The Big Picture: Combat Evolved?

[maninahat]

Has it crossed bobs mind that maybe their isn't some big ugly subtext and maybe the reason for all the different creeds and colours of the enemies is to give you more variation in the things you shoot at?

Then how hard would it have been to give more variation in the things you shoot WITH?

What?
Aside from the main human weapons like the Rocket Launcher, Assault Rifle, and Shot Gun, you also got to use alien weapons like the Needler, Plasma Rifle, Fuel Rod Cannon, Plasma Grenades, and Covenant Combine.
Even though some of the Alien weapons are the Equivalent of a Human weapon, it just fires energy, id say that was a good variety.

I meant characters, not weapons.

Then im not sure what you mean.
John was the main character, so you played as him.
Is that somehow bad?

Well, what's-his-name said that the different alien races were all there to just give you more variety in the stuff you shoot at. I wondered why we couldn't get more variety in the playable characters, in that case. Just a thought...

well i always thought that from a First Person perspective it wouldn't matter who you played as.
You would still be running around and killing lots of Aliens with whatever weapon you were given or found on the ground.
So having a larger variety of Targets makes more sense to me than having more characters.

Possibly, but then games like Mass Effect show how you can have a highly diverse team of goodies versus a diverse (but less so) team of baddies. It probably would have been more interesting if the Halo "Noble" gang are made up of various aliens with interesting cultures, even if they only have a small role to play in FPS genre.

 

[Hexley]

I would agree with his point except for the fact that it never even seems like Halo makes a point of the fact that the covenant is composed of different races outside of the primary gameplay sense. Grunts = standard foot soldiers, Jackals = quick and nasty snipers/skirmishers, Elites/Brutes = Leaders/match for the Spartans in combat ( most human-like ). While if the covenant were humans, all of these different positions could be portrayed by different varieties of humans, the same is usually not true of aliens in sci-fi. The different races seem less about showing the covenant as diverse, but rather because of the simple fact that in most sci-fi, alien races are portrayed as being largely the same within each species in comparison to humans ( such as how almost every grunt and elite are exactly the same as each other ).

And, as Bob partially pointed out, the creation and use of Spartans in Halo lore is mainly portrayed as a necessary evil of the human race rather than something that every human should strive for ( as far as how it's portrayed to us, not how the government in the story makes them out to be grand heroes in order to boost the morale of the troops ).

 

[The Big Eye]

I think dishing on entertainment because it appears to conform to some unrelated subtext is self-defeating. Assuming for a moment that we are giving the Halo storyline literary cred, why should this accidental bullsh!t subtext have any relevance to a game that is essentially about (inasmuch as it as "about" anything apart from killing stuff for fun) heroism, religious dogmatism and self-sacrifice? You're simultaneously giving Bungie too much credit as storytellers and too little credit as game designers (when it should probably be the other way around).

Your argument is wrong for two main reasons:
-Don't dish on narrative elements that are the result of gameplay decisions. There are lots of kinds of Covenant because this makes them more interesting to fight. They expanded this idea into the main storyline because it made things more interesting, then took the implications of this and ran with it. Plot-wise, it was one of the better decisions they made.
-Don't accuse Bungie's story of having fascist racist subtext by drawing on social standards that do not exist. Almost any game you can name on the market today has unfortunate implications of one kind or another, and most of these stem from having enemies (or allies) who are homogenized and racially stereotyped, both of which being things that Bungie managed to avoid. "Homogenized good guys versus evil, diverse enemy" is just not a thing. In this case, the good guys were "homogenized" because they were all human; the enemies were alien and so it only made sense to have a lot of different kinds. Simple.

Lastly, you don't like Halo, and that's okay. But please shut up about it now. Your critiques don't bring anything to new to the discussion and I think we'd all greatly prefer it if you moved your ass along.

 

[HotKakes]

Nice first show Bob and I hope to see more. This was a very interesting point of view to the popular series and it does bring up some interesting questions. Still, judging from the number of replies being 400 and just being released, I doubt that many of the replies are going to be well meaning or constructive. My only opinion about this new show is that the face cut outs are a bit odd to me considering that all of them are unfamiliar to me. I guess if I knew who the faces were, I could have a stronger grasp on their use. Oh well, keep up the good work Bob.

