The Big Picture: Combat Evolved?

[Wolfenbarg]

Interesting, but I think you dove way too deep into the subtext there. In my opinion, the whole point of the covenant is to express that unity behind the wrong cause is just as bad and dangerous as the 'traditional' badguy portrait of having faceless and emotionless enemies. I also do wonder why you called it "Combat Evolved?" if you were going to rant on the undertones of the game. Odd.

Good piece though. This kind of series will really get people talking on the forums, so I applaud you for bringing it to the site.

 

[Kpt._Rob]

While I'm glad to see another Moviebob show, since I love the other show as well, I can't say I felt this was a great start.

Now, don't get me wrong here, I certainly see how things could be read that way. I even see how you could go so far as to point this out as a collective sociological issue that we don't even notice, and that really needs to be addressed. But I think that in this one case there's one big thing to take note of here, which is that he's only analyzed this in the context of a story. That's fine and all, but a videogame is interactive story telling, and when you've got a game like Halo there's a purely mechanical issue to be addressed, specifically that you want variety in your enemies.

I can't know this for certain, but I would bet all the money in my wallet that in the case of Halo the people at Bungie were concerned primarily with the issue of having a variety of enemies for the player to fight so that it would be more interesting. They gave these different enemies different shapes and said "what story can we make up that will explain why all of these different aliens are working together?" The fallacy in analyzing Halo games like this is in the assumption that the story came first, when it's also possible that the different enemies (the game part of the game) came first and were then placed into the mold of a story that came second.

 

[jabrwock]

I like the new show, but I have to disagree on Bob's characterization.

The diversity of the "aliens" has been present throughout Bungie's games. In Marathon, the Pfhor were the "master race" alien, enslaving others and sending them into battle. They even had "enforcers" who would ignore humans, only firing on their own troops when they fled battle (they shot at the player too, but that was a plot point).

In Marathon, you even assist one of the slave races to rebel.

In Halo, the same ideas are there. Yeah, they're diverse, but only because of slavery, and (for those who joined the Covenant willingly) a common belief that humanity is the equivalent of devilspawn.

If we're going to go down the path of competing ideals, think of it less as "purity vs. diversity", but instead as "facism vs. theocracy".

 

[Warachia]

Normally I would criticize Bob for not reading into the Halo lore more, but the sad fact is he hit the nail on the head when he said that MOST halo players seem not to give to shits and a fuck about the campaign, and expanded universe.

The funniest thing is that the Covenants campaign of genocide against humanity is centered around the fact that a bunch of middle managers on a archeological dig found that it was the human race, a group largely ignored and avoided by the covenant, that was designated as the chosen heirs to a "Gods" legacy and not the crazy Camel people or the Pseudo-Predators. Read the book Contact Harvest for more.

I do appreciate the point being made however. Slave army or no the covenant do fascinate me more then humanities role in the Halo Universe, though that may be based on the unfamiliar vs familiar. Hell I want there to be an entire game centered around the Arbiter, preferably from well before or well after the current Halo Timeline.

there WAS a game centered around the arbiter, play halo 2.

 

[Catalyst6]

I think that I've been on these forums for all too long. I heard him say "Does anybody else notice this?" at 1:48 and automatically thought "You're never the only one".

 

[Bobic]

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?

Thank you, you just have solved every controversy ever.

Because, you see, Hitler didn't hate Jews, "Jud Süß" just depicted them like blood-sucking parasites to provide people with entertainment.

*facepalm*

The whole point of looking at "big pictures" isn't to analyse what's visible on the surface, but to ask why the surface appears as it does. And the idea that there is a subliminal factor which would make people create a universe in which the white supremacists are good and the diverse multicultural group is bad, WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT IT, well, it's quite troubling indeed. Not the subtext of a particular medium is the problem here, but the cultural subtext behind it, the cultural subconscious, as it were. Nobody is saying that what you say isn't true - the diverse nature of the Covenant makes for a better game mechanic than, say, the Helghast - but then, nobody is accusing Bungie of being consciously racist, just like I don't think that the people behind Resident Evil 5 hate black people (they do hate the laws of good story-telling, however). The problem goes deeper than that, that the audience would readily and uncritically accept such premises.

Good start to the new show. While I don't always agree with Bob, I usually find his thought processes very entertaining. Keep it up, big guy.

But you could read something negative like that into any form of media, it doesn't mean that anything of the sort actually exists on any level, including a subliminal one.

 

[Zakarath]

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.

but does that mean your ALLIES have to look the same? hell no.

I remember in Halo 2 i had a Hispanic man, a Woman, and SGT.Johnson on my team during several missions.
And hell you got to work with Elites in H3.

You played as a Human, generally Humans look the same in certain ways.
And they were apart of the military.
The Military uses uniforms.

oh great, token minorities to make a game not racist? wonderful. Not all military units mean everyone looks the same. They have different uniforms and issued weapons. In halo its the same damn spartan and the same damn star ship trooper look-a-like. Same weapons, same uniforms, and no resemblance to a working unit.

shotgun guy.
rifle guy.
green armor guy.

that's it. that is the scope of the human military? No battle medics, mechanics, tech specialist etc? A military means MORE than just a guy with a gun. They need soldiers to do a diverse range of functions. Halo soldiers just run about like jackasses shooting things and dying if anyone so much as farts in their direction.

