500 Years Apart? Maybe Not…

Yea, so, 2 minutes ago, I saw the Halo: Reach ViDoc 1. Freakin' amazing with what they did to the game. With pretty much a billion more ways to work to and form, they'd be hard-pressed not to make a great game.

Of course, that being said, a lot of gamers are likely going to be let down because of their high standards for it (and they say I'm asian).

The environments and concepts of Halo are set roughly 500+ years ahead of now, where we meet aliens who want to obliterate us from the galaxy for some reason that is quite idiotic on the antagonist's behalf. The terrain is both familiar and foreign; we see grasslands and plains, deserts and ice-capped mountains, cities and space themes that look very familiar to now, but we also identify tunnels 30 meters high, of some oddly reflective metal or mineral, bridges made of nothing but excited photons, ships that could very well match the death star in magnitude (okay, so it may take, like 3 ships, but that's not much compared to what the entire covenant arsenal contains).

Call of Duty is based off of past and present events, mostly from the trench warfare periods of World War I and II, evolving to the new, modern guerilla warfare. The gameplay is historically accurate, in a sense, and really puts a player into the hands of murderous foe or amiable allies. From the air to the land to the sea, there's no shortage of ammunition (unless you fire like nobody's business), and certainly no shortage of enemies. Every weapon has its own category, and every type of weapon has several variants, mostly based on the nation that manufactured it.

With the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, came several, rather interesting elements into the game. One, and most stunning, is the Semtex grenade. This is your average sticky grenade, so one toss plus one enemy to stick usually equals one death. It was truly surprising when I saw this, because it took the concept straight from its competitor, the big man in green, with the blue balls of fire. Other noticeable yet more subtle additions were some of the gametypes, including the ol' Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, and I think there was a VIP game of sorts. Of course, not all of them were exact replicas, but they did share startling similarities.

From what I've seen from Halo: Reach, it looks like some sort of blasphemy has occurred. Not that I would say it's blasphemy; both games have their own pros and cons, and I enjoy all of the pros, and scorn all of the cons (such as the pros, who are 99% wannabes anyway). But anyway, there was a section where it showed a spartan sprinting. It doesn't take much of a genius to see where they might have gotten that one from. Also, the combat knife made a star appearance, which I find more Call of Duty-esque as well, though the animation is a bit longer, but more awesome as well.

Between Call of Duty and Halo, there's some startling elements from each game that seems to have embedded itself into the other. What does this mean about the two companies? What does it mean about the two games? Surely I'm not the only one who notices these subtleties, but am I simply exaggerating? Or is there something more? Or less?

I guess only time will tell.

But hell, it would be amazing if the two game companies did merge, but there would likely be some Great Schism or something between CoDers and Halo fans. Still, it would make a decent FPS-MMORPG concept not so farfetched.