The Big Picture: Combat Evolved?

[Jammy Fingers]

While I have to concede that yes the good guys are samey and militaristic and the bad guys are diverse you know what is really going on: the covenant is a metaphor for jihadism. think about it the prophets want to eradicate all non-covenant species or convert them to the covenant.

but the thing is that its not the writers that are racist, it is the person who feels the need to point it out.

going back to the original point its not a matter of race it's a matter of game design. if I have an elite I know that this guy will be kinda tough and is leading this nearby group of cannon fodder(aka grunt) Oh shit a hunter these guys are tough I have to shoot him in the back though. damn sniping jackal! see what I mean diverse, easy to identify classes with a context that fits.

 

[Wrds]

Maybe this has already been said, but how do you start with a title like Combat evolved, then end on racial diversity issues.

I'm not complaining, I just find it hilarious.

 

[Risingblade]

but didn't humanity and the elites join forces later on? >.>

 

[Urazel]

Obviously I lost all credibility when this came out, but I was already a big covenant fan to begin with, they were visually much more dynamic (not to mention I preferred their quirky guns).
Grunts are kinda funny, elites are made of awesome, brutes... ok they're kind of bland, hunters are living tanks and pretty damn impressive, prophets are the religious zealots, jackals are really shifty.
Their simple species common traits give them more personality then more or less any other character in the Halo universe, except maybe Sergeant Johnson.
Oooh and the entire cast of Red vs Blue.


But I always prefer the more unusual races and creatures to bog standard humans you encounter everywhere to begin with.

Never stopped to think about the whole sub-text though, a little scary when you do.
I just liked the covenant

 

[Rassmusseum]

I love The Game Overthinker and Escape to the Movies, but I feel like you're really reaching (no pun intended) on this one, Bob.

You honestly thought that Halo Reach was about fascists fighting diversity??

Wtf??

 

[Nomanslander]

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.

Another words, made up techno babble.

Who ever came up with the idea wasn't thinking about chemistry and the augmentation process of the human body, and it's effects.

They were thinking, "hey, what if his eyes turned blue, that would be kinda cool, right?" Then someone smarted told him what that would symbolically represent, and since Bungie hates Halo considering all the years they've been enslaved making this game by Microsoft, they decided to tell the world how the really feel about the series.

I kid....;P

maybe?

 

[Wolfinton]

It is interesting. I will give you that.

also saying your employers are maybe batshit loco is not the way to go. That is what got me fired from my second job.

He was joking.

Yes, we must protect Bob. Of course he was "joking". *Winks*

Seems like a nice show so far, hope he goes into detail about a lot of the subjects though.

 

[greygelgoog]

Maybe I'm over analyzing this video, but I start to wonder if Bob isn't implying that if you like Halo then you are a Nazi. Maybe it's unintentional, but really guys?

 

[Pwner]

The "face" on the at the movies are bad enough, these are awful

 

[Jammy Fingers]

If games were an authentic recreation of what battle was really like, they wouldn't be much fun would they?

well certainly not if you got all of the traumas and emotional issues from coming home and everything that happened while you were there.

 

[fleischwolke]

Very nice, I'm looking forward to the next installment. Just one thing though: The clip art heads didn't work for me at all, because I just couldn't identify the emotions they were supposed to convey at a certain moment. I'd like a return to Movie Bob's smileys, but then that's just my impression.

 

[David Bray]

I usually have big problems with you, Bob, and certainly have issue with your dislike of (the first and only) halo, but this was an excellent new feature.
While i massively disagree with you about the campaign thing (although i agree that once matchmaking was introduced single player took a dive into the cess pit), the inherant undertones of Halo are disturbing and the dullness of humanity is upsetting, if not slightly self-depricating.

I'll be watching these quite regularly me thinks.

 

[Nautical Honors Society]

That was just really terrible.

Lack of racial and cultural diversity? Are you kidding me?

The Noble team is made up of many people of many different cultural backgrounds.

This is really a matter of you looking too deeply into an issue when it really is just "Humans vs Aliens".

Also, the pop-art faces? That is just your excuse to be lazy. It isn't original.

There is absolutely no focus to this video.

It starts off critiquing Halo: Reach and then it turns into some discussion about how Bungie is promoting fascism.

No one wants to here a dude rant if there is no substantial aim to support what he is saying.

Also, as for the blue eyes thing do you really think Bungie makes the commercials? Seriously? Wow...

By the way his eyes were blue to begin with, they just became more exaggerated after he became a spartan.

No scratch that Bob this isn't you looking "too deeply" into an issue, this is just you scraping the bottom of the barrel for controversy.

 

[wammnebu]

I dont agree with the message about the undertones the Halo games have.

First of the Persians were not a slave empire, they practiced a form of almost confederations with a feudalistic heirarchy, that allowed some cultural freedom within these groups. The armies of immortals cracked down on the greeks because they were burning Zoroastrian temples in Asia minor

secondly, its not purity versus diversity, but independence versus assimilation. Yes the covenants are all different races but they are all slaves under ONE race, and treated accordingly. Thus the covenant battle is like what you and the Greeks thought it was, because you see this army of drones followed by the prophet and the subliminal message of "how would you like humanity to be enslaved and fighting in some class because of being human. All are equally slaves under the covenant, its not even a mixing thing, its a loss. because you are trading one master race for another.

good topic though besides that

 

[jVictor]

I think the original intent for the inclusion of multiple races was simply for enemy variety and little more. It's more fun to shoot at various enemies with different abilities and weaknesses than the same set of guys every single firefight. As the game's popularity exploded and Bungie got a chance to elaborate on Covenant society I drew the conclusion they were more like the Roman Empire (in SPACE!). They expanded through conquest and assimilation, using the culmination of their religion as a uniting goal.

