Paramount+ cancels HALO TV series

Paramount+ have cancelled their TV series based on the popular Halo video game franchise after two seasons and seventeen episodes.

Amblin Television produced the show in conjunction with Microsoft, Xbox and 343 Industries, who developed the previous three games in the series. This group is now shopping the show to other streamers, but the reportedly high budget makes it a tough sell.

The show had a rough landing for its first season in 2022, with critics mostly left unmoved and fans annoyed by a large number of changes to the source material, including starting the show some considerable time before the games began, omitting key game characters, introducing new characters and killing off fan-favourite characters in different places in the narrative. The second season, released earlier this year, was better and had a stronger reception, finally reaching the events of the games (adapting Halo: Reach and ending where Halo: Combat Evolved begins), although the overall reception was still lukewarm. Paramount+ had indicated that the show had performed strongly for them in terms of viewership, so the decision to cancel was likely due to cost and the streamer's uncertain future, which may have also contributed to a shrinking of its Star Trek portfolio.

Fans may also hold hope that this clears the way for a more source-accurate adaptation of Halo in the future, but given how long it took this project to get off the ground and the declining reception of recent games in the series, that may be rather optimistic.

Halo: Season 2

The war between the Covenant and the United Nations Space Command is continuing to escalate. Frontier colonies continue to fall, whilst both sides are desperate to track down the mysterious artifact known as "Halo." The Covenant's advance soon brings Reach, the largest planet in the outer colonies, within range, sparking the biggest battle of the war so far.

Halo is a military science fiction franchise about people and aliens shooting one another, understandable as its primary instalments have all been first-person shooter video games. But as it has gone on, the series has built up a loyal following for its surprisingly deep background material (partially worked out by "proper SF author" Greg Bear) and extended cast of characters, despite them being mostly relegated to cut-scenes and secondary media.

A Halo TV series therefore isn't quite as batty an idea as it sounds, as the universe contains enough interesting ideas to be fleshed out in a dramatic format. Unfortunately, the first season of the show proved divisive, at best. Elements of the lore and setting were jumbled up and delivered in an odd order, established canon characters were either nowhere to be seen, showed up in different roles or were killed off in short order, and Master Chief spent most of the season without his helmet on (Chief, like Judge Dredd, is never seen in the games without his helmet). Some fans were livid, whilst more casual viewers found the show watchable but underwhelming.

This second season, like a lot of recent second seasons for adapted shows with iffy openings (see also Foundation and Time, Wheel of), is an improvement, but again, a qualified one. The show is more focused this year with the search for Halo being a driving force in many episodes, at least for Master Chief. Early episodes complicate this with internal UNSC politics and internal shenanigans with those space pirates nobody really cares about, but the writers are at least determined to bring all the storylines together mid-season on Reach for a massive showdown with the Covenant. This war episode is mostly impressive, but it does strain the limits of even this show's generous budget. The second half of the season unfortunately engages in some wheel spinning and makes the crucial error of thinking the audience gives even 10% as much of a toss about Soren's family than the writers do. Things do pull back together to deliver a very satisfying finale which finally, after seventeen episodes, does catch us up to where we really should have been in Episode 1 of Season 1. Better late than never, I guess?

The cast deliver good performances, with Pablo Schreiber doing a good growly Master Chief (although he somehow spends even less time in Season 2 with his helmet on than in Season 1), Kate Kennedy making Kai-125 both a sympathetic character and a badass, and Natascha McElhone's walking moral vacuum of Dr. Halsey being delightfully conniving in every scene she's in. Kwan (Yerin Ha) and Makee (Charlie Murphy) are still here, but are much better-served than the scripts they had in Season 1, and the finale finally makes us realise why Kwan is important and it nicely ties into the established Halo backstory. Bokeem Woodbine continues to have more fun than anybody else in the cast as Soren-066 (since Burn Gorman sadly left the show in Season 1), although even he seems to get bored of his "family kidnapping" plot after the interminable-feeling number of episodes it takes up. Particularly welcome are newcomers Joseph Morgan as Colonel Ackerson and Cristina Rolo as Talia Perez, who both add some surprisingly good scenes to the show, the former as an apparent new antagonist and the latter as an ordinary UNSC soldier dragged into Master Chief's orbit.

It does feel like maybe Season 2 has had a little bit of a budget trim: there's a lot of re-use of the same sets (one hallway on Reach becomes incredibly familiar) and there's very few of the all-Covenant CGI scenes we had in the first season. The action is mostly good, with the highlight being a one-on-one duel in the finale and several parts of the fall of Reach, but some of the effects are definitely iffy, like muzzle flares looking like they were made in MS Paint and copy-pasted over the guns. Obviously and correctly Hollywood is being ultra careful with weapons on sets these days, but it feels like the vfx for that could have been a lot better (especially as after-added muzzle flares is something people have been doing for decades at this point).

For those wanting an accurate retelling of the video games, Season 2 is better, but marginally. Seeing the fall of Reach, the iconic backstory moment of the franchise, later fleshed out for a prequel novel and game, is cool, but the absence of the many of the characters and events from both the Fall of Reach novel and the Halo: Reach video game may be frustrating. Some elements that don't show up until much later in the storyline turn up surprisingly early here, which feeds into the feeling that the TV writers don't seem to want the story to unfold as naturally as it did in the games, instead feeding in deep cuts from the lore when the people who really care will be annoyed by the show's deviation from the source material, whilst newcomers will likely be bewildered or not notice/care. Including an Arbiter, but not the Arbiter (the co-protagonist of Halo 2 and one of the franchise's most popular characters after Master Chief), but not making that clearer, is a good example of the writers tapping the game material but in an unnecessarily obtuse way.

Still, making a nine-hour TV show based on corridor shooting and occasionally driving a Warthog (or is it a Puma?) was clearly never going to work, so changes were necessary in the transfer of medium. It'll be up to each viewer to determine if this level of change works for them, and if they're unfamiliar with the games, whether the show works as a stand-alone experience.

For this non-hardcore Halo fan (casual appreciator might be a better descriptor), the sophomore season of Halo (***½) is better than its first, and moves up from "worth watching if there's nothing else on" to "solid sci-fi pulp action." It feels like a lot of potential from the source material is being left on the table here, but the show is at least moving in the right direction. Halo is available to watch worldwide right now on Paramount+.

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Halo: Season 1

In the year 2552, the planet Madrigal is in open rebellion against the United Nations Space Command, discounting reports that other human worlds are fighting again alien invaders. However, the aliens, the Covenant, attack the planet and butcher the inhabitants of a small town. An elite unit of Spartan super-soldiers, Silver Team, arrives but uncovers a bigger mystery related to alien obelisks and the single survivor of the colony, Kwan Ha. A battle of wits and wills begins between the Covenant and the UNSC, with the commander of Silver Team, Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, proving to be unexpectedly important to what is to come.

It's been over twenty years since the Halo franchise first appeared and, even being charitable, it's fair to say that the series is long since past its peak. Naturally, this is the moment that a Halo TV show chooses to arrive, just as WarCraft and Assassin's Creed both received adaptations long after their moments of cultural dominance had passed, and as a result were met with indifferent shrugs.

The Halo TV show takes the route of being a prequel to the events of the video games, set even before the events of Halo: Reach, but it is also explicitly set in an alternate timeline to the games. Characters, ideas and factions are present who do not exist in the games, and most of the game characters, races and stories have been tweaked for their presentation on screen. Just about the only thing that hasn't been significantly redesigned is the hardware. Weapons, armour, aliens and spacecraft all arrive with very solid approximations of their appearances in the video games.

