The Big Picture: Combat Evolved?

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tlozoot

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Feb 8, 2010
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This reads like something I'd make up when I'm desperately trying to finish an English paper hours before it's due in.

If there's a subtext of fear of unified races in the game, it's only because you've cherry-picked it out.

I'll be the first to admit that Halo doesn't have a good story. That said, I disagree with your conclusion that the game is, even unconciously, promoting the fear of unified races. Look at this from a gameplay standpoint and you'll see it's simply for a variety of things to shoot at, and to have to face enemies with different strengths and weaknesses.

What about in 2 and 3 where you end up allied with the Elites?
What about considering that they're only unified under a fundamentalist religion that started the thing in the first place?

Why don't we notice these subtexts? Because they're not really there. Throw me a Dicken's novel or a Shakespeare play and I'll have it including any subtext you want, as well as predicting the moon landing.

"If you look long enough into the void the void begins to look back through you."
 

alphaxion

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Oct 26, 2010
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I had a play with the Kinect Dance game... the menu system requires you to lift your hand up in front of you to select something in a strangely familiar form if you kept your hand open, talk about "unintended" symbolism ;)
 

Zakarath

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Mar 23, 2009
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sagacious said:
I always saw halo not as mono-culture vs multi-culture, but more as the enlightened Atheistic minority triumphing over the crusading majority.
I'm a christian mind, but that seems to be the attitude/message the halo games convey. After all, The Humans (read: atheists) only start to triumph after they win over the elites to their cause. (The elites find out that their religion is bullshit meant to control them)

So no, I don't think halo is racist or subtly master-race supporting. I think is very unsubtly the story of atheistic reason winning versus unenlightened religious zeal. (hell, the lower ranking elites are called ZEALOTS, the leaders are called PROPHETS, and they are going up against the Spartans who are SCIENTIFICALLY engineered to kick ass)

not too hard to figure out.
I never really picked up on the Humans being atheist, and I saw the error of the Covenant as not being religion itself but rather misguided religion. But one thing I kept noticing was all the biblically named stuff... The Ark, The Covenant, The Flood, Eden gets a mention, Halo itself, etc. Not entirely sure what (if anything) they were trying to do with it, though.
 

Sylocat

Sci-Fi & Shakespeare
Nov 13, 2007
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Bobic said:
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" (characters) you shoot WITH?
 

ThatsBitch3n

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Mar 25, 2009
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Wow, I love Escape to the Movies, and reading Intermission! Big Picture was very, very good and I can't wait to see more of it!!
 

Sakurazaki1023

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Feb 15, 2010
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Delusibeta said:
So, this is The General Overthinker in disguise. Certainly, much overthinking was included in this.
From what I saw in this episode, this series is "The Game Overthinker" dressed up so Screw Attack doesn't sue.

As many of the people in this thread have pointed out, Bob may have been putting way too much thought into the game and noticed subtext that wasn't intentional. That's pretty much the whole point of "The Game Overthinker" and, by extension, this new show. No, it's not likely that this was intentional and no, Bungie aren't fascists. The point is that you can learn a lot about a culture by closely examining subtext present in society. I wouldn't call this show funny, but it's definitely enlightening and entertaining.
 

Grigori361

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Apr 6, 2009
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So what they've done is give Mr "bob" a free ride, and a show about absolutely nothing?

I like it.
 

TheEnglishman

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Jun 13, 2009
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Interesting, got potential, but todays big picture was "Racism is bad, and Halo sucks."

It could get better.
 

Drops a Sweet Katana

Folded 1000x for her pleasure
May 27, 2009
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I loved the video! I'm a huge Halo fan and, to be perfectly honest, it's refreshing to see someone with an actually well-constructed opinion on it beyond 'OMG MY HALOZ BE OWNING YOUR CODZ COZ COD SUX!'
However, I think his point about the Fascist undertones, i.e. the uniform human military forces against the diverse and racial diverse Covenant, was a little bit, for lack of a better term, weak. The Covenant, however diverse in terms of SPECIES, are fighting against the UNSC, the United Nations Space Command, which represents the entirety of the HUMAN race. European people, African people, Asian people, Arabic people, Latin people, Americans, Russians; everyone, of every descent is fighting against the Covenant for survival of the HUMAN race.
Other than that, every point he made was valid, certainly more so than others I've heard. Great work Bob, I love it!
 