The games give us a very limited view of the UNSC, because we only ever see it from the view of a soldier. The supplementary materials (the novels) give us a lot more to work with and in a way, yes, the UNSC does de-emphasize the importance of the individual in favor of a more streamlined, uniform society. This much I believe was intentional on Bungie's part because it tells us that the UNSC are not a universal force of "good" and that there are quite a few things wrong with this kind of society (it just happens to work when there's a war with an alien entity, which is all the games are able to show us). While the SPARTANs themselves are ethnically and culturally diverse (like the colonies) from the outside you can't really tell the difference between them. The SPARTANs seem to be the perfect analogy for what UNSC is, and also what it needs in this time of crisis.

 

[Blood Countess]

again highly disappointing yet again from Movie Bob.Not as bad as his temper Tantrum over Scott Pilgrim flopping like it needed to do but this was close to as bad

Seriously guys, Ben needs another show, not this joke

 

[wammnebu]

[

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?

Darn, and i was really looking forward to Call of Duty: Trench Warfare

 

[AssassinJoe]

Well, no one's gonna read this comment anyway so I might as well go all out.

First of all I want to say great show MovieBob, I really like the way you look at these sorts of things.

Now that I got that out of the way, I going to go and lay down my opinion.

In the video, you make a lot of comparisions between the Halo games and facism, to this I would like to say, "No shit Sherlocke!!" The entire Halo universe is riddled with symbolism for the "master race", government control, and hate against anything that's different. To really see it though you have to delve into Halo's backstory.

I'm one of the many people who pre-ordered Halo: Reach like any fanboy would. The thing is though, I'm not a Halo fan. This is the first Halo game I've ever played. I didn't know what I was getting into. Luckily the pre-ordered game came with what is supposed to be the diary of the scientist how created the "Spartan Project" so I figure that it might give me some insight into the story, if only a little bit. So I start reading. What I found confused the hell out of me.

Apparently that commercial you have in the video isn't the complete story on how a Spartan soldier is created.

According to the diary, the Spartans were created to fight against rebellious human colonies who were tired of being monitored by a government that doesn't really give two shits about them (government control). Each spartan candidate is selected through thorough DNA checks of children. If the child fits the standards of excellence (master race) they are then kiddnapped and replaced with clones so that no one finds out about it, and then put in boot-camp for the rest of their childhood (exactly like in that animated Halo movie). Then the Covenant attacks, conveniantly at the same time the Spartans are deemed "combat ready". And of course the rebel colonies are attacked first so they beg for help from

Now this part really bugs me. It seems the Covenant's only reason for attacking us is because we're different. What happened to trying to convert the other alien races? I might have missed something there but still c'mon. I know you said it's weird we are attacking them cause they're different but it works both ways.

Another thing that bothers me is that I identify more with the Covenant then I do with the humans. Think about it for a second...... a group that goes around believeing their religion is the one true religion and attacking anyone who says otherwise? Sounds a little familar don't you think? Plus the fact that it's a bunch of races from different bakgrounds and planets all working together to achieve the same goal (I know that sounds like a little kid's tv show but it's still true). It's hard to really identify with the humans in these games because most of the human main characters aren't even given faces.

That's what I think any way. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't read it all.

 

[Internet Kraken]

This was painful to watch. Seriously, I can't believe the Escapist is paying somebody to go on the equivalent of a fanboy rant, while dressing it up as some deep intellectual look into the psychology of our society.

Bungie making the decision to have the Covenant consist of a variety of different races has nothing to do with racism, a master race conquering diversity, or anything like that. It was clearly a game design decision. By having a variety of enemies in different shapes and sizes adds diversity to gameplay. You won't just be fighting the same identical mooks over and over again. It also allows the player to quickly pick out priority targets. If every Covenant soldier was an Elite, it would be a lot harder to identify the biggest threat. Instead, the Grunts and Jackals comprise the majority of foot soldiers, allowing the player to clearly pick out the Elites as the leaders. Subsequently, when they see a group that consists almost entirely of Elites, they know they are in for a hard fight. It's something that was done for the sake of gameplay, obviously.

Secondly, you conveniently ignore the fact that Halo 2 and Halo 3 have you team up with the Elites. How can you claim that Bungie may be subtly sending a message of racial superiority when you are teaming up with aliens? This alone is enough to completley tear down your argument. It's also worth pointing out that the Covenant had next to no characterization in the first game. In the second game, we actually looked into their culture and saw how their leadership was comprised. Hell you play as one of them, and lead the entire Elite species (forget what their real name is) into rebellion. So while your argument might have had some weight if you were only talking about the first game, the second game wrecks it.

I know you're not an idiot though. There's no way you could have ignored all of this. So this just seems like you looking for another reason to beat on Halo needlessly.

 

[DevilSShadoW]

great show, great subject
keep it up