Day 12: Reach for the skies

After attending the City Pages "holiday" party (tradition dictates that newspaper Christmas fetes happen after the new year; a relic from the time when the weeks leading up to the season were particularly busy) Friday night, I ended up home a bit earlier than normal on a Friday night and not sure what to do with myself. I ended up playing through the last few hours of Halo: Reach, one of the non-Master-Chief editions of the series.

If you want my review of a more-than-two-year-old game (I'm slow, and I didn't replace my stolen Xbox 360 until the fall), I thought the actual game dragged a bit near the end with a lot of missions (including flying a helicopter around a bombed out city for what seemed like hours) lacking the tight focus of the best moments of the series.

What made the game interesting - and worth looking at considering yesterday's rant - is the ending. In the game, set in the weeks  before the first Halo game, you play as Noble Six, part of a team of Spartan super soldiers in the face of a massive invasion. That Master Chief is known as the "last of the Spartans" doesn't bode well for your team. One by one, they die - sacrificing themselves for the mission; cut down by Covenant missiles - until your character is the last one left. He (or she, it depends on choices you make at the start of the game) stays behind to defend the last ship out, which contains the information that will spark the following games.

The game ends with Nobel Six staring at the war-ravaged landscape, waiting for what will come.

Except it doesn't end there. After the credits run, we come back to Nobel Six. We can see hordes of Covenant heading his way. We go back into the game and are given one final mission: survive.

Survival isn't possible. You can take out the bad guys for some time, but eventually the shots start to get through. Ammo runs low and and bullet holes appear in the HUD, where your helmet has been cracked.

Eventually, Six is overwhelmed. Removing his helmet, he makes his land stand. He falls and dies, his smashed helmet the only remain.

And the cut scene jumps forward a few years, to a point after the war. The smashed, aged helmet is still there, but Reach has returned to the green. A voice-over talks about the importance of the sacrifices, but we can see it right there on the screen.

That's what makes video gaming a unique art form. Watching these moments would certainly have crafted an impact, but these weren't just characters we watched over the past 10 to 12 hours. These were ones we fought by. The writing - both of the cut scenes and the game design itself - is strong enough to make us care about the other members of the team. Our own interactions with Six, of course, make him considerably special to the person behind the controller.

That's the power of interactive entertainment. It rarely reaches this level, but when it does it makes for a unique experience that other areas have a difficult time replicating.