Sorry about missing last week, folks. Lots of things going on! But that just means that I got to spend even more time figuring out what my fourth entry should be. We made it through the Wasteland, so let’s see what the next game universe on this list is.
(find out after the jump)
No.4: Halo
Yeah, I went there.
There’s just something about Halo that I love. I can’t say exactly what it is, but I really love the universe that Bungie created for its premier shooter series. It’s an odd cross between Larry Niven and Stargate, but it seems to work.
You have the long-dead race that built amazing technology that we are now discovering and using to our advantage. They also left behind the Halos, which the first game (and parts of the third) takes place on.
I have to admit, but I’m a sucker for big space sci-fi and the whole “ancient advanced race” trope. It goes like this: the Forerunners built the Halos to contain a vicious alien species known as The Flood. The Flood infect organic life, turning them into Flood. It’s a dickish thing to do.
Look at the way the ring just fades away into the sky. Beautiful.
The Halos, while weapons, are also giant ringworlds with a diameter a little smaller than that of Earth. The ringworld is an offshoot of the Dyson Sphere, which theorized building a massive shell around a star for habitation. (I told you: big sci-fi.) There were many times while playing a Halo game that I would stop and look up. There would be an entire world hovering over my head. It was amazing. The surface area that something like a Halo would have is just astonishing. And the Forerunners built a few of them.
(In Larry Niven’s book Ringworld, which you should totally read, the ring that the main characters find has a diameter about equal to the diameter of the earth’s orbit around the sun, or 93 million miles. That is a lot of surface area.)
Halo may not be the most original sci-fi world ever, but I am still drawn back to it. And for a lot of people, it was their first entrance into science fiction. And for that, Halo makes my list.