Ampersand

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May 1, 2010
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Zakarath said:
Ampersand said:
I know it's kind of your job to over think things but would you not think that maybe the reason that the enemies in halo are alot more diverse then the player characters is because......they're the ones we're looking at all the time. It's a first person game remeber?

Also there are no good guys in halo. The spartans kill just as many humans as they do covenant, and in all of the stories surrounding the series, just as much sympathy is conveyed for the races of the covenant as for the humans, including halo 2 where you actually play as an elite.
In fact the only thing that comes close to a villain in the entire series is the flood......you know the homogenous consumption driven mass, the only aim of which is to propagate itself by means of wiping all individualism from the face the universe.
Exactly. He is reading waaay to much into this, and he's coming at it from the wrong angle. By the end of Halo 3 you're practically working with the Covenant against the Flood, whose STATED GOAL in the ark terminals is the utter homogenizing of the entire galaxy/universe.
Oh, and also: We were fighting the Covenant because their "arcane belief system" led them to try and wipe us out. I guess because they looked more diverse we should have just let them kill all the humans, right? Oh, and they were going to extinguish all life from the galaxy because their crazy prophets wanted to become gods. THAT is why we were fighting them, not because they were "the other". And honestly, DIVERSITY IN YOUR ENEMIES IS NECESSARY FOR INTERESTING GAMEPLAY. Oh, and one last point: you might want to note that for Halo 3, your team is comprised primarily of an alien, a black guy, a robot, and the love interest is an AI. If that isn't a diverse cast, I don't know what is.
Ha, That's a good point. ^_^
 

Twilight_guy

Sight, Sound, and Mind
Nov 24, 2008
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I'm not a big face of the emotional face stills. Still, I think the show has promise and could be quiet interesting. Being blind to sub-text, its always interesting to see what other people gleamed.
 

Orthon

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Mar 28, 2009
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Sweet, something to watch on tuesdays.

By the way, I like the fact that you choose Halo for the first ep. Considering that this show will piss people off, talking about Halo, a subject that WILL piss some people off is a good way of alerting people of what they're getting themselves into by watching it.

EDIT:Oh, and yeah, I forgot. Somebody might've mentioned this, but I think I can hear a fan of some description going on in the background. Or something, it's kind of annoying.
 
Aug 25, 2009
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Yeah I have issues with this because I am one of the people who played Halo for the story. And read the books etc, which I actually found quite fun.

So here's my issue, I literally just came from an hour where I was arguing that a roomful of people were reading far too much into Shakespeare, and in reality he was just pleasing the masses, and the real intellectual writing of the day was done by others like Marlowe, and how it was probably this over-analysis of Shakespeare which led to him now being idolised like some sort of God of literature.

I think you see where I'm going with this but I'll spell it out for those who can't recognise patterns.

Halo is being built up by all these people as a treatise on things, or a reflection of current society, or used to make whatever point you want but the problem is that you're using it to make the point. I couldn't be happier because I like Halo, but to all these people who don't and are trying to put it down consistently? Yeah, you are the reason it's going to be remembered as a seminal turning point in human culture four hundred years from now, not me.

This is also the reason I don't comment on Twilight anymore, every time someone stirs the flames, it's going to get more popular.

You want Halo to go away? Shut the fuck up about it.

Nice to see Bob getting a little more recognition though.
 

WaderiAAA

Derp Master
Aug 11, 2009
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CosmicCommander said:
Bobic said:
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?
Yeah... I was thinking that.

All of the 'racism' you saw in the Halo franchise was you being slightly paranoid.

Sorry Bob, I love you, but I gotta say no to this one.
I think you're both missing the point. He isn't saying that Bungie is in racist, but that they have without even thinking about it made something that has many aspects that can be seen as racist and that they really ought to think it through before they make it. I mean, take the eye-changing thing, isn't there any other way they could show that the tranformation was complete rather than give the soldiers the eye-colour of the aric race? Even in context, I don't see any scientific reason why the eyes would change to blue.
 

Bobic

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Nov 10, 2009
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Sylocat said:
Bobic said:
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?
There are a similar amount of guns to enemies, maybe.