The Big Picture: Combat Evolved?

[Flying-Emu]

Combat Evolved?

This week MovieBob rants about Halo.

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I love how he rants about how honestly cool and in depth the story really is, but then pretends like he thinks its bad.

Congratulations MovieBob, you're just as brainwashed about the "need" to hate on Halo as the rest of the world.

... No? He says that it's cliched and has almost no original content. Super soldiers who focus on abandoning the self to become a more perfect killing machine? Sparta. Faceless Space Marines? Heinlein.

The comparison of the Covenant to the Persian army that invaded Greece is... interesting, but I dunno if I fully agree with it. Regardless, at no point was he heralding the story in anything besides a sarcastic manner.

 

[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 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...

 

[wolf thing]

it was pretty good, but im sure there are different covenant because it varys game play and add a difficulty curb rather then it being part of the story. but still good video and also YOU MUST DO A VIDEO ON MONKEYS

 

[ARKSgtAlpha]

Yes, Another show kind of like extra credit! I love it! Props to escapist and bob for the idea.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

Terrible, terrible, terrible.

I don't get what's up with Moviebob and Halo. It's like he has one style of criticism that applies to Halo and another style he applies to everything else. This criticism was ham-handed, obtuse and downright silly. It doesn't even make sense internally. So the Covenant are bad for subjugating different people to a singular purpose, but they are also a fitting allegory for multiculturism? What? There are a thousand better reasons for the Covenant to be composed of multiple races, including the most obvious: more races allows for more diverse enemy types. Nothing about the sinister nature of the Covenant is ever represented as resulting from their diverse makeup except arriving at it through conquest. This could easily be construed as an allegory against militarism and nationalism. It is always their blind militarism that is reviled.

At this point it's like he's being defiantly ignorant. Yes, the Spartans give off a creepy 'master race' vibe. They always have and were always supposed to. That Moviebob pretends not to understand this smacks of willful ignorance. The humans represented in the Halo universe are a morally ambiguous lot that use questionable morals to stamp out rebels and guarantee order. How you could draw a line from that to a subconscious urge to distill a master race is completely beyond me.

Why is he trying so very hard to project these awful things into the Halo universe anyway? I'm sure he's not starved for less whimsical criticism.

I do however agree that the characters were cliche and annoying. I'm actually looking forward to rest of this series. I don't understand why Moviebob treats Halo so different from everything else, and I actually enjoy his video's about... most everything else.

 

[MB202]

You certainly know how to get people's attention.

Freaking AWESOME episode, BTW! The blue eyes thing made me do a double take as well!

But really, you're actually getting paid to ***** and rant about stuff? That's every nerd's dream... not, that's mankind's greatest dream, to just complain about stuff and get paid to do it. You are one lucky dog, Bob.

 

[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.

 

[Angrywyvern]

Hah! this is great, never say that my Tuesdays aren't video-less!
More Movie Bob never hurt anyone, after all, especially when it comes on an otherwise slow day.

 

[ZephrC]

You're making a dangerous and sadly common mistake here. You assume that fascism equals racial purity. That's simply not true, however. Fascism only requires a clearly delineated "Us" and "Them" to provide an artificial conflict between.

Certainly racism is a possible source of that delineation. On the other hand, there are other options as well. Which side of an imaginary line you were born on is a pretty common one. Also your deity of choice, or even simply how you choose to worship said deity can be used as a tool by fascists. Even within a group it can come down to something as vague as actions. How you dress, what music you like, who you like to fuck, all these things can be used to group people into "Us" and "Them".

When you're looking for signs of fascism, don't look for similarities to Hitler. Those are easy to pick out and will never gain any kind of foothold again at this point. Look for someone saying that we have to stop "Them". We need to make sacrifices to stop "Them". It's okay to do bad things to "Them". That's when you really need to start worrying.

I fail to see your point. You accuse Bob of having a limited view of fascism as being based on questions of race, and then proceed to list every type of protonormalist archetype which can be used to form an "us v them", with the conclusion being... what?

How does your definition of fascism (which is really a definition of protonormalism, but whatever) conflict with his? Just because a racially diverse group can develop fascist ideas based on something else which unifies them, or because fascist tendencies can rise from what is ostensibly a democratic society (looking at you, republicans), suddenly the notion of fascism based on racial uniformity becomes less valid?

Not trying to be an arse here, just curious about what your point is.

