You've seen the ads. Clutched the Halo 3 soda cans. Read the (interminable) hype. But now that we're less than a week from the release of this year's biggest game, the thing is: who cares?
Don't get me wrong, as I've said before, Halo had me from hello. I stopped my life twice before to play through the game, and I'll surely do it again for the third installment. The Halo franchise's greatest hook is its cinematic flair - the pacing, the music, the scope. But let's not lose sight of one simple fact: this is a sequel. A sequel to a sequel, actually. And while sequels can be awesome (like any Madden or Half-Life game), they are, at best, riffs on a theme. And what really matters - what this industry desperately needs - is not variation, but innovation.
Case in point: BioShock. While Microsoft was printing up its marketing blitz for Halo 3, this weird underwater shooter quietly stole the spotlight to become the year's most intriguing shooter. For jaded players and critics, it served up something rare: a world we haven't seen before. But then we'll have BioShock 2 at some point and, no matter how killer (and I suspect it will be killer), it will suffer from that same twinge of familiarity.
For the medium of games to grow, here's my modest proposal: ban sequels for the next decade, and sic the brilliant developers of Halo and BioShock and all the other standbys on some entirely new world. We need all the help we can get.