As with the games, the story focus on John-117 (The Wire's Pablo Schreiber), better known as Master Chief, a Spartan super-soldier who is one of Earth's best hopes in the war against the Covenant, an alliance of several alien races united by religion. Unlike the games, Master Chief is just one of an ensemble cast and we spend a lot of time with other characters: Dr. Halsey (Natascha McElhone), John's effective mentor and mother figure; Cortana (Jen Taylor), a newly-created artificial intelligence with loyalty issues; Soren-066 (Bokeem Woodbine), a former Spartan turned insurrectionist leader; Commander Keyes (Olive Gray), a UNSC officer and scientist; Kwan Ha (Yerin Ha), a rebel on the planet Madrigal; and Makee (Charlie Murphy), a human captured by the Covenant as a child and indoctrinated in their religion. We also spend a fair amount of time with the other members of Master Chief's Silver Team, particularly Kai-125 (Kate Kennedy).

The first season divides its story into several strands. In one, we learn more about the creation of the Spartan programme, particularly the way it inhibits the emotional development of the soldiers, and how Master Chief (and, later, Kai) deal with that revelation. There is some redundancy here - having two characters undergoing the same emotional journey is odd - but the actors handle the story well. Master Chief also learns more about his childhood and how he joined the Spartan programme. Dr. Halsey's dubious morality and willingness to overstep certain bounds to achieve her goals is present and correct from the video games, although this version of the character is a bit more obviously a bad 'un from the start, and her arc lacks nuance.

In a second strand we follow Kwan Ha's story as the last survivor of a massacre into becoming a potential rebel leader under Soren's tutelage. This story is competently executed, and both Woodbine and Burn Gorman as the villainous Vinsher Grath are having more fun than anyone else in the cast, but it's connection to the rest of the story and the setting feels thin. It's almost worthwhile for the final showdown with Grath, where Burn Gorman chews scenery with delicious aplomb.

In a third strand we follow the journey of Makee from Covenant stooge to discovering life among other humans. This story feels fairly random: the Covenant of the early games would never recruit or use a human to work for them (it would go against their entire religious ethos) and the feeling emerges that they had to give the Covenant a human representative to save on the CGI budget (the Covenant CGI is both excellent and fleeting) more than because there was a good story purpose for her existence. This is frustrating as Charlie Murphy gives a good performance (a lot of it in an nonexistent alien language), and deserves better material.

The season's pacing is uneven, dedicating entire episodes to some stories so entire sub-casts of characters don't appear, with even Master Chief sitting an episode out. To be fair, the games have also shown the Halo universe can survive without the big MC (the two Halo Wars games, Halo: Reach and Halo: ODST do without Master Chief as well), but given the main story focus here is on Master Chief's activities prior to the war for Reach, him sitting out a fair bit of the story is a bit of an odd choice. Having him spend most of the time he does appear without a helmet, even in extended action sequences, is an even odder one.

The thing is, all these choices could be borne if the end result was great, but instead it has to settle for being...kinda okay, I guess? The actors are all very solid, many of the ideas are fine (apart from the human Covenant member) and the show does have an ace up its sleeve with its action sequences, which are extremely well-handled. The battle sequences in the first and last episode genuinely feel like movie setpieces, and smaller action scenes throughout the rest of the series are decent. A bone-crunching internal conflict between Spartans genuinely sells the idea of these guys being human+ and you don't want to get in their way. These moments give us glimpses of a considerably better show that could have been created from the same ideas.

The show could have also tightened up its pacing a bit. There isn't really enough story to fill nine episodes and six to seven would have probably been better. There's also a lot of faffing around with ideas and elements that aren't very well handled, and for every change to the backstory and premise to make things more practical and affordable, there's another two or three that feel like change for change's sake. Even for a casual appreciator of the video games like myself rather than a deeply-invested megafan, a lot of these changes feel pointless.

The first season of the Halo TV show (***) ends up being okay. It's watchable, with some good performances and some outstanding action sequences. But the show is a bit flabby, the changes to the source material are mostly unnecessary and the show has that sheen of base-level, dull competence that a lot of modern TV shows have acquired. A second season could be a lot better, assuming they focus on the war for Reach and the search for the Halo itself. Right now, the show is okay but could do a lot better. The show is available to watch on Paramount+ worldwide.

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RIP Greg Bear

News has sadly broken that science fiction author Greg Bear has passed away at the age of 71, following a series of strokes.

Born in 1951 in San Diego, California, Gregory Dale Bear studied writing at San Diego State University from 1968 to 1973. Remarkably, he sold his first science fiction short story, "Destroyers," at the age of just 16. In 1970 Bear was part of a group of science fiction writers, SFF fans and comic book fans who decided to host the very first San Diego Comic-Con. In the years since, the San Diego Comic-Con has become arguably the single biggest and most important such mass media convention in the world.

After publishing short fiction throughout the 1970s, Bear published his first two novels (Hegira and Psychlone) in 1979. In 1983 he published the novelette Blood Music, which immediately won him the Nebula Award and Hugo Award. He expanded the story into a full-length novel, published in 1985 and arguably his best-known single novel. Almost simultaneously he published the other contender for that title, Eon.

The two books are both, in their own way, a reconsideration of classic SF ideas originally presented by Arthur C. Clarke. Blood Music is something of a revamp of Clarke's Childhood's End, presenting the transformation of humanity into a new form via rapidly enhanced biological evolution. Eon is a riff on Rendezvous with Rama, with humanity exploring a huge artificial construct that enters Earth orbit in the form of an asteroid. Hidden inside the asteroid is a portal leading into an infinite corridor known as "The Way," which transcends both time and space. Bear would revisit the Way in sequel Eternity (1988) and prequel Legacy (1995).

Bear wrote numerous other significant SFF works. His only major contribution to fantasy came in the form of Songs of Earth and Power, a duology consisting of The Infinity Concerto (1984) and The Serpent Mage (1986). He returned to SF with The Forge of God (1987) and its sequel, Anvil of Stars (1992), in which Earth is destroyed by a hostile alien intelligence but some humans are able to escape into space, where they plot vengeance. He flirted with cyberpunk with Queen of Angels (1990), and joined the "Mars rush" (a burst of Mars-focused novels from a number of authors, including Ben Bova and Kim Stanley Robinson) with Moving Mars (1992). The Nebula-winning Darwin's Radio (1999) explored the weaponisation of evolution.

Bear was noted as a writer of hard science fiction, but critic David Langford also recognised Bear's love of massive explosions and apocalyptic events, including melting the human race into sentient goo in one book, blowing up Earth entirely in The Forge of God, removing Mars from the Solar system in Moving Mars and wrecking a transdimensional world of infinite size in Eternity. Bear took mock-umbrage from this characterisation.

Greg Bear became a dominant writer of science fiction, often incorporating starships and far-future settings, at a time when many SF writers were focusing on near-future stories (particularly in the cyberpunk movement). He and two other contemporary writers in this mode, Gregory Benford and David Brin, became known as the "Killer Bs," for their critical acclaim and dominance in this period (the 1980s and early 1990s). They were occasionally named as successors to the "Big Three" of 1950s and 1960s SF, namely Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, although they failed to match the earlier trio's name recognition outside of the SF field or in terms of sales (for example, none of Bear's work has been adapted to television or film, although Eon has been optioned several times).