Sorry, I did kind of lose my point there a bit. What I was trying to get at is that the whole thing is silly because it obviously has nothing to do with fascism. Any serious fascist with enough brains that we should be afraid of them can't possibly use racism as their basis for us vs. them anymore, at least for any country that views Hitler as the ultimate badguy, so saying things like 'ZOMG! BLUE EYES! HITLER LIKED BLUE EYES!' is stupid. Either (obviously way more likely) it was a coincidence and there's no point wasting thought on the idea, or they're idiot fascists who will never succeed.

The broader point I was trying to get at indirectly was that perhaps this over-focus on racism as an artificial source of conflict for fascism is causing us to miss signs of it in other places, and maybe we as a society should knock that off.

 

[Necromancer1991]

that was fairly good, here's a tip though, MORE HEADS, after a few weeks of the same 10 heads I'll get tired of them, otherwise, good show.

 

[tehbeard]

tl;dr, but as far as I remember the eye color changing is side effect of one of the chemicals in the augmentation process responsible for enhancing eyesight.

Apologies if this has been stated before.

OT: Nice to see this show, hopefully it will be good.

 

[ARKSgtAlpha]

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...

mmmm... well if you mean variety in a single game like more then one person you play as, it would be hard to relate to them if the number got over 3ish. though if you mean more variety through out video games, then maybe because its the least likely to offend any one person or group? idk just my mussings

 

[Mark B]

I think it's quite the opposite, we don't notice because we have gotten to a point where the majority are not fearful of difference in race and culture

At least when shooting them in the head..
Personally I think we are used to having a game with a hero, who is taking on a variety of enemies. Normally done to make the game more interesting that full of grunts.

 

[binvjoh]

Awesome new show! I always loved when Bob went off on weird rants and now I can get a more concentrated dose of it!

 

[Cousin_IT]

With regards to the diversity of the coveneant, I wonder if that's a case of a gameplay motivated artistic decision, making different types of enemies clearly distinguishable to the player, taking on a whole heap of unintended implications & subtexts when the gameplay is removed.

 

[Serenegoose]

I think it's interesting that you called the whole master race/purity thing 'unintentional'. Now, I'm no Halo fangirl (just finished Halo 3 last week, and I'm going to be waiting the half year required for Reach to become halfway affordable) but you reviewed Halo Legends on escape to the movies. You should know there's nothing really good about the Spartan program. That it is unambiguously evil, given the wholesale kidnap of youths, how they become utterly depersonified and regarded as tools. So for them to pull a nazi/master race allegory on the program I don't think is at all unintentional, just revealing of the entire Spartan programs aims to create a Master Race regardless of the human cost.

 

[Nomanslander]

I never really thought Halo was supposed to be that complex, I always just thought that the extent of its complexity was shooty shooty bang. Oh, and teabaging -.-

You'd be amazed how much thought and effort goes into creating a simple idea....0o

 

[reeper4444]

1) No matter how diverse a group is, if they're trying to wipe out humanity for no good reason I think we're allowed to hate them.

2) Now gamers not only have the "games harm children" arguent against them but also the "games are racist in a way one man noticed" argument against them

 

[AgDr_ODST]

this could be good, but he neglected to mention that the humans teamed up with the Elites in Halo 2 and 3

so... the humans just really wanted ANY ally, but the other people didn't WANT to be their ally. THEY were the ones who wanted to do the "cleansing" of the human race. WE were just sitting back and defending ourselves

but yeah, Bungie isn't exactly helping themselves with the whole "blue eyes" thing. (unless it's a The Who reference )

yeah thats the thing that he seems not to get, on top of whats been said about all the different races being thier to give some variety to the player.

 

[Ampersand]

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.

Their soldiers the wear uniforms, also theres normally only like 2 or 3 or them on screen at a time and in spite of that they still have a surprising amount of diversity (they were even given names.)

not all soldiers look the same. Say that to a US military officer and he will ***** slap you back to the stone age. As i said before, soldiers mean MORE than just a guy with a gun, they have different ROLES, UNIFORMS, AND WEAPONS. All halo soldiers are just jackasses who run around shooting things with the same armor and the same gun. Just because modern warfare shows soldiers running about quick-scoping doesn't mean that's how actual war is. try that in a war zone and that will get you blown to bits. diversity in halo: combat evolved in the starship trooper look-a-likes? bull shit.

I didn't say they did now did I?
In halo they didn't give the soldiers alot of diversity, because they aren't the primary focus of the game. If i'm a 3D modeler i'm not going to break my back working on something that the player isn't even going to be looking at.
That being said there is still some diversity in the halo support characters, at the very least you have the marines and ODSTs on the battle field with you, all of whom have carry a variety of weapons including covy weapons they've found lying around.

On a seperate note, don't assume that you know more about warfare then I do. If games were an authentic recreation of what battle was really like, they wouldn't be much fun would they?