09.23.07

anatomy of a review

Posted in games, work at 10:51 pm by Rob Fahey

My review of Halo 3 is live on Eurogamer.

In summary - it’s the best game in the Halo franchise, and since I assume that you’ve worked out by now (six years and four iterations down the line, counting PC versions) whether you like Halo or not, it’s a shoo-in for a 10/10.

What’s quite interesting about this review is not so much the text, or the score, though. Rather, it’s how I had to conduct the review process itself - an unusual and not entirely comfortable taste of how things may turn out as games become bigger “media events” and companies like Microsoft struggle to exert further control over the review process.

Normally, when I review a game, I am sent a game disc that I can pop into a console and play in my own time, on my own equipment, in my own house. I have the opportunity to try out any aspect of it I like, and to spend as long as I like with the game - deadlines allowing. Given that interactive software is such an incredibly personal experience, I hold that this is by far the best way for a reviewer to engage with the product. It lets us explore, experiment, and think about what the game is offering, how it’s accomplishing it, and where it sits in the context of the medium. That’s important.

Halo 3 was…. Different. Unpleasantly different.

For Halo 3, Microsoft didn’t let the code out of its sight. Instead, we were requested to turn up at the Sanderson Hotel, an achingly posh haunt just north of London’s Oxford Street, and spend a day there playing the game - with an open offer to stay the night as well, if we so desired.

I confess that the alarm bells which rang in my head weren’t quite as justified as I expected, but it was still an odd experience. I turned up at the hotel at around 9am on a Tuesday morning, and was greeted by Microsoft’s PR staff in the lobby - and handed the key to my room, despite the fact that I had made it clear that I didn’t want to stay the night (frankly, it just felt like an unjustified level of PR luxury, given that I can get a night bus from Oxford Circus that gets me home in under 20 minutes).

Upon heading upstairs through the hotel’s astonishingly overblown decor, I ended up in a double bedroom decked out in luxury, with a large Samsung plasma screen and an Xbox 360 sitting on the desk at the end of the bed. This is the thumbs-up to the experience; once the PR types had put Halo 3 in the 360’s drive and sealed the console with a tight cable-tie, I was left to my own devices in the room to play the game. I had feared that I’d be playing with PR types looking over my shoulder and generally being a nuisance - thankfully Microsoft, unlike some other publishers whose antics have reached my ears, had the cop on to avoid that particular nightmare.

So, with a break for lunch, I played through the game in a day in a hotel room, vaguely guiltily helping myself to peanuts and bottled water from the mini-bar which probably came to about eighty quid’s worth, if the ludicrous bar price list is anything to go by. I think the peanuts cost about eight or nine quid for a small bag. They were fucking shit peanuts, too.

In the evening, a room had been set up full of additional screens and consoles, with all of the journalists brought together to play multiplayer maps. This was quite a good plan, because it meant we got to experience lots of nooks and crannies of the multiplayer modes that might not have been apparent through the hit-and-miss process of setting up Live matches prior to the launch of a game. Full marks on that one, although I did raise an eyebrow at the handing out of 20 pound notes to journalists who won various matches. The point where perks of the job become money in your wallet makes me vaguely uncomfortable, although there’s a more pragmatic side of me which points out that it was mostly just straightforward, competitive fun. And yet, and still…. Hmm.

Overall, though, I still feel like I didn’t have the kind of experience with Halo 3 that left me totally comfortable with my knowledge and understanding of the game. A day was long enough to play through on Normal, and mess about a bit on Heroic and Legendary difficulty - I’d have liked to have played further in those modes, although I seriously doubt it would have changed my conclusions about the game. More annoyingly, there was no opportunity to play co-operative mode, or to try out the multiplayer over Xbox Live - components which I’m genuinely pissed off about having to leave out of the review, just as they’ve presumably been left out of every review published in the UK.

Frankly, I hope we don’t see much more of this kind of thing going on. I don’t have any problem with the industry’s “preview junket” culture, where journalists are dragged off to exotic climes to see games in their early state; yes, it feeds through to positive previews and hype, but to be honest, the concept of a preview is so intricately linked to hype and marketing that it’s almost a non-issue that people have stayed in a five-star hotel to write it.

Reviews, though… When you review something, you are telling a lot of people, most of whom probably earn less money than you do, whether they should or shouldn’t spend a fucking big pile of cash on an entertainment experience. To my mind, that’s a duty that shouldn’t be pissed about by freebies or junkets, and it’s one that any good reviewer should prefer to do in private, in their own time - and in their own place, not in an expensive hotel with eight quid packets of peanuts.

The game is still fucking ace, though.

Technorati Tags: Eurogamer, Halo, Halo 3, journalism, Microsoft, Xbox 360

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