I really shouldn’t be surprised but then again, I always set myself up for these things. Halo: Contact Harvest is less a book but a series/video game bible/layout that, I imagine, was thrown aside when better ideas came along. I don’t want to say the book is written poorly because writer Joseph Staten is actually quite talented. His universe building skills, as shown in the second Halo game, for example, are excellent.
His problem: the universe he’s built is boring and as confusing as shit. I remember really liking Halo 2 at first. I felt the writers really expanded a universe that was mostly a rip off of Aliens in the first place. But then I started getting a bit confused and realized that SHOWING me a universe is one thing but hearing/reading about it is another. Halo 2, while an underrated game story-wise (the Covenant sections are interesting though not compelling), was definitely a mess. They lost track of their hero and focused on aspects that were made so utterly confusing and deep that, well, it wasn’t fun. And let’s not get started on Halo 3, in which they had to a)continue this craziness established in Halo 2 and b)erase all the terrible mistakes from Halo 2 in some exposition-heavy way to make Halo 3 a bit more accessible to newbies of the XBox 360 and to the now critically mixed franchise.
I always ignored the books because I always found myself more frustrated with Halo’s mythology as oppossed to drawn to it. Also, I was shocked that despite the Halo franchise being one of my all-time favorites in the video game world, I was very unattached to it emotionally. I liked Master Chief but he is a very thin hero. . .not much depth there. He’s cool but is he lovable. There was Cortana. . .and who knows what the fuck happened to her at the end of Halo 2. I know Halo 3 told me but. . .I still don’t really know. And then there was the tricky Arbiter, who, himself, is a mythological symbol that makes you want to tear your eyeballs out. He was cool and I liked his missions in Halo 2 but. . .yeah. . .not much there either EXCEPT Keith David’s awesome voice.
The main three characters were really devoid of anything other then COOL moments. And the Halo games outside the Master Chief vein were pretty unbearable. A lot of people seemed to like ODST but, frankly, I had no interest in exploring the Halo world any further WITHOUT at least someone COOL since emotion was too hard to ask. I didn’t even finish Halo Wars and I will probably skip Halo: Reach since it is a prequel and prequels, especially loaded with anti-climaxes, dense mythologies, and, once again, none of the original characters, just sounds like crap on a stick.
So I think I just explained why I skipped the Halo books! I don’t want to read about this universe that is confusing and dense and has no emotion behind it. . .especially when I can’t fire weapons that blow shit up! But, somehow, I bought two Halo books. I bought one called The Ghost of Onyx, and this book, Contact Harvest. I initially bought Contact Harvest because it had Sgt. Avery Johnson on the cover. Now this was interesting to me for two reasons. One, I was GOING to name my first child Avery (and my last name is Johnson) so that would have been weird. . .and it had nothing to do with Halo. Second, Johnson seemed to be the only genuinely fun NPC in the whole Halo universe. You cared for him when he was there. . .which wasn’t enough, frankly. And, naturally, they fucking killed him at the end of Halo 3. Figures the first main character, of sorts, to die would be black!
But in the video game, Johnson was an Apone-rip-off who was kind of fun. But as I started to read his story in Contact Harvest, which is a prequel by the way, I instantly regretted it. Some people, who are rip-offs of other caricatures in the first place, can’t be made three dimensional. Johnson is a drill sgt who says witty things and shoots stuff. . .yet in Contact Harvest he has a tragic past and a way with the laaaadies. It’s all kind of sad really. And now that I’ve read Johnson in all kinds of different situations outside of mindlessly shooting elites. . .I don’t like him anymore. Once again, the creators behind Halo have OVERDONE the mythology. Sgt. Johnson is no longer interesting to me now because he is OVER written now. Ugh.
The rest of the book doesn’t help much considering half of it is about Covenant politics. And the writer fails to let the story flow. . .he insists on writing a sentence and then writing eighteen paragraphs on Covenant society that led to that one sentence. It’s really distracting and annoying. It is not exaggeration when I say this book really could have been 100 pages shorter. But pesky Joseph Staten can’t let us turn the page without knowing how the Elites had a war once or how Sgt. Johnson masturbated once when he was 14!
Plus there is this inane subplot involving an Unggoy (the little creatures for the Covenant) and a flying creature called a Huragok and their friendship even though both, to facilitate the narrative of future games, must die. And then there are the AIs (like Cortana) that kind of Moonlighting/love-hate each other. Really bad. There is no one to root for in this book, nothing physical or emotional to grab on to, and the story, what little there is (something to do with Covenant/UNSC first contact out on the frontier of human space), is underwhelmed by the oppressive back story. I am seriously questioning reading the second Halo book I bought. . .I’d advise to ignore this one if possible.