In the late 1990s, Bear joined Benford and Brin on working on The Second Foundation Trilogy, an officially-authorised sequel series to Asimov's classic SF series. Benford wrote Foundation's Fear (1997), whilst Bear penned Foundation and Chaos (1998) and Brin rounded off the project with Foundation's Triumph (1999).

Unlike many of his peers, who had a tendency to look down on media tie-ins, Bear, was also happy to work in other people's playgrounds. He penned the Star Trek novel Corona in 1984 and the Star Wars novel Rogue Planet in 2000, which acted as both a sequel to The Phantom Menace and a prequel to the New Jedi Order saga. In 2011-13 Bear agreed to flesh out the ancient backstory for the Halo series of video games by penning the Forerunner Saga trilogy, consiting of Cryptum, Primordium and Silentium. Bear incorporated previous Halo mythology and his own ideas, which in turn became canon for subsequent video games.

Bear suffered a series of strokes in recent days which led to him being hospitalised before passing away. He is survived by his wife Astrid and two children. The field of science fiction and fantasy fiction is a poorer place for his loss.

STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS & HALO hitting British and Irish television in June

Paramount+ has confirmed its launch date in the UK and Republic of Ireland: 22 June. The service will launch both as a stand-alone service and also as part of a Sky Cinema subscription.

Imagesource

The launch roster for the channel will include Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Halo, City on a Hill and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Legacy shows that were formerly on other services will also transfer over, including Star Trek: Discovery, Billions and Yellowjackets.

The stand-alone subscription will be a reasonable £6.99 with the first seven days free, significantly cheaper than Netflix and slightly more expensive than Apple TV+. Pricing for the Republic of Ireland has not yet been confirmed.

The launch date does leave UK and RoI SF fans holding out for Halo (which began airing in the US on 24 March) and Strange New Worlds (which launches this week) some considerable amount of time behind the curve, which is likely to drive up piracy in the meantime.

There have been complaints about the addition of yet another streaming service to the roster. The UK and Ireland currently enjoy using Netflix, Amazon Prime TV, Disney+, NowTV, BritBox and Apple TV+ (alongside the free, homegrown BBC iPlayer and All 4). This isn't as bad as the US, which has several more options (including Paramount+, Peacock and Hulu), but is getting up there. With the recent, significant cost of living increases, viewers are getting choosier about what platforms to keep using and which to drop. It'll be interesting to see if Paramount+ can pick up a significant UK viewer base.

HALO TV show to launch on 24 March

The long-gestating Halo television series now has a launch date. The show will drop on Paramount+ in the United States (and other territories where Paramount+ is available) on 24 March. The plan for territories outside the United States where Paramount+ is unavailable is unclear.

The trailer sets up the premise of the show, which is similar but not quite identical to the video games. The premise sees the now-multi-planetary United Nations at war with the Covenant, an alliance of several hostile alien races united by a common religion. The Covenant are somewhat technologically superior to humanity and are dedicated to the human race's destruction on ideological grounds. Key to the battle are the Spartans, powerful warriors clad in state-of-the-art armour. The protagonist is Master Chief Petty Office John-117, mostly known as "Master Chief," a legendary soldier even among the Spartans, as he learns that the fate of the war with the Covenant depends on finding an unknown alien artefact known in the records of a dead race as "Halo."

The series also features a number of other Spartan soldiers, a group of scientists monitoring the progress of the Spartans, and a powerful AI known as "Cortana."

The Halo video game series began in 2001 with Halo: Combat Evolved, becoming arguably the signature series of the Microsoft Xbox series of video game consoles. It has since expanded to six games in the main series (divided into two sub-series), a prequel and an interquel, and a number of spin-offs, including the Halo Wars strategy series. There are also novels, graphic novel and both live-action and animated shorts (as well as the tangentially-related Red vs. Blue online comedy series). The most recent game in the series, Halo Infinite, was released at the end of last year. To date, the series has sold over 81 million copies.

The Halo TV series retells some of the stories from the games, but in a modified form, most notably to be more of an ensemble piece whilst the games focus much more on Master Chief alone as the protagonist. According to the writers, the TV show takes place in the "Silver Timeline," a distinct (but similar) continuity from the video games. 

The TV show stars Pablo Schreiber as Master, with Jen Taylor reprising her role from the video games as Cortana. The series also stars Natascha McElhone as Dr. Halsey, Shabana Azmi as Admiral Parangosky, Olive Grey as Miranda Keyes, Rafael Fernandez as Jacob Keyes, Bokeem Woodbine as Soren-066, Kate Kennedy as Kai-125, Natasha Culzac as Riz-028 and Bentley Kalu as Vannak-134.

Paramount+ unveils teaser trailer for the HALO TV series

Streaming service Paramount+ has unveiled a teaser for its upcoming TV series based on the Halo video game franchise.

The trailer depicts several characters from the show, including Natasha McElhone as Dr. Catherine Halsey, creator of the Spartan-II programme; Yerin Ha as newcomer Quan Ah, Kate Kennedy as Spartan warrior Kai-125 (she is shown in and out of armour), Bokeem Woodbine as Spartan trainee Soren-066, Bentley Kalu as Spartan Vannak-134, Olive Grey as Commander Miranda Keyes, Natasha Culzac as Riz-028 and Casper Knopf as the young John-117, better known as Master Chief. The adult Master Chief will be played by Pablo Schreiber.

The teaser also hints at locations from the games, including the Covenant holy city/space station known as High Charity; the space settlement known as the Rubble (which previously appeared in the Halo novel The Cole Protocol); and futuristic cities and alien dig sites, possibly on Earth or the colony world of Reach, or another world altogether.

The Halo television series will reportedly take place within the video game and spin-off continuity (despite some scepticism about that), and appears to be primarily set before the events of Halo: Reach, during the Human-Covenant War. It is unclear if the story will be completely self-contained or will segue into an adaptation of the Halo video games (which chronologically start with Reach before moving into the original Halo: Combat Evolved), but I assume in a TV show called Halo, at some point they will show the actual titular Halos themselves.

Halo is set to debut on Paramount+ in the United States in early 2022.

NEWS: In-production HALO TV series flips from Showtime to Paramount+

In a surprise move, ViacomCBS has flipped the in-production Halo TV series from its Showtime cable network to streaming service Paramount+ (a rebranded version of CBS All Access).

Halo has had an agonisingly slow development period, with Peter Jackson developing a feature film version of the video game franchise almost twenty years ago. The current iteration was greenlit in 2018 and began shooting in October 2019. Five episodes had been completed when production shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Production reportedly recently spooled up again for the final five episodes of the first season.

The move will likely frustrate Showtime execs and fans, especially as it comes after they reportedly had to abandon work on the Kingkiller Chronicle TV show - a prequel to Patrick Rothfuss's novel, The Name of the Wind - due to reported massive cost overruns on the Halo project wiped out their development budget.

Halo stars Pablo Shreiber as Master Chief, Natascha McElhone as Dr. Catherine Halsey, Shabana Azmi as Admiral Parangosky, Charlie Murphy as Makee and Jen Taylor as Cortana. It is now expected to debut on Paramount+ in early 2022.

