Portal:Halo/Selected article
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Halo: Combat Evolved, or simply Halo, is a science fiction first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie Studios, and the first installment of the Halo trilogy. It was released on November 15, 2001 as a launch title for the Xbox gaming system, and is considered that platform's "killer application". With more than five million copies sold worldwide, Halo is second only to its sequel, Halo 2, in sales for the Xbox video game console.
The titular Halo is an enormous, ring-shaped artificial space habitat/planet, which (according to Bungie Studios) has a diameter of ten thousand kilometers. Halo sits at a Lagrange point between a planet and its moon. Rotation provides the station's gravity. In the game, the player assumes the role of the Master Chief, a cyborg "super-soldier" with battle armor. The Master Chief is accompanied by Cortana, an artificial intelligence who occupies the neural implant between the battle armor and the Master Chief's brain. Players battle various types of aliens on foot or in vehicles as they attempt to uncover the secrets of the Halo. The game has been called "easy to learn," and has been praised for its "engaging story". Widely considered to be one of the best, and most influential, first-person shooters of all time, Halo's acclaim rivals that of GoldenEye 007 and Half-Life. For example, Edge gave Halo a full score of ten out of ten, only the fourth such designation in the magazine's 12-year history.
Master Chief Petty Officer Spartan 117, more commonly known as Master Chief, is the protagonist of the Halo series. Towering over other United Nations Space Command forces and weighing approximately half a ton in his armor, the Master Chief is one of the last remaining SPARTAN-II supersoldiers. Inspiring awe in allies and fear in foes, the Master Chief first appears in Bungie's 2001 Halo: Combat Evolved, where he and his A.I. construct Cortana fight enemies to unravel the secrets of Halo. The character returns in Halo 2 and Halo 3, and is featured in the expanded universe novels Halo: The Flood, Halo: The Fall of Reach, Halo: First Strike, and Halo: Uprising.
Halo 2 is the 2004 sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved, the award-winning first person shooter developed by Bungie Studios. Released for the Xbox game console on November 9, 2004, the game is the sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved. After its initial release, Halo 2 was the most popular video game on Xbox Live, holding that rank until the release of Gears of War for the Xbox 360 nearly two years later. By June 20, 2006, more than 500 million games of Halo 2 had been played and more than 710 million hours have been spent playing it on Xbox Live; by May 9, 2007, this number had risen to five billion, with more than five million unique players on Xbox Live. Halo 2 is currently the fifth best-selling video game in the US and is the best-selling first-generation Xbox game worldwide. A Windows Vista version was later released. Critical reaction to the game was mixed, with the matchmaking and multiplayer considered stronger than the single player campaign.
Halo 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie Studios exclusively for the Xbox 360. The game is the third title in the Halo series and concludes the story arc that began in Halo: Combat Evolved and continued in Halo 2. It was released on September 25, 2007 in Australia, Brazil, India, New Zealand, North America, and Singapore; September 26, 2007 in Europe; and September 27, 2007 in Japan. On the day before its official release, 4.2 million units of Halo 3 were in retail outlets. Halo 3 holds the record for the highest grossing opening day in entertainment history, bringing in US$170 million in its first 24 hours, going on to gross US$300 million in its first week. More than one million people played Halo 3 on Xbox Live in the first twenty hours. As of January 3, 2008, Halo 3 has sold 8.1 million copies, and was the best-selling video game of 2007 in the U.S. The game was well-received by critics as well with the Forge and multiplayer offerings singled out as strong features; on Game Rankings, Halo 3 ranks as the sixth highest rated Xbox 360 game to date.
Halo 3's story centers on the interstellar war between 26th century humanity, led by the United Nations Space Command, and a collection of alien races known as the Covenant. The player assumes the role of the Master Chief, a cybernetically enhanced supersoldier, as he wages war in defense of humanity, assisted by human Marines as well as allied alien Elites led by the Arbiter. The game features vehicles, weapons, and gameplay not present in previous titles of the series, as well as the addition of saved gameplay films, the Forge map editor (which allows the player to perform modifications to levels), and file sharing.
Cortana is a fictional, artificially intelligent (AI) character in Bungie Studios' Halo series of video games. Voiced by Jen Taylor, she appears in Halo: Combat Evolved and its sequels, Halo 2 and Halo 3, as well the novels Halo: The Flood, Halo: The Fall of Reach, Halo: First Strike, and Halo: Ghosts of Onyx. During gameplay, Cortana provides backstory and tactical information to the player, who assumes the role of the Master Chief. In the story, she is instrumental in preventing the activation of the Halo installations, which would have destroyed all sentient life in the galaxy.
Bungie first introduced Cortana—and Halo—through the Cortana Letters, cryptic emails sent during Combat Evolved's production in 1999. Since then, the character has been used extensively to advertise the series. Action figures of the character were sold before the releases of the latter two games, and she appeared in other forms of marketing for Halo 3. Cortana has been recognized for her sex appeal, believability, and character depth; she was rated as one of the ten most disturbingly sexual game characters by Games.net and one of the fifty greatest female video game characters ever by Tom's Games.
Halo Graphic Novel is a graphic novel published by Marvel Comics in partnership with Bungie Studios. The Halo Graphic Novel is the Halo series' first entry into the sequential art medium, and features aspects of the Halo universe which until then had not been discussed or seen in any medium. The majority of the book is divided into four short stories by writers and artists from the computer game and comic industries. Each tale focuses on different aspects of the Halo universe, revealing stories that are tangential to the main plot of the game. The book also contains an extensive art gallery compiled of contributions from Bungie, Marvel and independent sources. Released on July 19, 2006, the Halo Graphic Novel was well-received, with reviewers noting the cohesiveness of the work as a whole, as well as the diversity of the individual material. The success of the novel led to Marvel announcing a new limited comic series, which became known as Halo: Uprising.
Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, often abbreviated as RvB, is a machinima comic science fiction video series created by Rooster Teeth Productions and distributed primarily through the Internet and DVD. The series chronicles the story of two opposing teams of soldiers fighting a civil war in the middle of a desolate box canyon (Blood Gulch), in a parody of first-person shooter games, military life, and science fiction films. Initially intended to be a short series of six to eight episodes, the project quickly and unexpectedly achieved significant popularity following its Internet premiere on April 1, 2003. Rooster Teeth therefore decided to extend the series; the fifth and final season ended with episode 100, released on June 28, 2007.
Red vs. Blue emerged from Burnie Burns' voice-over-enhanced gameplay videos of Halo: Combat Evolved. The series is primarily produced using the machinima technique of synchronizing video footage from a game to pre-recorded dialogue and other audio. Footage is mostly from the multiplayer modes of Halo: Combat Evolved and its sequel, Halo 2.
Both within the machinima community and among film critics, Red vs. Blue has been generally well-received. Praised for its originality, the series has won four awards from the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences. It has been credited with bringing new popularity to machinima, helping it to gain more mainstream exposure, and attracting more people to the art form. While special videos continue to be released online, the completed series is also available on DVD, making the series one of the first commercially released and successful machinima products. Rooster Teeth has created videos, some under commission from Microsoft, for special events, and Red vs. Blue content is included with the Legendary Edition of Halo 3.
