The Worst Stories In Shooting
Monday, July 4th, 2011Shooters with stories can be fantastic (as 100% of all people currently hoping/praying/sacrificing animals to speed the release of Episode 3 understand), but it’s usually unnecessary. If you’re on a multiplayer server, you hate those guys. Story over. If things get heated you might add a romantic sub-plot between their mother and a football team, or some powerful contrasting symbolism involving their lifeless corpse and the part of your body which could generate new life, but mainly the plot development is limited to killing something and then reloading.
Some game developers put you in a building full of mutants, hand you a gun, and think they’re not done. It’s a worse mistake than an obstetrician delivering a baby then deciding to see what else they can get out of there. They try to layer story on top of the game with all the skill and success of an incontinent adding fudge to a steak - the best you can hope for is that they just miss and you skip their contributions.
1. Halo 3
Halo revolutionized console shooting by adapting it for thumbsticks, Xbox Live, and including a grenade button (the single greatest advance in First Person Shooting control since the the fire button). Halo servers brought this classic across to the PC and today, on a platform with so many shooters it’s technically an army, it’s still a lot of fun to play. The plot was a masterpiece: you’re Toughest Guy, Aliens are Bad, go kill them.

Notice how you make even the tank look wimpy
Halo 2 threatened to raise moral issues by showing that one of the enemies you’d been massacring was actually a good guy, then sidestepped them by showing that he was the only one of the enemies who was a good guy and had him immediately join your side. Unfortunately “Someone who looks different to me” was still far too much moral complexity for most Halo players to process, and he was relegated to the sidelines for Halo 3. So that it could concentrate on the worst story ever.
When your story is “damsel in distress”, the most unoriginal plot since “God created that light up there” you don’t draw attention to the fact. Mario only rescued a princess because without that he’s a genocidal turtle-murderer. Halo 3 very very wrongly thought it had a rich story, or even a real story, using new narrative elements to involve you. Translation: it interrupted gameplay with cutscenes you couldn’t skip. “Interrupting your view” and “Whining” are the two worst things a game developer can do outside of reversing your controls, so it’s a mystery why Bungie programmed Cortana to do both.

They made it this horrible and blurry on purpose, so that Cortana could prove that the Architect wasn’t the most annoying computer program ever
2. Homefront
To call Homefront’s story laughable is cruel because with a little work, and an understanding of parody (especially how it had already happened), it could have been. And it would have been glorious. It could have been Hot Shots: The Shooter. We’ve covered Homefront’s almost-hilarity before, but don’t think we’ll ever get over mothers bravely throwing themselves into combat situations armed with nothing but unkillably loud babies just to show how evil the Koreans are. (Here “evil” apparently means “lacking X-ray vision”, as the Koreans were at that point cruelly and evilly shooting at the terrorists who had just killed about a hundred of them, firing at a house that only said terrorists were in. Well, only the terrorists were in when they started shooting.)
Protect my baby! (Because I’m doing the opposite!)
Homefront servers offer so many advantages (the brilliant BP system and Battle Commander modes included), it’s unclear why they had to manufacture such contrived advantages as “Wow, this mode also doesn’t mock the very concept of patriotism!”
3. Gears of War 2
Gears of War has a brilliant story: a developer said “let’s render beautiful environments, blow the shit out of them, then release steroid-mutants the size of small tanks to fight there.” And lo, it was good. Unfortunately someone decided that this story of human fridges eroding each other with bullets needed deep emotional resonance, and that these should be emotions other than the “YEAAAAAAHH WOOOOO!” joy the game was already full of.

YEAAAAAHHHH WOOOOOO but no seriously we should include emotional depth too
The result was the least tragic death since Bond killed Blofeld. Dom being forced to kill his tortured wife (we’d have included a SPOILER tag if this counted as a plot) sounds heavy when you put it like that: quickly. Which isn’t how the game put it. They drew Dom’s whining out over so much of the game you’d have raced him to shoot her through the head. They also chickened out of their own drama, turning a mercy killing into a cowardly plot point by including a “Get out of moral conflict FREE!” card. Super-tough Gear Tai going insane from literally five minutes of evil torture. Dom’s wife had been down there for years of agonizing pain, which is about how long the cutscene feels, and means the big emotional moment is about as conflicted as the Ku Klux Klan voting on their uniform color.










