I really shouldn’t be surprised but then again, I always set myself up for these things. Halo: Contact Harvest is less a book but a series/video game bible/layout that, I imagine, was thrown aside when better ideas came along. I don’t want to say the book is written poorly because writer Joseph Staten is actually quite talented. His universe building skills, as shown in the second Halo game, for example, are excellent.
His problem: the universe he’s built is boring and as confusing as shit. I remember really liking Halo 2 at first. I felt the writers really expanded a universe that was mostly a rip off of Aliens in the first place. But then I started getting a bit confused and realized that SHOWING me a universe is one thing but hearing/reading about it is another. Halo 2, while an underrated game story-wise (the Covenant sections are interesting though not compelling), was definitely a mess. They lost track of their hero and focused on aspects that were made so utterly confusing and deep that, well, it wasn’t fun. And let’s not get started on Halo 3, in which they had to a)continue this craziness established in Halo 2 and b)erase all the terrible mistakes from Halo 2 in some exposition-heavy way to make Halo 3 a bit more accessible to newbies of the XBox 360 and to the now critically mixed franchise.
I always ignored the books because I always found myself more frustrated with Halo’s mythology as opposed to drawn to it. Also, I was shocked that despite the Halo franchise being one of my all-time favorites in the video game world, I was very unattached to it emotionally. I liked Master Chief but he is a very thin hero. . .not much depth there. He’s cool but is he lovable. There was Cortana. . .and who knows what the fuck happened to her at the end of Halo 2. I know Halo 3 told me but. . .I still don’t really know. And then there was the tricky Arbiter, who, himself, is a mythological symbol that makes you want to tear your eyeballs out. He was cool and I liked his missions in Halo 2 but. . .yeah. . .not much there either EXCEPT Keith David’s awesome voice.
The main three characters were really devoid of anything other then COOL moments. And the Halo games outside the Master Chief vein were pretty unbearable. A lot of people seemed to like ODST but, frankly, I had no interest in exploring the Halo world any further WITHOUT at least someone COOL since emotion was too hard to ask. I didn’t even finish Halo Wars and I will probably skip Halo: Reach since it is a prequel and prequels, especially loaded with anti-climaxes, dense mythologies, and, once again, none of the original characters, just sounds like crap on a stick.
So I think I just explained why I skipped the Halo books! I don’t want to read about this universe that is confusing and dense and has no emotion behind it. . .especially when I can’t fire weapons that blow shit up! But, somehow, I bought two Halo books. I bought one called The Ghost of Onyx, and this book, Contact Harvest. I initially bought Contact Harvest because it had Sgt. Avery Johnson on the cover. Now this was interesting to me for two reasons. One, I was GOING to name my first child Avery (and my last name is Johnson) so that would have been weird. . .and it had nothing to do with Halo. Second, Johnson seemed to be the only genuinely fun NPC in the whole Halo universe. You cared for him when he was there. . .which wasn’t enough, frankly. And, naturally, they fucking killed him at the end of Halo 3. Figures the first main character, of sorts, to die would be black!
But in the video game, Johnson was an Apone-rip-off who was kind of fun. But as I started to read his story in Contact Harvest, which is a prequel by the way, I instantly regretted it. Some people, who are rip-offs of other caricatures in the first place, can’t be made three dimensional. Johnson is a drill Sgt who says witty things and shoots stuff. . .yet in Contact Harvest he has a tragic past and a way with the laaaadies. It’s all kind of sad really. And now that I’ve read Johnson in all kinds of different situations outside of mindlessly shooting elites. . .I don’t like him anymore. Once again, the creators behind Halo have OVERDONE the mythology. Sgt. Johnson is no longer interesting to me now because he is OVER written now. Ugh.
The rest of the book doesn’t help much considering half of it is about Covenant politics. And the writer fails to let the story flow. . .he insists on writing a sentence and then writing eighteen paragraphs on Covenant society that led to that one sentence. It’s really distracting and annoying. It is not exaggeration when I say this book really could have been 100 pages shorter. But pesky Joseph Staten can’t let us turn the page without knowing how the Elites had a war once or how Sgt. Johnson masturbated once when he was 14!
Plus there is this inane subplot involving an Unggoy (the little creatures for the Covenant) and a flying creature called a Huragok and their friendship even though both, to facilitate the narrative of future games, must die. And then there are the AIs (like Cortana) that kind of Moonlighting/love-hate each other. Really bad. There is no one to root for in this book, nothing physical or emotional to grab on to, and the story, what little there is (something to do with Covenant/UNSC first contact out on the frontier of human space), is underwhelmed by the oppressive back story. I am seriously questioning reading the second Halo book I bought. . .I’d advise to ignore this one if possible.