Halo 3

The war between humanity and the Covenant has taken an unexpected turn. Civil war has erupted within the Covenant, with the Elites turning on their former masters after discovering their plan to activate the Halo Array, wiping out all sentient life within the Milky Way galaxy. Forming an alliance of convenience with the humans, the Elites plan to find the Ark - the mysterious, ancient megastructure where the Halos were built - and disable the Array once and for all, as well as mitigating the threat of the Flood. Master Chief and the Arbiter, enemies of old, put their differences aside to bring salvation to the galaxy.

Halo 3 is less a sequel to Halo 2 than its direction continuation. Halo 2's development process was infamously torturous and Bungie had to push it out of the door before it was fully ready, leading to criticism of the game for being effectively incomplete on release. Halo 3 came out three years later on the more powerful X-Box 360 platform, allowing for a graphically more impressive game.

Thirteen years on from release, Halo 3 has finally made the transition to PC via The Master Chief Collection and it's a bit of a mixed bag. Being designed for more powerful hardware means the game consists of much larger environments and areas than the first two games, making it more fun to play with more sprawling combat areas. The game mixes up vehicle and in-person combat with more skill than the prior games and there's some stronger weapon design.

However, whilst both Halo and Halo 2 have been significant revised and updated over the years, Halo 3 has not, so whilst it looked far better than Halo 2 on release, it actually looks significantly worse than Halo 2: Anniversary, the version of the game that ships with The Master Chief Collection. This means there's a bit of an unexpected downgrade for people playing the series in order. Character models and textures are significantly less impressive than Halo 2, and the sudden dearth of fantastically-rendered CG movies in favour of far more clumsy, in-engine cut scenes is jarring.

Once you adjust to that, there's much to enjoy here with some solid redesign of enemies - the bullet-spongey Brutes from the second game have been improved and giving them their own, far more interesting weapons arsenal is a good move - and a storyline that twists and turns through several interesting spins. The re-focusing of the game on the Flood as the main enemy at the halfway point recalls the weaker moments of the first game and it can never quite get over that issue. Fighting intelligent enemies who know when to seek cover, use grenades and flank is is simply always going to be far more fun than fighting a bunch of Half-Life rejects who shuffle towards you in a straight line, veritably begging for you to shoot them. Level design also feels a bit stretched at the end of the game (including a nightmarish re-use of the infamous infinite identical rooms from the original game, thought fortunately very briefly, and a re-use of the same design for the final mission of the game).

A lot of these problems seem to be down to Halo 3 not really being supposed to exist. It was really the last act of Halo 2, but to make it work as a full game - albeit a 7-hour one that feels a little stingy after the 10 hours of the first two games - it's had a lot of filler added to it. Some of this filler is entertaining, but there are a few moments when you may find you grinding your teeth and wanting them to either come up with something more interesting or cut to the chase.

Halo 3 (***½) is an enjoyable first-person shooter which cannot match its forebear for its tighter design and stronger storytelling chops, and does resort to a few disappointing design decisions to drag its modest length out a bit longer. Still, it provides a solid conclusion to the original Halo trilogy. The game is available now on X-Box One and PC as part of The Master Chief Collection, which also includes remastered versions of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, and more moderately graphically-updated versions of Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach and Halo 4. A new Halo game, Halo Infinity, is due for release in 2021 on PC and X-Box Series X.

Halo 2: Anniversary

AD 2552. The Master Chief has destroyed Halo and saved the galaxy from annihilation. Unfortunately, the Covenant have located Earth and launched an assault on the planet. As Master Chief helps in the defence, far across the galaxy, the Covenant commander who led the mission to Halo has been disgraced and dishonoured. However, he is offered the chance to regain his honour by becoming an Arbiter and leading a new mission...to a second Halo installation.

The original Halo was a frustrating first-person shooter: excellent outdoor environments and solid combat let down by stodgy pacing and exceptionally poor level design. The game has not aged well and, after my experiences earlier this year with a solid but not particularly exciting Halo: Reach, made me wonder if this was one franchise that is not for me.

Halo 2, fortunately, is a hugely superior game to its forebear. It has a great deal of mission variety, as the game follows Master Chief fighting Covenant forces in New Mombasa and the Arbiter fighting the Flood on a second Halo. The game's combat has been dramatically improved, with an elimination of the original game's endlessly copy-pasted rooms and replacing them with more dynamic combat areas. You can now dual-wield weapons (at the cost of not being able to easily melee or use grenades), allowing some excellent weapon combo tactics (using a weapon that's good against shields in one hand versus one good against armour in the other, or combining human and Covenant weapons together). There's a greater variety in enemy unit types, and more missions where allies help you out.

This is backed up by a much more involved storyline, taking in the Covenant's religious beliefs, their internal politics (including ostracising one member race and a resulting civil conflict) and the interaction between the Covenant, humanity and the Flood.

The Flood also return and are also improved beyond their Halo: Combat Evolved appearance, with them being far less annoying and more entertaining to fight. Giving the Flood a voice and intelligence to reason with is a bit of a misstep though, removing much of their formerly implacable, unreasoning menace (the same problem with the Borg in Star Trek).

Missions alternate (more or less) between Master Chief and the Arbiter and this gives rise to a reasonable amount of variety in gameplay. Keith David is particularly noteworthy of praise for his performance as the Arbiter and helps the player get invested in his story.

There are considerable improvements over the original Halo that make this sequel far more worthy, although a few weaknesses remain. Vehicle handling remains problematic (Banshees getting caught on scenery and flipped around is irritating), and friendly AI is decidedly weak. On several missions the friendly AI just switched off, leaving my allies standing around completely oblivious as they were gunned down by enemies. The new enemy types are mostly challenging, but the Brutes are annoying, being just massive sponges which take an immense amount of firepower to bring down and are not very fun to fight.

Also bewildering is the game's ending. Infamously, Bungie had to terminate Halo 2's development for time reasons, leaving the game not so much on a cliffhanger as just interrupted mid-flow. The Arbiter's story arc does get a satisfying conclusion but Master Chief's does not and his story is left bewilderingly hanging. Obviously this isn't so much a problem now when you can proceed immediately into Halo 3, but I can only imagine the rage that took place when the game originally came out fifteen years ago.

Otherwise, Halo 2 (****) is an enjoyable, well-judged first-person shooter with a good balance between action and storytelling. The game is available now on X-Box One and PC as part of The Master Chief Collection, which also includes a remastered version of Halo: Combat Evolved and graphically-updated versions of Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach and Halo 4.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

AD 2552. The Pillar of Autumn, a United Nations Space Command capital ship, is fleeing the fall of the human colony world of Reach to the Covenant, a hostile alliance of alien races. The Pillar has tracked Covenant intelligence leading to a remote star system. Upon arrival they find a massive ring, ten thousand kilometres across, with a habitable biosphere. Crippled in combat, the Pillar sets down on the object and it's up to the only specially-trained Spartan soldier on board, the Master Chief, to discern the origins of Halo and why the Covenant hold it in such reverence.

Halo: Combat Evolved was originally released in 2001 as the signature game of the original Microsoft X-Box game console, as well as the first game in the expansive Halo franchise, which has expanded to seven main-series games, three major spin-offs and numerous novels and comic books, as well as an upcoming TV series. It's always been an interesting anomaly that such an enormously popular franchise has expanded from such mixed beginnings.

