Tnnaas
September 16th, 2015, 03:00 PM
Developed by: Bungie
Published by: Microsoft
Available on: Xbox 360
Forge 2.0 is a bad comedy. Released with Halo Reach, it indulges players in the fantasy that they’d be good at making video game levels. This sort of self-deception has become common in the age of digital consumption, and while there’s something utopian in Forge 2.0's appeals to community participation and sharing, the game quickly collapses into a scratch sheet of horrible ideas and levels you’ll regret having played. It’s a tool for the mass production of cultural refuse, single-use distractions that fail to replicate the spirit of the original.
The game’s level editor is built around Halo 3's Forge, allowing players to quickly build levels by spawning objects from an in-game menu. The level editor is both incredibly easy to use and despairingly limited by the mandate that all your ideas fit in the “Halo Universe." It’s open-ended enough to make one want to imagine entirely new ways to play video games, but in practice it seems capable of producing only bad variations on ideas old Halo has already done better.
You can find and play other players’ levels based on popularity or newness or upload your own through Halo Reach's file sharing system. Alternately, you can play a selection of five Bungie-made Halo levels in Forge World. Here you’re given ten environments to create brand new maps, which can range from short gimmick maps, remade maps from older Halo games, or cacophonous new creations overcrowded with misalignment platforms, piled-up weapons, and nonsensical clusters of spawn points.
Playing the user-created levels feels jarringly antithetical to the welcoming nature of most Halo games, which even at their most difficult have a simplicity and transparency to their layout. The most popular user levels in Halo Reach feel bafflingly opaque, frenzied contraptions that rarely seem to have a purpose. Returning to older Halo games after a dozen hours with Forge 2.0 levels, the distinction becomes even more radical. Forge 2.0 levels often feel like they have nothing to offer but petty gameplay, while even the most unimpressive levels from 2004’s Halo: Custom Edition — one of the least well-regarded in the series — uses a minimum amount of difficulty to set up a sense of gameplay and discovery that’s missing from most Forge levels.
Forge 2.0 levels feel strangely raw and hostile, underscored by most game types' endless lives, allowing you to get wrecked on the same level over and over until the match comes to an end, at which point you’re sent back to unreliable heap of broken community creations. Over time, it becomes intensely dispiriting, with the few creative levels being lost among the gaping archive of disposable failures.
There is a futile egotism to Forge 2.0, a piece of software that caters to delusory belief that enthusiasm and creativity are interchangeable, that being a fan of something can, if practiced with enough care, create an equivalent of the work to which one’s fandom is fixated. This self-deception is antithetical to the genius of Halo games. From Combat Evolved to Wars, Halo games have always felt like creations in pursuit of abstract ideas rather than homages to any specific history or design tradition.
Forge 2.0 feels like the antithesis of this spirit. Halo levels begin to feel like traps that can’t be escaped. As with many digital tools that seem to liberate us from the laborious demands of creation, Forge 2.0 is primarily an engine for circulating bad ideas and broken gimmicks as if there weren’t already an overabundance of them.
Care Source (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2015/09/15/super-mario-maker-is-an-engine-for-circulating-horrible-new-mario-levels/)
Published by: Microsoft
Available on: Xbox 360
Forge 2.0 is a bad comedy. Released with Halo Reach, it indulges players in the fantasy that they’d be good at making video game levels. This sort of self-deception has become common in the age of digital consumption, and while there’s something utopian in Forge 2.0's appeals to community participation and sharing, the game quickly collapses into a scratch sheet of horrible ideas and levels you’ll regret having played. It’s a tool for the mass production of cultural refuse, single-use distractions that fail to replicate the spirit of the original.
The game’s level editor is built around Halo 3's Forge, allowing players to quickly build levels by spawning objects from an in-game menu. The level editor is both incredibly easy to use and despairingly limited by the mandate that all your ideas fit in the “Halo Universe." It’s open-ended enough to make one want to imagine entirely new ways to play video games, but in practice it seems capable of producing only bad variations on ideas old Halo has already done better.
You can find and play other players’ levels based on popularity or newness or upload your own through Halo Reach's file sharing system. Alternately, you can play a selection of five Bungie-made Halo levels in Forge World. Here you’re given ten environments to create brand new maps, which can range from short gimmick maps, remade maps from older Halo games, or cacophonous new creations overcrowded with misalignment platforms, piled-up weapons, and nonsensical clusters of spawn points.
Playing the user-created levels feels jarringly antithetical to the welcoming nature of most Halo games, which even at their most difficult have a simplicity and transparency to their layout. The most popular user levels in Halo Reach feel bafflingly opaque, frenzied contraptions that rarely seem to have a purpose. Returning to older Halo games after a dozen hours with Forge 2.0 levels, the distinction becomes even more radical. Forge 2.0 levels often feel like they have nothing to offer but petty gameplay, while even the most unimpressive levels from 2004’s Halo: Custom Edition — one of the least well-regarded in the series — uses a minimum amount of difficulty to set up a sense of gameplay and discovery that’s missing from most Forge levels.
Forge 2.0 levels feel strangely raw and hostile, underscored by most game types' endless lives, allowing you to get wrecked on the same level over and over until the match comes to an end, at which point you’re sent back to unreliable heap of broken community creations. Over time, it becomes intensely dispiriting, with the few creative levels being lost among the gaping archive of disposable failures.
There is a futile egotism to Forge 2.0, a piece of software that caters to delusory belief that enthusiasm and creativity are interchangeable, that being a fan of something can, if practiced with enough care, create an equivalent of the work to which one’s fandom is fixated. This self-deception is antithetical to the genius of Halo games. From Combat Evolved to Wars, Halo games have always felt like creations in pursuit of abstract ideas rather than homages to any specific history or design tradition.
Forge 2.0 feels like the antithesis of this spirit. Halo levels begin to feel like traps that can’t be escaped. As with many digital tools that seem to liberate us from the laborious demands of creation, Forge 2.0 is primarily an engine for circulating bad ideas and broken gimmicks as if there weren’t already an overabundance of them.
Care Source (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2015/09/15/super-mario-maker-is-an-engine-for-circulating-horrible-new-mario-levels/)