 

[AKmontalvo]

Seems like this is gonna be his nerd rage show, dont think for a second thats a critisism, just an observation, i prefer Scape to the movies thus far, but it seems harsh to make perminent judgements on the first episode, just seems to me EttM is more smartly written (which i prefer) but that doesnt really make this one 'bad'

 

[roostuf]

Huh i never seen that way before, thank movieBob.

OT: Please god do a warhammer.

 

[TheTurtleMan]

I'm sorry but I think Movie Bob needs to do a little more research for future videos because he openly admitted he hadn't played Halo 2 or 3. The games in which the humans team up with the elites for the sake of a common goal.

Now im all for saying movie bob is reading into this WAAYYY to much, but in both Halo 2 and Halo 3 the Arbiter is basically a stand-in for "The token black guy" older movies would have. He's "The token good alien". BUT as i have said earlier, i think the variation in the covenant comes more from wanted varied dudes to shoot at more than anything. It's a game design choice.

I wouldn't actually say that the Arbiter was the one good alien though, he was just amoung the first of the elites to realize the prophets were starting a war against the elites. This meant he was also one of the first to join the humans because after all, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. After the rest of the elites learned about the covenants plans to kill them off, they were happy to jump on the humans side.

Although I wholeheartedly agree with different targets in the shooting range point. One massive army of grunts or fighting the brutes on planet of the apes wouldn't be as fun as a wide array of species of covenant to kill.

 

[Gigaguy64]

Has it crossed bobs mind that maybe their isn't some big ugly subtext and maybe the reason for all the different creeds and colours of the enemies is to give you more variation in the things you shoot at?

Then how hard would it have been to give more variation in the things you shoot WITH?

What?
Aside from the main human weapons like the Rocket Launcher, Assault Rifle, and Shot Gun, you also got to use alien weapons like the Needler, Plasma Rifle, Fuel Rod Cannon, Plasma Grenades, and Covenant Combine.
Even though some of the Alien weapons are the Equivalent of a Human weapon, it just fires energy, id say that was a good variety.

I meant characters, not weapons.

Then im not sure what you mean.
John was the main character, so you played as him.
Is that somehow bad?

Well, what's-his-name said that the different alien races were all there to just give you more variety in the stuff you shoot at. I wondered why we couldn't get more variety in the playable characters, in that case. Just a thought...

well i always thought that from a First Person perspective it wouldn't matter who you played as.
You would still be running around and killing lots of Aliens with whatever weapon you were given or found on the ground.
So having a larger variety of Targets makes more sense to me than having more characters.

Possibly, but then games like Mass Effect show how you can have a highly diverse team of goodies versus a diverse (but less so) team of baddies. It probably would have been more interesting if the Halo "Noble" gang are made up of various aliens with interesting cultures, even if they only have a small role to play in FPS genre.

But that wouldn't make any sense.
Comparing Halo to Mass Effect is useless anyway because of how different they are.

 

[Jumplion]

oooo, new show, I'm liking it.

It's great that you gave Halo a shot for once and gave your position on it.

I think that right now, story telling in games are still too juvenile and basic compared to other works. This isn't to say that every game (or every medium out there) should have a grade-A, Oscar-nominating, story to tell, but so far video games are lagging behind other mediums in terms of storytelling and themes and whatnot.

Obviously, as you've said, Halo isn't really the prime example to cite with storytelling in games, with it being mainly a multiplayer game n' all, but video games in general still have a long way to go with telling stories with themes, morals, symbolism, etc.... kind of like how an author pays attention to every little element to form the story he/she wants out of it.

 

[Yokai]

This series has the potential to be good--I enjoy Escape to the Movies and consider Bob's opinions usually pretty valid--but Godwin's Law applied to Halo might not have been the best idea for a first episode. He's sounding an awful lot like the nitpickers who come up with ridiculous theories to bash video games, regardless of how truthful they are or how much they're reading into it. I'm no great Halo fan myself, but I hardly think Bungie intended to inset a subliminal master race message into their games. And also, "I'm just sayin'" never works to lessen the reaction to an opinion. Slow down, Bob. Try and make a better first impression.

