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 Administration’s 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 weren’t really ‘bad’—they 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 "I’m going to play it because it’ll be fun and I can see past the politics to enjoy myself"—fine, that’s 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.
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.
So should we surrender immediately when the aliens land, and smoke the peace pipe or are we allowed to shoot back?
Those who play this game and are young enough to be influenced don't vote.
The rest are smart enough to know what's what.
Or I could look at it as a video game ("or a hat, or a brooch, a pterodactyl..." - Johnny in Airplane) and leave it at that. Given what's happened over the past few weeks and what's going down even as we discuss this, real events on the ground carry far more weight and meaning than the storyline in some FPS from Mr. Softee.
Gamer PING
And I thought it meant high altitude low opening...boy am I lost.
"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."
Isn't that sort of the point...? :)
Good point..I just think its a poor biz decision
As a Halo player looking forward to Halo 2 I think this guy is nuts.
Not sure how they are going to change the story around so as the Halo is good (maybe we should try to understand the Flood, they are just not understood).
But whatever the story.... it is the game play any of us care about.
Give it up and play the freakin' game.
Halo sucks. I get my CTF on in Tribes 2, a real mans game where shooting punks moving at 300kph is the leetness.
If you listen carefully to Guilty Spark's dialogue, you'll find there are some interesting mysteries under the surface.
"But the covenant were already seeking to destroy human existance long before Halo the ring planet was destroyed."
Exactly! And the threat presented by The Flood in Halo 1 was clear, imminent, and direct.
Perhaps it IS allegorical to Islam. After all, Bin Laden was screaming about our humiliation of Hussein as one justification for the attack on the WTC. It was only AFTER that attack that we REALLY humiliated him. :)
I tend to be one of the ones here that is pretty outspoken. That, and my "Get Out The Gloat" campaign of the last week has been fun ;0)
As a side note, have any of you guys watched the Halo: Red vs. Blue series???
If you spent any time playing in Halo's Blood Gulch you will think this is damn funny stuff.
I always thought it was ironic considering the red versus blue states election rhetoric we just went through
www.redvsblue.com
No kidding. Beside, Joe Staten is just a "Cinematics Director" anyways. Who cares what he has to say?
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