I feel like I got my face singed just watching this. I mean DAMN, that's some spite.
When considering the Halo mythos it's pretty important to realize - it's almost like a separate issue from the game itself. Halo has a very well constructed universe, and the fact that the games revolve around you being a supersoldier who can casually punch an alien to death is really not a reflection on the quality of the mythos Bungie built behind it. Watch the Arbiter cutscenes from Halo 2 and tell me that's not some elegant presentation at work. The unsettling militarism is gone, replaced with a portrait of religious zealotry that comes across as more an ironic cautionary tale than gun-wanking attempts at acting badass because we know that it's ultimately misguided.
The fact is that Halo's singleplayer, while still not exactly what I'd call highbrow anything, is an entirely different game from its multiplayer. Singleplayer is a story about a lame protagonist in a lovingly crafted universe. The multiplayer is a pit full of twitchy twelve year olds calling each other naughty words. A lot of games are like that. I went into Modern Warfare 2 expecting a landslide of the impossible claiming to be ultra-realism and chest-thumping American jingoism, and actually found the single-player campaign, unlike its multiplayer population, dropped attempts to recreate warfare as something fun and instead provided you with a sort of entertaining James Bond/Tom Clancy-hybrid action movie, and little quips on the loading screens were bereft of fanatical USA nationalism and instead filled with words of caution about the horrors of war and absurdity of conflict, as if to prevent the multiplayer crowd from getting brainwashed into joining the army by their skill with an tiny analog stick, lest they imagine it carry over to an actual firearm.
So, yeah. I think the writers of Halo are a cut above most of their readers, so to speak.
When considering the Halo mythos it's pretty important to realize - it's almost like a separate issue from the game itself. Halo has a very well constructed universe, and the fact that the games revolve around you being a supersoldier who can casually punch an alien to death is really not a reflection on the quality of the mythos Bungie built behind it. Watch the Arbiter cutscenes from Halo 2 and tell me that's not some elegant presentation at work. The unsettling militarism is gone, replaced with a portrait of religious zealotry that comes across as more an ironic cautionary tale than gun-wanking attempts at acting badass because we know that it's ultimately misguided.
The fact is that Halo's singleplayer, while still not exactly what I'd call highbrow anything, is an entirely different game from its multiplayer. Singleplayer is a story about a lame protagonist in a lovingly crafted universe. The multiplayer is a pit full of twitchy twelve year olds calling each other naughty words. A lot of games are like that. I went into Modern Warfare 2 expecting a landslide of the impossible claiming to be ultra-realism and chest-thumping American jingoism, and actually found the single-player campaign, unlike its multiplayer population, dropped attempts to recreate warfare as something fun and instead provided you with a sort of entertaining James Bond/Tom Clancy-hybrid action movie, and little quips on the loading screens were bereft of fanatical USA nationalism and instead filled with words of caution about the horrors of war and absurdity of conflict, as if to prevent the multiplayer crowd from getting brainwashed into joining the army by their skill with an tiny analog stick, lest they imagine it carry over to an actual firearm.
So, yeah. I think the writers of Halo are a cut above most of their readers, so to speak.
