Posted on 11/08/2004 2:01:36 PM PST by Republican Radio™
Halo 2, the sequel to the top selling game for Microsoft's Xbox, will be released on November 9th.
Joe Staten, the Microsoft employee and writer responsible for the storyline of both games, will use the new game (targeted at teens) as a political protest against the Bush Administration.
For those who don't know story of the Halo games, it takes place in the future when vicious and radically religious alien forces called "The Covenant" are in a war with the human race and have trapped a lone human warship light years from Earth near the heretofore unknown Halo, a huge ring-like world manufactured and abandoned millennia ago by a powerful race. Unfortunately, Halo is still inhabited and activating its immense power will bring forth "The Flood," a bio-mechanical army that will wipe out all human and Covenant life in the universe. Your mission a genetically-modified human soldier in the game of Halowas to fight the Covenant, the Flood, and destroy Halo before it is activated and all life as we know it ceases to exist.
Halo scribe and Microsoft employee Joe Staten was interviewed in the November 5, 2004 issue of Entertainment Weekly (subscription required) about the new game. In the interview Staten says the Halo 2 story follows the Covenant "holy war" invasion of Earth brought on by the fact that Earth military forces destroyed Halo at the end of the first game. Unlike in the first game where Halo was a life-destroying superweapon, in Halo 2 we are now told that Halo was one of many and are "utopias, safe havens in a universe filled with terror." Halo 2, according to Staten, will show the story from "both the humans and aliens" and makes militant Earthlings into the imperialist bad guys against the religious Covenant aliens who consider Halo as a religous relic. "You could look at it," Staten says of his Halo 2 storyline "as a damning condemnation of the Bush Administrations adventure in the Middle East." Microsoft has taken a straightforward action game classic in the original Halo and decided to make a political statement with Halo 2.
It begs the question: Why would a gamer or the parent of a gamer pay $50 to play a game that will force the player to shoot hundreds of "bad aliens" for hours to advance in the game and then at the end of it admonish the player for shooting the bad aliens? "These aliens werent really badthey were just misunderstood and we awful human beings had no business ever leaving our little corner of the universe. You, and all humans like you, are violent and bad but the aliens are more highly-evolved, peaceful, caring beings that we should have respected and loved rather than murdered."
If Joe Staten and Microsoft want to make a political statement (and as anyone living near Microsoft HQ in Redmond, WA will tell you, the overwhelming majority of their employees in Redmond, WA are violently anti-Republican), they can do it without my money funding their next political statement. It will be a drop in the bucket, of course: Halo 2 has a rabid fanbase clamoring for the product and over $50 million is pre-order sales means the game is already massively profitable prior to its retail release.
To the gamers that will say "Im going to play it because itll be fun and I can see past the politics to enjoy myself"fine, thats their right. However, I urge those concerned about the rot in American pop culture to spread the word about Halo 2 and Microsoft's hateful view of the Bush Administration.
What say ye?
Why is anyone even suprised.
I VOW to the 58,000 + names on
The Viet Nam Wall who never came home
"I will do everything I LEGALLY can
to expose Hanoi Kerry once and for all."
MSM still refuses to tell the real story about Hanoi Kerry!
ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, NBC, NY Times
is part of THE cover up of the election.
Do you wonder why the Left whines about the election results?
They still think Hanoi Kerry is a "war hero"
They don't know what a traitor he is!
And I don't know about you but
I'm sick and tired of the Right media saying
"what an honorable man Senator Kerry is"
Why isn't the Right all over Hanoi Kerry
to be impeached from the US Senate?
"In a bombshell development that could have turned President Bush's victory into a landslide
had it come out before the election, John Kerry wrote in his Vietnam war diary that
he met with "terrorists" in Paris - a revelation that "flabbergasted" his running mate John Edwards."
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/11/7/101350.shtml
And still the MSM,
ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, NBC, NY Times
hide the truth from America.
And still 99 US Senators refuse to impeach this traitor.
Timeline of John Kerry
http://www.archive-news.net/Kerry/JK_timeline.html
Hanoi Approved of Role Played By Kerry and VVAW
http://www.nysun.com/article/3756
The whole 42:09 Stolen Honor online FREE right now! E-mail it NOW!
Stolen Honor nails Kerry and the VVAW
and how they lied at Winter Soldier.
And how Kerry lied to the US Senate in 1971
And how Kerry and his pack of liars caused our POW's to suffer!
Kerry and the DNC cannot stop
EVERYONE on the internet from seeing this!
http://stolenhonor.com/documentary/watch-video.asp
EXPOSE HANOI KERRY!
Distribute these url's!
http://tonkin.spymac.net/hanoikerry1.html
There is a backup site
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Who cares, halo is a fun game, I will buy 2 when it comes out. And no, halo tournaments will not be left wing cocktail parties. It will be a bunch of video game fans playing capture the flag against each other.
I've been Beta Testing this here at MS, during lunch etc... for months, and I've not seen anything that is anti-Bush etc...
Me thinks this is just the one guy giving his idiotic opinion, and nothing more, but I could be wrong I just havn't seen it, though.
I try not to read into video games. Or movies. Or song lyrics. Or TV. It's called entertainment.
Maybe Statin should have released it on schedule to have had any impact on the election... It would have made me happy, but may have kept some NRA guys home home from the voting booths.
Oh well, Statin was lazy and his plans were foiled.
Like my 16 year old will really care, LOL.
He plays Halo with his friends and it's all about kills and scores. If this guy thinks that a teenager is going to tune into his "political" message, I think he's sadly mistaken.
So you're blaming Gates for the political views of his staff? Get real.
MS doesn't hire people based on their political views. They hire based on technical expertise. It happens that they recruit a lot of their staff from the West Coast, and they also have a strong college recruitment program. It should be no surprise that they get a lot of Lefties this way.
Would you suggest that Gates screen his employees for their political affiliations? That's exactly the kind of behavior that makes people like John Edwards salivate.
His message seems far too vague to affect any young mind fush of mush.
Roger, that--Far Cry stomps Halo into the ground (that includes 2).
There are a lot more Conservatives here at MS than you would imagine. Most just keep a low profile...
I don't know about this. Sounds a little bit too conspiritorial to me. I doubt MS would risk anything like this to make some kind of vague political statement.
I worked for a HUGE Fortune 500 company and we would have never done anything so controversial as to alienate 51% of the American Public...Just plain business sense to stay away from subjects which can cause trouble.
Well, this is one game my kid ain't gettin'.
Judging by some of the responses here, I doubt that 51% are going to pay much attention. If we boycotterd every last little thing that was anti-Bush or anti-GOP, we'd have virtually nothing to do but spend all day on FR.
I served for two years in the Microsoft trenches. I know there are Conservatives there, but, as is always the case, you never hear a peep out of them - which, I guess, is sort of the point. It's the Lefties that make the most noise.
Amusingly enough, it's also the Leftie engineers that have the greater propensity for designing enormous, needlessly complex data structures and inheritance hierarchies, and then debating them in design review meetings for as long as possible before having to actually sit down and build them. :)
(I still live in Redmond, btw, in case you wanna hang sometime.)
There's something very off or misconstrued about either this report or Entertainment Weekly's report. But the covenant were already seeking to destroy human existance long before Halo the ring planet was destroyed.
LOL. How violent and un-PC are we talking here?
Bootlegging it is for low-lives pay for the game it's good so is the story line. This whole posturing on some terrestrial political definition of Halo2 sounds like pure BS.
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