involving prequel levels to the Halo 1 story, that see Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson investigate odd happenings involving some kind of bizarre black ops intertwined with a highly classified Covenant espionage scenario. Great premise, and as I detailed yesterday, the first of these bonus missions, Boarding Action, did an excellent job of capturing the essence of what was the vibe of Halo 1, and recreating the wondrous sense of both mission design, combat scenarios, level flow, and overall mood of a Halo 1 mission, making it feel like it fits right in to the overall story. The second of these bonus missions goes maybe one step further, in feeling like what a lot of the rest of the game does, in combining elements from multiple Halo games, in more of a send up to 2 and 3, instead of just more closely mirroring the first Halo game by its lonesome.



This is where context is key comes chaotically into play, cause whereas, when H:CEv serves up, what is essentially a remixed level from Halo 1, with elements from the second and third game mixed in as well, I feel challenged in accepting the presentation laid before me, as it seems to contradict the missions statement of a revisitation to an old point of nostalgia. However, when that same thing is done, but under the banner of a mode specifically with the goal in mind of remixing old content, I end up feeling okay with the attempt at servicing up the content in such a manner. Further, when new bonus missions do the same thing, there is no incongruency in the delivery process, because it is taking the essence of reference to grant the player kind of a Back to the Future 2 level of ingress to a similar point in time, in catching a glimpse of the past from a different angle, and therefore, not violating the reality of the space time continuum in the process. In this way, you are creating a new window of nostalgia to peak through, without upsetting the very core memory of what is being revisited, maintaining its metaphysical structure in the process, without any untoward violations there after.



This may seem like a semantic to some, but it would be the difference of remaking Back to the Future, but redoing all of the elements of the first film, but pretending nothing has changed in the process, vs making another film, that revisits that film, much like the sequel did, where a lot of elements have changed behind the scenes, but since we didn’t see it from that angle, there is no harm no foul, cause we weren’t aware of it in the first place. We consider the present(past) of the events through the lens of paradox, instead of servicing the Grandfathers Paradox, think of it more as committing to a new paradox, one I will now create and verily dub The Voyeur’s Paradox, where instead of creating the inherent danger of becoming your own grandfather by traveling back in time, one only endangers changing the outcome of becoming one’s own grandfather by witnessing the event as observer (see: voyuer), and thusly changing the outcome just by measuring it, through the proxy of observation, in reference to similar metrics involving the act of altering states through mere observation alone, as put forth in the fundamentals of quantum mechanics.



While I sure do desire to follow all of that up with further extrapolation, I was just writing a mile a minute to get a chance to edit this with the negative amount of time I have left to do so, as I have run out of minutes with which to create.

Until next time.

~Pashford