This Anniversary Edition of Halo was released in 2011 to celebrate the franchise's tenth anniversary and was re-released in 2020 as part of the Halo Master Chief Collection on PC. Remasters of this kind are always controversial, since they sometimes alter and adjust the original game's level design and aesthetic. To be frank, in the case of Halo, I was looking forwards to some changes to the game's design, which have not only aged well, but were pretty poor going even in 2001. Alas, the remaster has stuck extremely close to the original game design, replicating its flaws as well as its strengths.

On the plus side of things, Halo has some very nice environments. The first third or so of the ten-hour game features entertaining outdoors combat on islands, in valleys and on grasslands, sometimes featuring vehicles with multiple crewing points and some pretty solid friendly AI. This is easily the best part of the game and, combined with the game's robustly entertaining multiplayer mode and some very strong multiplayer maps, is where the game's reputation mostly comes from. The graphics for this part of the game have been updated nicely, particularly the vast vistas showing Halo's interior structure rising up in the distance and then up overhead. Combat is reasonably solid and the Covenant enemies are reasonably intelligent and challenging (even if the monkey-like, comedic Grunts are far more irritating than genuinely threatening, but the Elites and Jackals make up for them).

In terms of the campaign mode, this enjoyable part of the game is sadly brief. After the opening levels you have to descend into the bowels of Halo and the game never really recovers after this point. The subterranean levels are mind-bogglingly repetitive on a scale that, over the years, I'd come to believe I had exaggerated in my mind. Replaying the game I discovered that no only had I not exaggerated them, I'd undersold them. You spend hour after hour making your way through identical rooms to flip a switch, then backtrack through these identical open rooms to the area you just unlocked, which consists of another series of rooms identical to the ones you just passed through. When this Groundhog Day section ends you find yourself in a large, temple-like structure having to do the same thing again, this time through much bigger rooms and with approximately four trillion, considerably less intelligent and interesting enemies chasing you: the Flood. The Flood are a not-very-well-disguised (and very much less entertaining) version of the Xen aliens from Half-Life, using small creatures to "zombify" enemies and turn them against one another, and are simply tedious to fight, since they just run at you and never use the more advanced tactics and AI of the Covenant enemies.

It's always been a mystery as to why Bungie made almost two-thirds of the game so repetitive and tedious as to at times feel almost miserable. The original X-Box had severe memory limitations, but that didn't stop them making the opening third or so of the game much more varied and entertaining. I suspect time was to blame and faced with critical deadlines, they just designed two areas and copy-pasted them to make larger areas. This is not unusual in gaming, but it's interesting that Dragon Age II - a later game that had the same problem but made up for it with a reasonable well-executed main storyline with a larger cast of more interesting characters - was criticised for it when Halo seems to have been given a pass for it.

A counter-argument is, of course, that Halo's campaign is really there as practice and warm-up for the multiplayer mode, which remains robustly entertaining (although perhaps a bit pointless; Halo 3, 4 and Reach have stronger multiplayer combat). Halo's story is pretty barebones in this first game and it was really only with Halo 2 that the storyline and characters started being fleshed out in much greater detail, giving rise to the popularity of the franchise.

As it stands, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (**½) is best experienced as a historical curiosity. It's not completely unplayable and the remaster adds a nice sheen to the graphics and some cool new backdrops, but doesn't solve the original game's severe problems with level design. It's certainly not aged half as well as Half-Life, the recent Black Mesa remaster of which is much stronger.

The game is available now on X-Box One and PC as part of The Master Chief Collection, which also includes a remastered version of Halo 2 and graphically-updated versions of Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach and Halo 4.

Halo: Reach

AD 2552. The Covenant - an alliance of alien races bound together under a fanatical religion - have launched an attack on Reach, one of the largest colonies in the United Nations Space Command. Noble Team, a special operations unit composed of specially-trained soldiers known as Spartans, are deployed to halt the Covenant gaining vital intel on alien ruins that predate both their species and humanity, and to try to prevent the fall of Reach until reinforcements arrive.

Halo: Reach was originally released in 2010 and serves as a prequel to the other games in the Halo series, taking place immediately prior to the events of the original Halo: Combat Evolved. For its PC debut, as part of the Master Chief Collection (which will eventually see the entire Halo series released on PC, mostly for the first time apart from old ports of the first two games), Reach has been spruced up with more modern graphics but in terms of mission design and plot it's been left alone.

Approaching Reach fresh, it feels like a curious halfway house between real old-skool FPS games (the 1990s era, arguably running from Wolfenstein through Half-Life 2) and later, crushingly linear console-driven FPS games like the later Call of Duty games. Each level is somewhat open, allowing you to determine how to approach each objective as you see fit, but as the game was built to fit into the hugely restrictive memory of the X-Box 360, so these areas are not particularly large. This means you have the freedom on how to advance and engage the enemy, but this freedom means generally moving across spaces generously twice the size of a football pitch at time linked by lots of corridor shooting designed to hide loading screens, all of which is pretty defunct on modern PCs which could hold the entire game in active memory if necessary. The restrictive weapons loadout of the series is still in place here, meaning you can only carry two weapons at a time and have to switch weapons frequently due to somewhat bafflingly limited ammo capacity.

This mixing-and-matching of weapons on the fly is fun, although somewhat half-hearted; several times per mission you are given a generous opportunity to stop and rearm yourself as you see fit, meaning the "desperate battle against the odds, surviving with whatever weapons you can scavenge" angle never really kicks in. Halo: Reach pulls its punches in delivering a more compelling FPS experience than the standard.

In terms of story, the game is pretty straightforward although not massively driven by exposition. The game seems to assume familiarity at all times with the previous Halo titles (and even the spin-off novels; the book Halo: The Fall of Reach sets up a lot of the events of this game), which was fine when it was launched as a prequel but more of an issue in its remixed form as the first game in the series for modern gamers new to the franchise via the Master Chief Collection. Exactly who the Covenant are, what their objectives are and the significance of both Reach and the alien tech on the planet are all left extremely vague. Mission objectives rarely vary from the FPS standard: go here, shoot this enemy, push this button, watch this cutscene. Regarding the latter point, at least Reach is not obnoxious: cutscenes are usually brief, reasonably well-acted (although always cheesy) and don't outstay their welcome.

Although restricted in size and boiling down to being variations on the standard arena-corridor-warehouse-corridor-arena structure, the level design is usually decent and the game changes things up by introducing vehicle-only levels, including a fun and diverting side-level when it turns into a space combat sim. A later mission changes the game into a helicopter combat game which is also fun, but both side-games and the main mission suffer a little from being too easy; FPS games designed for controllers have to be a little more forgiving of reaction times and responses. When ported to mouse and keyboard, they can become trivial unless redesigned to accommodate the much faster action and responses allowed. Halo: Reach hasn't, exposing the less accomplished enemy AI. Enemy units are well-designed, but "tougher" units are too bullet-spongey, soaking up ridiculous amounts of ammo to hide an inability to make them more of a threat through AI or strategy.

Despite all of these problems, I had fun with Halo: Reach (***½). It's a junk food game which is enjoyable, easy, short (the game barely cracks six hours and can be easily finished off in one sitting) and easy to digest without doing anything really memorable. Its soundtrack is distinctly above average, the graphics are solid for a ten-year-old game (even if the overreliance on static backgrounds is a bit more obvious than it was on release), the controls are responsive and there's a plethora of fun multiplayer modes. However, it is still only a slight and diverting game.