 

[internetzealot1]

Yes, Bob, you are taking this too far. Bungie just wants to give players alot of variety in the enemies they fight.

But the blue-eye thing was pretty funny.

Seriously though. This is the first episode of your new series. Why does it have to be a halosux rant? Why can't it be something more constructive and positive? You could've analyzed the Super Mario Galaxy games and tried to predict where the series will go next. You could've discussed the merits of the art stlye for the next Zelda game. But instead...you just call Halo shit...again...

Really, isn't it time to move onto something else now? Something much more bland, much more overrated? Like, I don't know, Call of Duty!

 

[ZeroMachine]

And once again, you ignore facts in order to make Halo work worse, simply because of your hatred for it.

But I guess I shouldn't be too harsh. You're doing something knew here. Taking things way to out of context to make Halo look worse.

... Oh, wait a minute... I guess you're the same narrowminded asshat as you've always been with this series.

The one, ONE thing I will agree with you on, is that the characterization in Reach was atrocious. Halsey is the only interesting character, Jorge taking a far-gone second place, and the thing is her character is only interesting to me because I know her back story from the novels and her journal.

So, let me just make this clear. You wrote this: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/moviebob/7190-Trope-a-Dope
a beautiful article which encourages looking at intimate details before passing judgement on a story.

Yet you never, ever take a look at the intimate details of the Halo story, and instead, call it "been there, done that, boring."

This'd be forgiveable if you were talking about the gameplay. But you're talking about the entire Halo story.

You're a fucking hypocrite.

 

[liamwazhere]

That was awesome! Great show!

 

[maddawg IAJI]

The Spartans are, in my opinion, more diverse and interesting then the covenant, especially the Spartan IIs. You take a very dirty military trick to perfect human soliders by experimenting on children who have shown to stand out above the normal population and you train them to kill. Spartans range from a variety of different races as well, from the African Americans like Master Chief to Hungarians like Jorge. The whole process was painted as grim and how they took the youth from these children and turned them into weapons. Weapons that would become legends in the UNSC. These men and woman easily stand out with their much larger stature, their enhanced strength, intellect and armor and their complete ability to change and fight much more effectively. They weren't even allowed to die for fear that they would drop morale, hence the phrase "Spartan's never die."

The only comment I can share about the Halo Reach ad, is that it was a commercial, they work on a two-four minute time frame here and they're not exactly given a lot of time to flesh it out. They needed to paint the subject to be a soldier and to be part of some very strange experiment. You can't really find many ways of showing it worked in such a short time that changing a genetic trait may be one if not the only option available.

 

[Dansrage]

Loving this new thing, i always trust Bob to recommend good movies, he never lets me down, this new show looks interesting.

Now, i know Bob has never liked Halo, and even as a Halo fan i can look past that, but i can't help feeling that he doesn't really know what he's talking about where Halo is concerned, if he had read the lore and species history (which of course he won't have done, if he doesn't like halo) i think he would change his perspective.

Halo is pretty shallow when it comes to messages and hidden meanings, and purital fascism isn't one of them.
The idea of the SPARTANs giving up their identity to protect the human race is supposed to inspire feelings of sacrifice and selflessness, and even then many characters such as Forge or Buck are not spartans. The whole "US vs THEM" theme is supposed to show how desperate the situation is, Humanity is being assaulted from all sides by a force both numerically and technologically superior, and they're losing the fight. Only through self-sacrifice do the main characters save the human race, Master Cheif dying at the end of Halo 3, Noble 6 staying behind on Reach to protect the Pillar of Autumn, Forge activating the engine etc.

The Covenant are a pretty odvious take on religion and blindly following orders, but as they progress they (notably the sangheili) learn that their leaders don't have their best interests at heart and rebell, joining the humans and turning the tide of the war.
It is true that the races are very diverse, and it's one of the most attractive aspects of Halo to me, but Bob is forgetting that this is a video game, there would be no point making the SPARTANs diverse because you play as them, the Covenant are so diverse because they are enemies, you dont want to fight the same enemies all the time.