ODST has a lot more of the diverse military unit thing going. You have Squad Commander Guy, Heavy weapons guy, explosives guy, pilot/tech guy, sniper guy, Navy Intelligence girl, etc.

 

[Drops a Sweet Katana]

Interesting stuff. I don't think any of that was intentional but I can see the correlation. For me the difference comes with choice. The Covenant races didn't have any, they were converted. For the Spartan's they chose to become part of the ultimate in protection. Choice is everything. That is what makes the Covenant a threat. If they had showed up at Reach and said "hey you guys wanna play intergalactic UN with us?" and accepted whatever answer we gave, that would be ok. The fact that they came to conquer and enslave us, well that pretty much makes them an enemy. Regardless of their multiracial ranks.

Not be an absolute fan-boy (although I am, sorry), but the Spartans were kidnapped at the age of about five or six and replaced with a clone so no-one would notice.
And also the Covenant just want us dead, not to make us their slaves. We were scapegoated by the Prophet of Truth who wanted to cover-up the fact that we were the descendants of the Forerunners, an ancient, technologically-advanced race that the Covenant worship as 'gods', to fulfill his own power-hungry agenda. The discovery of this information would have caused the collapse and dissolution of the Covenant.

 

[Warachia]

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.

but does that mean your ALLIES have to look the same? hell no.

I remember in Halo 2 i had a Hispanic man, a Woman, and SGT.Johnson on my team during several missions.
And hell you got to work with Elites in H3.

You played as a Human, generally Humans look the same in certain ways.
And they were apart of the military.
The Military uses uniforms.

oh great, token minorities to make a game not racist? wonderful. Not all military units mean everyone looks the same. They have different uniforms and issued weapons. In halo its the same damn spartan and the same damn star ship trooper look-a-like. Same weapons, same uniforms, and no resemblance to a working unit.

shotgun guy.
rifle guy.
green armor guy.

that's it. that is the scope of the human military? No battle medics, mechanics, tech specialist etc? A military means MORE than just a guy with a gun. They need soldiers to do a diverse range of functions. Halo soldiers just run about like jackasses shooting things and dying if anyone so much as farts in their direction.

I love it when someone doesn't even bother playing the previous games, there were seperate units in the first and second games, tech specialists, medics and engineers, the third was mainly wrapping things up, and how is ODST not a seperate unit? No, lets make them look different, give them armor that doesn't blend in and weapons that are ineffective for combat. In the first two games marines pick up whatever armor they can find, and even use covenant weapons.

 

[Sylocat]

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 humean wepons like the Rocket Launcher, Assult Rifel, and Shot Gun, you also got to use alien weapons like the Needler, Plasma Rifel, Fuel Rod Cannon, Plasma Gernades, and Covant 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.

 

[Dana22]

I like it, looking forward to next episodes.

Also, Godwins Law ftw !

 

[Gigaguy64]

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.

but does that mean your ALLIES have to look the same? hell no.

I remember in Halo 2 i had a Hispanic man, a Woman, and SGT.Johnson on my team during several missions.
And hell you got to work with Elites in H3.

You played as a Human, generally Humans look the same in certain ways.
And they were apart of the military.
The Military uses uniforms.

oh great, token minorities to make a game not racist? wonderful. Not all military units mean everyone looks the same. They have different uniforms and issued weapons. In halo its the same damn spartan and the same damn star ship trooper look-a-like. Same weapons, same uniforms, and no resemblance to a working unit.

shotgun guy.
rifle guy.
green armor guy.

that's it. that is the scope of the human military? No battle medics, mechanics, tech specialist etc? A military means MORE than just a guy with a gun. They need soldiers to do a diverse range of functions. Halo soldiers just run about like jackasses shooting things and dying if anyone so much as farts in their direction.

the unit you were a part of in Reach had that Diversity.
Kat was a Tech expert.
Jorge was the Heavy Weapons expert.
And then we even had a Sniper Spartan and Assault Spartan.

And in the early games it talked about the different units in the military, but YOU weren't apart of them.
You were sent in to clear a path for the rest of the army.
The soldiers you were with had the same objective.

 

[SFR]

Uh... Almost everyone in Noble Team has a different accent. You also gotta take into consideration that's what the military does. Strip individualism to create a single unit.

As far as I know, different species don't normally hang around because... you know, planet distance and all that. The different alien races in Halo are simply to create gameplay variation and show how large the ideals of the covenant have spread. They aren't exactly slaves... Uh, maybe slaves to religion? FOR THE GREAT JOURNEY!

 

[jabrwock]

that's it. that is the scope of the human military? No battle medics, mechanics, tech specialist etc? A military means MORE than just a guy with a gun. They need soldiers to do a diverse range of functions. Halo soldiers just run about like jackasses shooting things and dying if anyone so much as farts in their direction.

