Halo for Xbox is a game that requires navigation through virtual landscapes and an acute spatial awareness and I would consider it to be a “very spatial game.” The levels are outside in forests, deserts, and alien worlds or inside spaceships, alien hideouts, and spacestations. When this game is played in multiplayer mode, each player has the goal of finding and killing the other players before they are killed. To avoid being killed you have to quickly recognize where you are in the game level. You have to associate landmarks you see in the virtual landscape and make-up a sort of mental map of the level. Or, you can cheat and play with the locator map turned on (the map has a north indication as well as a dot to represent where each player is in the level. When you play story mode you have to use landmarks heavliy because you return to check points after dying. The landscape is in some cases designed to be confusing, but a spatially aware player can avoid distraction and get right to the “shoot ‘em up.” This game is played in virtual spaces and places and those environments all have their own spatial components (scale, topography, built envioronments, natural envioronments). The game environment has so many spatial aspects to it. Below are some screen shots:
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