Steal This Game: Halo Reach

There are plenty of games franchises that could use a helping hand to
improve. So we're going to start stealing the best bits from the games
we love and figuring out how to insert them into games that would
benefit most.


Halo: Reach,
Bungie's swan song to the Halo universe, takes what's been done well
for the past decade and makes it all even better. There's a lot of great
things in Halo: Reach -- things other games need. Hold on to your
britches, Halo, you're about to get jacked.


Easter Eggs in games is nothing new, but Halo: Reach took this to the
next level. The variety of hidden goodies included a secret rally race
and a hidden room packed with computers full of little Halo details. The
final cut-scene even offered a hidden view of Master Chief, frozen in
stasis and on his way towards the first Halo game. These Easter Eggs
weren't just cool little asides, but sometimes functional pieces of the
gameplay well worth finding.


Grand Theft Auto is a franchise predicated on the exploration of (and
mass destruction) of massive cities, but aside from some pigeons and
Statue of Happiness' hidden beating heart, GTA IV's Liberty City was
fairly light on Easter eggs. A sandbox game could always use more sand,
and something like seeing a glimpse into protagonist Niko Bellic's seedy
past through a hidden flashback mission would be just one of many
hidden (and totally optional) ways to flesh out some awesome back story.


When Halo 3 hit store shelves in 2007, offering the first fully realized
replay system for a first-person shooter, I was certain that was the
future of games. By now, every game should have a replay system that
allows a free camera control, editing abilities, and sharing
functionality. But few games do this and Halo remains the only franchise
that's really gotten this right. Uploading, searching, and sharing
videos is easy in Halo: Reach. Not so much for Call of Duty: Black Ops
and numerous other games with clunky replay systems.


Getting mauled to bits by necromorphs is as terrifying as it is
downright awesome to watch, even if it means instant death for your
character. So why not include a replay mode that lets us edit and share
the coolest, craziest and most violent Dead Space death sequences on the
fly. Steal this, EA!


You never had a hope for survival in Halo: Reach. A prequel, the story of
the final Spartans have been known for years. Reach was glassed (kind
of like destroyed, but cooler) and all Spartans save Master Chief were
lost. Your team is going to die. And so is your character, Noble Six.
But it's how you go out that's both powerful and memorable. After
completing your mission, the credits roll. But wait, there's more!
You're stuck on Reach, a doomed planet, with no hope of escape or
survival. Covenant forces are incoming. All that's left is to try and
take as many with you as possible. The final level, a bonus, is a
survival mode to see how long you can last before the inevitable.


Spoilers: Ganon gets stabbed in the head or shot to death with light
arrows at the end of every Zelda game he's in. He growls, steals a
Triforce piece and a princess makes Link hit a bunch of switches and
climb a lot of ladders and then turns into a giant pig person and dies
by Link's sword. So if we all know that Ganon will die, every time, why
not let us play as him for a bit? Seeing his attempt to conquer Hyrule
with power - from his perspective - would be a wildly unique way to show
us a totally different side of the tried and true Legend of Zelda
history.


Online play is Halo: Reach's bread and butter. Not only has Bungie
created the best online matchmaking system around, but their party
system (which keeps your group together), is top notch. Better still is
how the online experience carries over outside of the game. Bungie.net
has crazy stats on every Halo game you've played. Where do people get
killed most often on a map? What's the most effective weapon at each
location? Those who want to dive in can find an amazing amount of detail
on their past online endeavors.


Gears of War 2 added stat tracking to multiplayer, but it still pales in
comparison to what Bungie was doing with Halo 3 in 2007. Reach's
Facebook for Spartans just takes that further, with gamertag tagging in
screenshots and the return of robust kill tracking and data mining.
Gears of War isn't made by Microsoft, but it's functionally a first party exclusive - why not give Epic a little of that sweet stat-tracking magic?


We don't know exactly what Gears of War 3
has in store for multiplayer, but we've seen no indication that they're
going to include the level of game customization Halo Reach offered.
But at least they've finally got the party system right - and with
dedicated servers, things might even work this time!