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7 Games That Tried, And Failed, To Make You Cry Man-Tears

Storyline! Yeah, that's an important part of videogames these days. It may be something that's been lauded by gamers since the days of Zork, but only fairly recently has it become so in vogue. As a general rule, the cycle goes: experiences wanted by players from games of old > indie games do it > becomes cool > triple-A developers do it > becomes uncool, and around again. And it makes sense in a vague kind of way. Big budget development teams don't want to waste money experimenting with something new if people won't buy it. They're a business after all. Let the bedroom devs take the plunge, they've got nothing to lose. If it works, then copy them.

7) Halo: Reach – Death Of Any/All Noble Team

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Bungie’s farewell to their much beloved Halo franchise was a fine instalment. Terrific, in fact. It played wonderfully, looked great, and received a flawless critical reception. In many ways, it was the perfect swansong. In some other ways, however, not so much.

Bungie purposefully absolved themselves of Master Chief’s story arc by ignoring his plight (and that of his jabbering, blue helmet-wife) altogether, instead choosing to construct a brand new tale based on the history of the original title. Now, we get that they were sad about leaving Halo behind, but what they came up with was so over-the-top sentimental that if you removed the shooting elements, it wouldn’t have looked out of place as a segue on Oprah.

The idea, I suppose, is that we would be struck by the poignancy of the deaths of Noble Team Six, as one by one they perish against ever increasing odds. The problem with that though, is that we’d never met them before this game, and they barely even took their helmets off. Emotionally connecting with interchangeable colours of Power Ranger is difficult enough, and that those ‘ever increasing odds’ boiled down to ‘shooting more purple aliens’ meant that, if anything, their deaths were a good thing for the player as it was one less name to try and remember.