The game is available now as part of The Master Chief Collection, and over the coming months should be joined by revamped versions of Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST and Halo 4 (and probably Halo 5: Guardians, but that's likely a bit further off).

Halo Wars: Definitive Edition

The year 2531. The United Nations Space Command and the alien Covenant are engaged in a war for control of vital resources. The UNSC starship Spirit of Fire investigates Covenant activity on the planet Harvest and uncovers evidence of a plot by the Covenant which could imperil all of humanity. The Spirit of Fire has to pursue a Covenant taskforce into deep space and attempt to thwart their plans without backup.

The Halo series began life as a real-time strategy game for Mac, before transitioning into a first-person shooter for PC before finally arriving on the original X-Box in 2001, the first shooter since GoldenEye to really work with a console controller. The series became a huge success, selling millions of copies of the original game and its sequels Halo 2 (2005) and Halo 3 (2007), and a spin-off, Halo 3: ODST (2009). In a sign of things becoming full circle, Microsoft decided to expand the franchise to other genres and commissioned a real-time strategy spin-off, Halo Wars, which was eventually released on the X-Box 360 in 2009. In 2016, the game was finally ported to PC as a "Definitive Edition," which is the version I have reviewed here.

Halo Wars gained praise on release as the first real-time strategy game made to really work on console. An intuitive interface allows players to build units, expand their bases, select forces and advance across the battlefield from a standard controller. Some standard RTS controls and ideas had to abandoned or simplified for the experience, but the transition was surprisingly successful.

As with most RTS games, Halo Wars opens with you having control of a single base. This can be upgraded with modules, such as supply depots (which generate supply, the game's sole resource), power stations (which generate power, which determines what upgrades and advanced units you can build), barracks, vehicle construction stations and aircraft construction stations. You can also add turrets to bases to help defend them. In an interesting twist, even a fully-upgraded base can't hold all of the structures you need, forcing you to expand early and explore the map to find areas where you can set up secondary bases.

The resource gathering is a particularly nice touch. Rather than send out a harvester of some kind to mine a resource, you simply generate supply points. The more supply depots you have, the more supply you generate, but of course you only have a limited number of expansion modules, so if you build lots of supply pads you may find yourself unable to build a vehicle factory or a barracks. This encourages early-game expansion and exploration. The supply mechanic isn't new, originating as it did in the Command and Conquer: Generals expansion Zero Hour many years earlier, but Halo Wars makes it really work as part of the mechanics.

You can build an extensive army consisting of infantry, aircraft, tanks, anti-air batteries and other units. The elite Spartan super-soldiers can't be built (at least in campaign mode) but can join the fray as special elite units for certain missions.

For a supposedly "cut-down" RTS, Halo Wars surprisingly enjoyable even for an experienced PC strategy gamer. The unit variety isn't the most extensive, but the focus on a smaller roster helps streamline the game and make it more enjoyable. It also allows for battles to be fought faster and more furiously, rather than you agonising of which of several very slightly different units to build.

The campaign is enjoyable, with a fairly straightforward SF story. As the game is set twenty years before the original Halo: Combat Evolved, no prior knowledge of the franchise is needed, making it a perfect jumping-on point ahead of the release of the upcoming Halo Master Chief Collection on PC (which will bring Halo: Reach, Halo: ODST, Halo 3 and Halo 4 to PC for the first time, alongside upgraded versions of the original Halo and Halo 2).

The game does have several problems, however. The game doesn't use many "standard" RTS controls, instead forcibly mapping camera controls to WASD and not allowing you to reassign them. This means many standard RTS controls - A for attack-move, S for stop - are not available in the game. The game is also on the short side: I polished off all 15 campaign missions in about 11 hours. The game feels like it really needs a Covenant campaign to make the game a more worthwhile single-player experience, and indeed the story feels a bit opaque at times, like we were supposed to be getting more information about the Covenant version of events but at some point this was cut.

The other problem is that the game can't help but feel a little familiar, particularly in missions fighting the organic Flood where you have to destroy their living technology. This feels very reminiscent of fighting both the Zerg in StarCraft and the Tyranids in Dawn of War.

Still, given it is now available at a very reasonable price, Halo Wars (****) succeeds as a short, focused and fun real-time strategy game which doesn't make too many concessions to its console origins. It's available now on Steam.

The entire HALO collection (almost) is finally coming to PC

In a surprising move, Microsoft have confirmed that their hithero mostly-X-Box-exclusive Halo video game series is coming to PC.

The original Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) had a well-received PC port, but Halo 2 (2004)'s PC port was poor and badly reviewed. Subsequent games were not released on PC at all.

The Halo: Master Chief Collection is now coming to PC. This will include revamped and upgraded versions of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, but, for the first time, Halo 3 (2007), Halo 3: ODST (2009), Halo: Reach (2010) and Halo 4 (2012). The spin-off Halo Wars strategy series and Halo 5: Guardians (2015), the most recent game in the main series, are not included.

Microsoft plan to release the games this year, although they will be releasing each title individually so they can test and optimise each game through a releasing and testing period. Microsoft will be releasing the game via their own online store but, surprisingly, also through Steam.

Showtime commission a 10-episode HALO TV series

In a surprising move, the cable network Showtime has commissioned a 10-episode TV series based on the space opera video game series Halo.

Kyle Killen (Awake, Lone Star, Mind Games) will act as showrunner and chief writer, whilst Rupert Wyatt (The Escapist, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Captive State, The Exorcist) will direct multiple episodes and serve as a producer.

The Halo video game franchise has included nine console and PC games, two arcade shooters and multiple spin-off novels and comics. The franchise has sold over 77 million units, generating $5 billion in revenue for Microsoft. The game series depicts a war between the United Nations Space Command (UNSC), including Earth and her colonies, and an alien race known as the Covenant. This war is complicated by the discovery of a massive, ring-shaped space habitat known as the Halo and the discovery of an alien threat known as the Flood, which the Halo is designed to hold back. In the original Halo: Combat Evolved and its direct sequels, it falls to a human hero (known as "Master Chief") to save humanity from the Flood. More recent games have focused on new threats and new discoveries about the origin of the Halo. It is not yet known when or where the Halo TV show will be set relative to the timeline of the games.

Peter Jackson spent some years developing a Halo movie series with future Game of Thrones writer Dan Weiss before the project foundered over budget concerns.

Showtime's move into big-budget, high-concept franchise TV is a response to the recent announcement of multiple high-profile projects by studios and networks including HBO, Netflix and Amazon. The acquisition of the Halo licence is particularly notable, since the Halo video games are partially inspired by Larry Niven's Ringworld and Iain Banks' Culture novel series, both of which are now being developed as TV shows for Amazon.

Showtime are apparently betting the farm on Halo, following the extremely expensive Twin Peaks revival last year which attracted critical acclaim but low ratings. The network are seeing this show as the opportunity to take the fight to their rivals.

Steven Spielberg announces live-action HALO TV series

During the launch announcement of Microsoft's new console, the controversially-named X-Box One, it was casually dropped in that Steven Spielberg will be making a live-action TV series based on the Halo videogame series.

Almost no other information was revealed, except that the series will be a premium-content show developed as an original series for the X-Box One's TV portal (i.e. there won't necessarily be a traditional or cable network involved), which may also be accessible from the X-Box 360's Gold Live service. Further information - if there's going to be a pilot or a 13-part series or possible airing dates or casting information, or even when it'll be set and what characters will be involved - has not been revealed, though I expect more to be revealed in the next few days.