Mechanics and tech specialists are all over the ships when you're on them.

As for medics, you're going to single out Halo for that? Many FPS don't have medics, or if they do, they perform magic juju to fully restore players/npcs (SW: Republic Commando comes to mind).

 

[Seneschal]

Wheee, new Bob show!

OT: The Covenant is more interesting? DUUUUHHHhhh...

Halo 2 arguably had the most interesting story of the series (back when it was a silly tongue-in-cheek space opera), and most of the interesting parts revolved around the Arbiter, the Brutes, the Heretics, the Hierarchs, you got to see how the Covenant actually functions, etc.

As far as mainstream shooters go, at least Bungie decided to channel Heinlein instead of Tom Clancy. Of course, the gameplay is what people buy it for, and I've heard a lot of players who "are still not feeling it" just like Moviebob. The regenerating-shield-two-weapons-plus-grenades thing is a rather specific taste. For the record, I love how the Halo games work, but I only play the campaigns.

 

[Agayek]

nice, looking forward to more of the new show.
oh and where was that footage of the guys eyes turning blue from?
i've only played halo 1+2 so if its from 3 or reach, that would explain why i havent seen it.

It's from one of the trailers for Reach I believe. I'm not sure which one, but I know I've seen it before and I put no effort into finding or watching extraneous Halo stuff, so it must have been in a trailer.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Why aren't we noticing it Bob?
Because it's generic. It's so bland that the subtext has become invisible.
Imagine you are the world's most boring and inconspicuous person. You look like an ordinary dude in the crowd even when you're walking by yourself.

And because of this, as long as you remain in society, you are so marginalized and insignificant that you might as well be invisible.

Secretly, you could be a spy. Or an assassin. Or a psychotic serial-killer. Or mega-genius just walking home from a day of doing Foyer' Equations in his head.

But nobody would ever look twice at you unless they caught you in the act.

Halo has not one single iota of original thought behind it when it comes to the context; and it's done in this manner because writing an original story would not appeal to their target audience nearly as strongly.

Sorry, but Halo's story was made to appeal to an audience 12-20 year old males, and it was good for business. Hell, even I like those sorts of stories on occaision, but I would never call them "deep".

What's the story:
"Aliens want to conquer humanity, and we'd rather they didn't."

Get McGuffin, shoot the bad guys, cue the end credits. The only simpler plot is Mega Man where we just skip the McGuffin part.

Halo never wanted to be deep, yet some people tell me that it is. Too many people, following Reach's release. I'd really like it to stop.

The whole "Nazi-Fascism" gig is a coincidence; I doubt anyone writing the Halo stories has the capacity for clever use of symbolism at this point; and if they did, it would certainly be squelched out in favor of more "badass". Everything up until now has been so blunt and thinly-veiled that I still have a black-eye from Halo 3.

Besides, isn't there some other, slightly different video-game story that used the concept of a slave-army of aliens to conquer humanity? Perhaps some of the aliens then switch teams halfway through because of a plot contrivance or rebellion?

Nah. Maybe it's just a coincidence...
Now I had better fire Reach back up so I can get back to fighting off the Combine Covenant.

 

[Zakarath]

A lot of people seem to be missing the Fact that the Halo series is primarily a Lone Hero type of game. While there were slight departures in ODST and Reach, On a whole you're the hero, and the marines around you are pretty much only there to make combat a little more interesting while giving enemies a distraction. The squad is bland BECAUSE THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO FOCUS on them. The game is focused on you shooting aliens in the face, not on your team, and so your team doesn't need to be spectacularly diverse and characterized.

 

[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?

 

[FlameUnquenchable]

Or, y'know, maybe they just wanted a diverse array of aliens to shoot up, where their hazard level is broadcast by their physical stature (small monkey thing = weak; gigantic bear-gorilla = strong) similar to TF2's classes having distinct silhouettes, and then filled in an excuse plot around it. Doesn't strike me as "kill them because they dare to be unlike us" so much as "and that's why you're shooting split-face reptiles and shield-carrying vulture-people". I know the implications are there, but it's hard to consider them intentional.

Just saying.

Have to agree here. Nno matter what they're alien (not human), and we're human (we just aren't that interesting). When you have a crazy Religious cult bent on domination, sometimes you get mixed races they've conquered and subjugated. Plus concept artists love to go crazy on wierd alien species. I think it was more for the flavor of the universe than actually being 'afraid of diversity'.

The Humans are the protagonists because that's who we identify with, and the Spartans are the 'super-soldier' formula that basically represent Neitsche's superman that we all want to be. It evokes a response in humans that's why it's a winning strategy to make a game around. Us fighting Aliens will always be popular because it brings out that ingrained emotion that links us to our humanity and other humans.

The thing that bothers me here is, some of this could just be Overthinking the plot. It's a shooter, the story is somewhat involved but not overly, you've got aliens, it doesn't have to be read on the same level as Herbert, Asimov, Card, Gibson, Bradbury, Heinlein, Clarke, ..you see where I'm going.