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[Varin]

Interesting article on game storytelling

[CoffeeJedi]

good article

i've always thought that Halo had THE BEST "Earth vs Aliens" plots of any video game. Most games just rely on "there is a war between earth and planet x, now go blow 'em up good!" Halo gave us a fully fleshed out alien culture of religious zealots, and ancient artifacts that can destroy all life. the plot twists, flood, Covenant rebellion, gravemind, etc, all contribute to something really interesting. a plus to Bungie for continuing the storyline in Halo 2 and expanding things, and not just doing a simple retread of the original. I wasn't really disappointed about the "lack of an ending", noone complained that Empire Strikes Back didn't have a proper ending. The Arbitor/Tartorus plot wrapped up pretty well, and the Chief got back to Earth. It seemed like a good arc, and is a pretty good starting point for H3.

Marathon had a great story as well, if you can figure out what the heck is going on by the end of infinity.

[Anton P. Nym]

Yeah, I was kinda disappointed by the lack of love for at least the Marathon series. Halo's story has been pretty good, but Marathon's is (so far) the superior of the two in depth and convolution... and it really broke some ground when it came out. (And you're not supposed to be sure of what happened in the ending of Infinity... the ending is yours to create from your interpretation, IMO.)

I liked the "Empire Strikes Back ending" quip... "not again if they put hot irons to the soles of my feet." I'm guessing that that's how it could feel afterwards...

-- Steve's also mildly disappointed that no one there pointed to a GREAT way to insert story into a game; make untangling/revealing it the reward for completing parts of the game. Though the create-a-story-through-XCOM did strike a, uh, personal resonance...