Everything is quiet. Too quiet. A comrade wonders where the enemy is. I scan the room. Nothing. We prepare to move out. Then it happens. A blood-curdling, unearthly roar, a ghostly shape and a flash of blue in my peripheral vision, and a scream from one of my men. More roars and screams, and in mere seconds all of my marines have been gruesomely eviscerated. And what had I done about it in the meantime? Uh, actually, I ran and hid behind a box. That’s where I am now, sweating, shaking, hoping they won’t find me. Some hero. Some Master Chief.

This is what makes Halo the most thrilling videogame of recent years. Its other features are almost irrelevant. Take the two-weapon limit. That creates some speedy choice-making, but notice that they are blind choices. You never know which weapon will be appropriate around the next corner, unless you are already trying again. First time through, there is no tactical element to picking your guns, because you have no information on which to base any tactical thinking, unless you are already in the middle of a firefight and get lucky. And, by the way, let’s not kid ourselves that two weapons is any more “realistic” than the bristling arsenal that an FPS normally allows. A man can easily hold a pistol in each hand, plus two more pistols holstered at the thighs, plus a rifle or two slung over his shoulder. Arbitrarily, Halo won’t let you. It is a design choice with some interesting results, but it doesn’t make the game “realistic”.

Nor are the aliens especially well imagined. A Hunter might look pretty frightening the first time you see him up close, simply because of his size, but he is basically just a standard grunting reptile. Eventually, moreover, the gaping chink in his armour just seems silly. You’d think they would be able to design something that fitted. And the Grunts? Personally I’m immune to that sort of comedy. Disturbing memories of Elvis in Perfect Dark threaten to flood back.

On the other hand, what Perfect Dark is so good at is very different from the strengths of Halo. Bungie’s game does not boast anything like the semiotic depth of Rare’s flawed gem: the splendid selection of gadgets, the wide variety of visual and cybernetic modes in which the player engages with the environment in Perfect Dark are unmatched. The laptop gun or the combat boost have no parallels in Halo’s universe.

In fact, Halo and Perfect Dark are so different that to call them both first-person shooters tells you almost nothing. The generic term FPS has become almost useless, in the same way that “platformer” can describe works as wildly different as Taz and Ico. FPS tells you about a certain mode of experiencing the gameworld, but it tells you nothing about what you’re going to have to do when you’re there, apart from shoot some stuff. Because the generic difference is this wide: Perfect Dark is a spy game, whereas Halo is a wargame.

The generic twist that James Cameron gave to Ridley Scott’s original Alien film was the reason for his sequel’s brilliance. Alien was a horror movie; Aliens is a war movie. Similarly with Halo compared to most of its generic brethren. What Medal of Honour: Allied Assault achieves only fleetingly, Halo achieves routinely throughout its world. It places you in a war movie. And it works that trick by creating an extraordinary sense of involvement. I’ve blinked in disbelief at the cunning of my enemies. I’ve laughed when one of my men kicked a prone alien and said “How does it feel to be dead?”. I’ve shouted at them to get out of the way of enemy grenades. And when I’ve let them die, I have felt bad. Guilty. This is its true magic.

For this to work so well, it is crucial that the death of your fellow soldiers does not signal game over, try again. It is vital that the game allows you to continue, fresh with relief that at least you survived, only to regret the lack of backup 20 minutes later. You can only regret things that are irreversible, just as you can only feel pity for the protagonist in a tragedy or a novel because his actions are irreversible. Irreversibility is the central melancholic fact of the human condition.

Now Halo does not insist on true irreversibility: if you like, you can restart the level and try to keep your marines alive this time. But that would take time and work. Once you have made your choice to plunder your comrades’ inert bodies and keep going, that choice is at least irreversible for your current path through the system - which might last until the end of the game. And that pseudo-irreversibility is enough to create an emotional impact that is far more important, in terms of immersion in Halo’s world, than aesthetic complaints about miles of identical stainless-steel corridors, true as the latter might be.

In fact, Halo is reminiscent less of any other first-person shooter than it is of Advance Wars. Every time an infantry unit gets blown away by some medium tanks in the latter, there’s a pang. It’s not because they’re hyperrealistically rendered little fellows, and it’s not because I’m enthralled by a narrative (the stories of both Halo and Advance Wars are merely rudimentary frames); it’s because I messed up but must still fight on. I am responsible for the consequences of my actions. For all its beauty, a game such as Ico lacks this variety of emotional pull, because as soon as Yorda dies she is reincarnated back on the last glowing sofa. I am never given the opportunity to regret her absence. Her death is a routine annoyance, not a profound loss.

Clearly, to be fun and satisfying, videogames must always centre on you. But they are free to qualify and complicate that egocentricity. Halo is not just about you, and that is its genius.

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