The End is Nigh: Halo 3

By Martin Gaston

‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This week: mucking about with the end of Halo 3.

This week I finished Halo 3. Sort of.

I’ve written about the first and second games in the past, contemplating the quirks of their pacing, but my recent experience of Halo 3’s grand finale was coloured by the ludicrous and masochistic challenge I, and a few others, chose to embark upon: obtaining a zero-point achievement named Annual.

It’s hard. Even its rules are contrived. Four players on Legendary difficulty, with Iron (forces everyone back to a checkpoint if anyone dies), must complete the level by riding Ghosts, the nippy Covenent craft which look a bit like raw chickens covered in Skeletor’s armour, through the tumultuous vehicle finale. The entire Halo is collapsing around you, but the only thing you’ll be hearing is an assortment of cusses from the headset. It’s all very, very silly.

The level is divided into two sections. The first section, unofficially dubbed the shooty bit, has you in a grand argy-bargy with the hostile Flood forces, while their despotic ruler bleats comments like “I have beaten fleets of thousands! Consumed a galaxy of flesh and mind and bone!” directly into your brain. You’ll hear those quotes repeated a lot, because it’s a very tricky experience: you’re attacked from every angle in a wide-open area, and the unpredictability of Halo’s excellent AI ensures one of you will likely take a stray thwack to the back of the head at some point, thus sending the entire team back to the last checkpoint whilst your teammates irately chide your performance.

Persevere and it’s off to the boss fight with 343 Guilty Spark, the cutscene where Johnson gets killed off (again) and the grand narrative climax of the trilogy as Chief, the Arbiter and Cortana activate the Halo. Wait – isn’t the whole point of the games to stop the firing of any Halos, you say? Don’t worry about that now: everybody leap into a Ghost (they’re hidden under a ramp) and start driving. The whole planet is about to self-destruct.

Checkpoint Reached. Thank God.

The vehicle part – or the drivey bit – is what took us the most amount of time. Halo is notable for popularising the co-op trend and the Warthog is blatantly designed around it, but I’ve never played a cooperative task which demands so much coordination and communication between players. The sequence has to be driven with the players in an orderly line, the path too narrow to do it side-by-side, and as the player at the front of the pack passes over certain invisible triggers the floor beneath everyone starts to disintegrate: the quartet have to be tightly-packed, else the players at the back are plunged into oblivion before they even have a chance to mess it up. Ghosts, as anyone who has played Halo can confirm, are just fiddly enough that the players have to be repeatedly shouting whether they’re accelerating, boosting or braking every five seconds. To reach the end of the level, then, requires repetition, patience and immaculate driving. And, in our case, 88 restarts.

Of course, the unintentional beauty of taking a crack at Annual is that it ruins all Bungie’s work to create pace, structure and narrative – the game’s natural peaks and troughs are completely done away with when everything is obstinately difficult. Before Modern Warfare 2 popped up, Halo 3 was probably this generation’s most ubiquitous ‘blockbuster’ title, aping the linear narrative progression of the forms of media – books, movies, television shows – we’ve all grown up so very accustomed to. Annual is two hours of Halo entirely removed from its Hollywood veneer, a challenge of silly rules that reduces the game to the intrinsically videogame experience of hugely agonising, but eventually euphoric, cycles of restarting checkpoints.

I’d recommend it to others. Annual was a modification of Halo 3’s final level that added two interesting hours onto a game I’ve already played to death. I didn’t ever see myself playing the Halo 3 campaign again, at least not until my nostalgia gland craved it five years from now, but Annual afforded a brief, beautiful lease of life to a very familiar ending sequence. And that, I feel, makes the experience a whole lot more than a daft zero-point achievement.