I have a confession to make that will alienate me from at least half of all gamers: I hate Halo.

With every new and improved Halo comes some new weapons, a handful of new maps, and maybe slightly better single-player AI.

But what stops me from enjoying Halo in any way, shape or form is the return of one of the most annoying new video game mainstays since Medusa Heads- The one-hit-kill rifle butt.

First let me break my hatred down into the most logical reason: When gamers play video games, we enter the game world still carrying our percieved notions of reality from the real world. My percieved reality is thus- people clubbing you hurts, but bullets kill. In reality, one or a few bullets will kill a human being. But boxers trade blows for round after round after round, barfights rarely end in anything but black eyes and bloody lips, and the marines are taught that in close quarters combat, dragging your adversary to the ground and submitting him with expert strikes is the key to victory, not holding your rifle the wrong way and swinging it around like a wildman.

Simply put, we all know that piercing a human body with a high-velocity projectile is far more deadly than blunt-force trauma, even from a considerably heavy object. So I am pulled out of the Halo game world every time I get into a gunfight with someone who is equally well-armed as I, and am taken by surprise when, after I've unloaded an entire clip into his abdomen, he runs up to me and takes me out with one glorified sucker punch.

At least in the first two Halo games (and I admit I haven't played the third), the gunbutt-strike attack doesn't even look that painful! It isn't a full-fledged, over-the-head hammer blow. It's just a quick jab.

The Counterstrike/Battlefield convention of the one-hit-kill knife attack is a little more bearable: For one, it has to be carried out on an unsuspecting foe, and big frikin' Bowie knives are deadly enough to concievably kill someone with a well-placed strike.

But one thing that bothers me about all of it, whether it be knife or gunbutt, is the lack of skill it takes to pull off an attack like this.

In the game world, we essentially cripple ourselves. Our sense of sight is more limited than in the real world, we have no sense of smell or touch, and our hearing is limited to what the developers want us to hear. Since our enemy's footsteps sound identical to our own, it is incredibly easy to "sneak" up behind someone and stab them. In fact, there's no "sneaking" element to it at all. Just the luck of running out of a corridor after an enemy passes it, and snaking him while he's gunning away. In this scenario, given the choice of either gun-clubbing the poor sap in the back of the head for a one-hit-kill, or blasting him with 5 should-be-lethal revolver rounds and risking him reeling around and wailing on us, it's really no choice at all. While the developers were surely thinking that the one-hit-kill aspect of the melee weapon is a good trade-off for the requirement that one must be breathing down his enemy's neck in order to use it, it is effectively over-powered because we cannot use the senses that would ordinarily alert us to impending danger to counter it.

Consider Doom: In Doom's multiplayer, most of the weapons were powerful, but the melee-only chainsaw was pretty much a gauranteed kill. But it came with one very logical and reasonable trade-off: Every time you fire it up, it's horrifying roar lets pretty much the entire level know that they oughta watch their backs. Have we devolved since then? Really?

Halo had to take the over-powered melee weapon to the next level with the introduction of the crazy-killtastic-something-saber. Now instead of having to come right up close to one's enemy, one simply has to know the map well enough to find the sword, then point in the general direction of an enemy, be a reasonable distance from them, and have two hands (to depress the fire button). Now we're punishing skill and rewarding obsessive, pathetic map memorization. Throw in the other Halo convention that I hate - the recharging shield - and a pretty unskilled player can wreak havoc on a level for a significant period of time.

The knife or gunbutt should be a last resort weapon- something to switch to when you run out of ammo or a clever last-ditch alternative to reloading, provided only that your enemy is pretty much down to their last breath anyway.