Presumably this means that the long-planned Halo movie (at one point to be written by Game of Thrones showrunner D.B. Weiss, directed by District 13 director Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson) is on hold pending how the show turns out.

There have been four games in the core series, comprising a completed trilogy (Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 and Halo 3) and the start of a second trilogy (the unpredictably-titled Halo 4). Halo 5 is currently in-development for the X-Box One. There has also been a prequel game, Halo: Reach, a self-contained expansion to Halo 3 called Halo 3: ODST, and a spin-off real-time strategy game, Halo Wars.

The games begin in the year 2552, when humanity is at war with a hostile alien race, the Covenant. During a battle between a human ship and a Covenant vessel, both encounter a massive ring-shaped structure in space, ten thousand miles wide. The human vessel crashes on the surface and one of the few survivors, a Spartan elite trooper known only by his rank, Master Chief, has to fight through the Covenant forces to discover the structure's secret: it is home to a rapacious, hostile race known as the Flood which will overwhelm and destroy the entire galaxy if left unchecked. Later games reveal that there are multiple Halo rings and their true purpose is to keep the Flood under control, even if it means wiping out all life in the galaxy. Later games focus on the emergence of a new threat, the Prometheans.

The games span a period of five years, along with Reach, a prequel set a few months before the first game and depicting the Covenant launching a full-scale invasion of the human colony world of Reach, home to 700 million people. A potential TV series could be set at any point in the games' timeline, or even earlier or later, focusing on different characters and situations altogether. Spin-off novels, including some written by hard SF author Greg Bear, are set thousands of years earlier during the construction of the Halos, though it's less likely that a TV show would move so far away from the familiar iconography of the games.

More news as it is revealed.

Common mistakes in SF&F

This is one everyone can join in on. What are the most common errors you see people making about SFF books? Not spelling mistakes or things of that nature, but more assumptions that people make and trivia that commentators may not be aware of? Here's a few to get started:


1. It's Otherland, not Otherworld.

Tad Williams' four-volume Otherland series is a fine 'rationalised fantasy', with the fantasy elements taking place in a VR simulation in late 21st Century South Africa. However, everyone and their uncle seems to get the name wrong, calling it Otherworld. To be honest, this is probably a more accurate title, but it's not the right one. Yet I've seen bloggers, magazines and even hardcore Williams fans make this mistake as well.

Anomander Rake not present.

2. It's Steven Erikson, not Steve Erickson.

The author of the Malazan series is called Steven Erikson, not Steven Erickson. This is probably the single most common mistake I encounter on forums, and used to make it myself. You may say, so what? But in this case the distinction is important, as there is also an accomplished, award-winning speculative fiction author called Steve Erickson who has written books such as Arc d'X and Zeroville and championed a young Neil Gaiman during his Sandman days (he wrote the introduction to one of the graphic nove collections). Of course, to add to the confusion, Malazan Steve's real name is actually Steve Rune Lundin, with Erikson as a pen-name (according to rumour, adopted because it puts his and Ian Esslemont's Malazan books next to one another on the shelf). In a similar vein, Frederik Pohl gets renamed 'Frederick' quite a bit as well.


3. Nights of Villjamur isn't Mark Newton's debut novel.

Mark seems rather embarrassed by it, but a year before Nights of Villjamur came out, British small press Pendragon Publishing put out a book by him called The Reef. It's a proper novel, 310 pages in length, and is set in the same world as his Legends of the Red Sun series (albeit thousands of years removed in a remote part of the world). More importantly, despite Mark's claims, it's actually pretty good.

But who'd win in a fight between an Ultramarine and Jim Raynor?

4. Warhammer & 40K predate WarCraft and StarCraft.

Penny Arcade put it best, but it's not uncommon to see people making this mistake even today: Dawn of War ripped off StarCraft, Warhammer Online ripped off World of WarCraft, the Tyranids are totally repainted Zerg and so on. You know, ignoring the fact that Warhammer debuted in 1983 (eleven years before WarCraft: Orcs and Humans) and Warhammer 40,000 in 1987 (eleven years before StarCraft). And that Blizzard reportedly asked Games Workshop to do official Warhammer computer games in the early 1990s and were turned down, so had to create their own IP. Not knocking Blizzard here (StarCraft II will be my first day-of-release PC game purchase in almost three years) who make fantastic games, but the idea that Games Workshop stole anything from them is chronologically impossible.

5. The Wolfman predates Twilight.

By about sixty-five years. Seriously.


6. The Halo is more like a Culture Orbital than the Ringworld.

The titular construct from Bungie's X-Box games is actually much more like an Orbital from Iain M. Banks' Culture novels than Larry Niven's Ringworld (from his classic 1970 novel of the same name). They pretty much all look the same, but famously Niven's construction is too big to actually work in accordance with the laws of physics, and increasingly ridiculous explanations are offered in the succeeding books as to how to stabilise the structure, including fitting rocket engines the size of Jupiter to it. The Culture Orbitals are 'merely' 3 million km across and much more stable. Oddly, it's the computer game which makes the most sense, with the Halos only being about 10,000 km across. The biggest similarity between the two is that both Orbitals and Halos orbit a star (the latter in conjunction with supermassive gas giants), whilst the Ringworld completely encloses it. All of that said, Microsoft did give Niven a complimentary X-Box and copy of the game, acknowledging the visual similarity of the design.

7. A Song of Ice and Fire, not Fire and Ice

I thought we'd seen the back of this one many years ago, but the recent announcement of the HBO TV series has seen a whole truckload of coverage of the books and the series in more mainstream outlets. Thus we are now seeing stories about A Song of Fire and Ice, an SF series set on the planet Westeros where the seasons last for forty years, or some other butchering of title and premise. Less of a criticism of SF fans as mainstream journalists who can't even be bothered to look at Wikipedia for five minutes.

The 'successor' to Revelation Space, but not the 'sequel'.

8. Chasm City is a Revelation Space 'novel', but not part of the Revelation Space 'Trilogy'.

Alastair Reynolds' first novel was Revelation Space, the first novel to be published in the Revelation Space Trilogy and also the first book set in the wider Revelation Space setting (note to authors: calling your book, series and wider setting all the same thing can be confusing). It was followed by Chasm City, which was marketed as the follow-up to Revelation Space, but is not Book 2 of the Revelation Space Trilogy, whilst it is the second book in the wider Revelation Space setting and in fact takes place immediately before the events of Revelation Space (its main character has a cameo in Revelation Space, a cameo that would have passed readers by as they had no idea who he was and it was so fleeting it's unlikely they'd remember him when Chasm City came out a year later). At the time of publication this was extremely confusing, although with the distance of ten years, the completion of the trilogy and the arrival of additional books in the same setting, it is now easier to sort things out, but even so there remains some confusion over what book goes where in what order.

9. Gentleman Bastard, not Gentlemen Bastards.

Scott Lynch's fantasy sequence is called The Gentleman Bastard, singular, a reference to the central character of Locke Lamora. The confusion is understandable since Locke's gang is called the Gentlemen Bastards, but the singular title makes more sense given the fate of many of the Bastards and their allies in the first two books.

Impressive? Yes. Even remotely plausible? Not really.

10. A Dyson Sphere isn't what writers often think it is.

In SF parlance, a Dyson Sphere is a solid shell completely enclosing a star at a distance of roughly 1 AU, providing a living surface billions of times greater than that of a terrestrial planet, powered by absorbing 100% of the energy of the englobed star. Whilst a fantastic and mind-blowing idea, it's not actually what the term means. A 'proper' Dyson Sphere in fact consists of many individual solar collector satellites stationed in orbit around the Sun, absorbing the energy and returning it to Earth for use. Freeman Dyson, the creator of the concept, was not a fan of the 'sold shell' approach, finding it unconvincingly unrealistic. Also, vast numbers of problems have been identified with the 'solid shell' approach, enough to render the idea almost completely unfeasible. But SF writers still use them (and misuse the name) because the idea is cool.

Further suggestions will be gratefully received.

Richard Morgan on writing SF for video games

Richard Morgan has been interviewed by NowGamer over his new role as writer for Crysis 2. In the interview Morgan, not normally known for his shy and retiring views, describes the Halo series as mediocre and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as examples of bad storytelling, which has already attracted some seriously negative commentary from the fanbases of those series (mostly responding to the highlights on Kotaku and io9 rather than reading the full story, and with rather too much over-use of the somewhat daft, "But if you read the novels Halo has a really good story!" line, which doesn't quite compute as it has no bearing on storytelling within the games).


Morgan makes some interesting points about the use of story and drama in games, although I think it is also true that the interactive element (in the case of a FPS, combat) has to take precedence. A poor shooter with a great story is still a poor game, whilst a great shooter with a poor story is still an enjoyable game, if merely one that you are not going to remember or enjoy for very long. Better still is a story that adapts to a limited medium, something the Half-Life and Max Payne series have done so successfully. A good story in a much more narrative-driven genre like RPGs I would argue is also far more important (hence why I've taken over two years to get halfway through The Witcher, as the story is so mind-numbingly dull, whilst I tore through the full replay of Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2 and Jade Empire in a matter of weeks last year).

Still, there does appear to be a decline in the art of good storytelling in games. We have Dragon Age and Mass Effect still doing good stuff, but when I think back to the turn of the decade when we had games like StarCraft, Freespace 2, Planescape: Torment, Anachronox, Hostile Waters and Baldur's Gate 2 giving us great stories regardless of genre and look at what we have now, it is hard to argue that this art seems to be in decline.

Halo: Combat Evolved

Having enjoyed putting together the C&C3 review yesterday I've decided not to rest on my laurels and immediately proceed with another PC games review. At some point I will actually review truly classic games that everyone should play immediately if they have not done so previously (Freespace 2, Hostile Waters, Planescape: Torment etc etc), but frankly it's more fun to look at those games which everyone has heard of but which actually aren't all that. Hence:


Halo was first unveiled circa 1999 as a major first-person shooter from the makers of the classic Marathon series on the Apple Mac and the Myth series of strategy games on the PC. Halo promised to combine a solid SF setting (basically an Orbital from Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, althouh lazy reviewers referenced the more obvious titular construct from Larry Niven's Ringworld books) with equally-good vehicular and personal combat all set against a solid storyline. However, a bump appeared in the road during development, namely a large, misshapen, three-times-too-big bump called the Microsoft X-Box. Before you could say "Killer App!" Halo had been gagged and dragged screaming off to the land of Console Exclusive Releases, leaving PC players feeling vaguely cheesed off, but the developers immensely richer. Anyhow, Halo came out for the X-Box, made a tremendous wad of cash, got lots of people to buy the thing and was praised by all and sundry as the Best Thing Ever, with even the usually-more-difficult-to-excite-than-Al-Gore Edge magazine getting unseemingly excited and awarding it maximum points, which felt rather wrong, a bit like Barry Norman giving a five-star review to Debbie Does Dallas.

Meanwhile, the PC community had basically forgotten that their promised classic had been carted off to the land of mass appreciation, mainly because Half-Life 2 had just been announced, Doom 3 was on the way and something called Far Cry was looking a bit tasty as well. When Halo therefore arrived on PC at the end of 2003 like an overeager puppy anxious to please its new owners, it was rather cruelly ignored and reviews were less than stellar. No doubt some of this can be put down to PC owners generally believing that console games are unchallenging sacks of crud and console conversions are very disappointing (although if the game in question is developed by BioWare, this rule no longer applies), but most of it can be put down to the fact that Halo is in fact a bit (but not totally) crap.

Things get off to a solid if unoriginal approach when your spaceship detects a huge alien artefact in space and your captain decides to check it out. Your ship then gets borded by what appears to be a bunch of gibbering monkeys wearing brightly-coloured spacesuits, giggling like lunatics and running around like a bunch of five-year-olds on acid. These turn out to be the primary recurring footsoldiers of the Covenant. They are the worst enemy ever conceived for a first-person shooter. Shooting them is satisfying, but would be more so if your collection of weapons weren't entirely inspired by the Super-Soaker 5000. Things obviously go pear-shaped and you end up stuck alone on the huge alien construction, at least for about ten minutes until you meet up with some of your mates and engage in squad-based combat with the Covenant.

This takes up the first third of the game and is actually enjoyable. There's some nice non-linearity to the game, combat is generally okay and Halo's approach to grenades is, if massively overstated, nonetheless a welcome innovation in the staid FPS genre. Much respect to the vehicles. If there is one thing Halo gets right, it's the vehicles and vehicle combat, which are fun throughout the game. Also, whilst the gibbering Covenant monkey grunts remain infuriating, more challenging opponents turn up who are more interesting to fight.

You may suspect a huge "BUT" is coming and you would be correct. About a third of the way through the development of the game Bungie apparently checked in on the gametesters and realised that people were having fun fighting in outdoor environments with vehicles and alongside NPC allies and against a reasonably decent opposition. Bungie apparently decided that it would make perfect sense to therefore kill all of the NPC allies, take out the vehicles, set the second two-thirds of the game almost entirely indoors on the same map just repeated over and over and replace the Covenant with The Flood, the Flood being basically the headcrab zombies from Half-Life with the added bonus that they sometimes explode when standing right next to you and they never appear in numbers of less than four trillion. I can only assume that Bungie had a moment of rebellion against their evil corporate overlords at Microsoft and tried to sabotage their own game, but it didn't work because it came too late in the day and all the previews had enthusiastically widdled on about the great part of the game and not even mentioned the large chunk of it that sucked donkey legs.

Towards the end of the game, around the time you've slaughtered your sixty quadrillionth Flood creature and passed through the same room eighty times, things do get vaguely interesting again and you experience an enjoyable jeep ride along the spine of an exploding starship. However, given that the game ends three seconds after this, this turns out not to be the return-to-form you were hoping for but rather a rather cruel way of the developers telling you they could have made the whole game as fantastic as that, but chose not to because they were too busy spending their development budget on beer and pizza.

Of course, Halo (**) wasn't a total write-off. As I said, the first third of the game is still fun, the multiplayer is okay (if nothing special by PC standards) and it did give us the superb Red vs Blue Internet comedy series, which is a Good Thing. However, it doesn't really make up for the fact that nearly two-thirds of the game is unplayable by all but the terminally stubborn and the ending is so blatantly sequel-incurring that they may as well have just demanded your credit card number before running the final cut scene.

Halo is available for the X-Box (USA, UK) and the PC (USA, UK) and has been out for ages, so should be quite cheap on both systems. There are sequels which are apparently far superior, but given that the PC port of Halo 2 was apparently a total disaster, I am not in any hurry to play them.