The Big Picture: Combat Evolved?
- Thread starter MovieBob
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Not sure i really agree with you bob, its a fully multicultural human team, most of the games are set in a version of africa that is actually the most advanced nation on earth, if you look at a purely human ascpect then its one of the most representative games out, and it doesnt really play on stereotypes for that.
and tbh looking from a game design viewpoint, having different alien races as your enemy makes sense just because it would be boring fighting the same type constantly.
the advert with the blue eyes wasnt made by bungie so it would be a bit harsh to 'blame' them for that
the whole spartan movement is shown to be a necersary evil for the survival of the human race, but an evil nonetheless, you bring up some interesting points but its a bit of a lazy arguement to bring up in your first video. 'its the NAZI'SSSSSSS' i excpected better from you bob, im actually disappointed
and tbh looking from a game design viewpoint, having different alien races as your enemy makes sense just because it would be boring fighting the same type constantly.
the advert with the blue eyes wasnt made by bungie so it would be a bit harsh to 'blame' them for that
the whole spartan movement is shown to be a necersary evil for the survival of the human race, but an evil nonetheless, you bring up some interesting points but its a bit of a lazy arguement to bring up in your first video. 'its the NAZI'SSSSSSS' i excpected better from you bob, im actually disappointed
That has nothing to do with their uniform, they all have something to distiguish but it isnt all that much, you wont see the color scheme changing drasticly from one ocupation to another.Ultratwinkie said:
Also, the aliens diverse in species, we are only one specie, and Halo Reach in particular even has multiple races so they did made variety on the allies, they have multiple colors and diferent body structure. There is a russian (I think) chick, a black guy, a eastern huge dude, the tipical white guy and our character, all with their own colour and body sizes.
He's over-thinking it. The covenant were made racially diverse so you could fight a lot of completely different looking aliens, that's it. It is not a commentary on multiculturalism. Having a diverse assortment of aliens to fight is way more fun then if they just made all the enemies in the game elites.
Maybe your not reading into things enough!The Austin said:
Katamari Damacy is actually promoting the same idea, that only by absorbing all things into a whole and disrupting the landscape around us can we appease the king of the universe. Also Teenage mutant ninja turtles. Actually about how mutant turtles will rise up to destroy humanity.
Let's be honest here, I think both MovieBob and Yahtzee miss the entire point of military disapline and uniformity. You can't conduct a war if you have everyone out there running around, doing their own thing. You need to control information, and get people to the point where they do what they are told. This incidently includes being sacrificed for the greater good. Sending one group of guys into a meat grinder so your other team of guys can complete an important objective in the big picture while the enemy is busy for example (and if this example offends you, remember that wars are ugly and blow chips for a reason).
The thing to understand is that we're dealing with a military organization in these games. Even as a Halo fan I understand this, and why it's all uniform. These guys aren't a representitive of humanity as a whole, but of our military, our champions, our defenders. Us, the game players, are not supposed to need a lesson in the diversity of humanity, because we are humans. We generally don't see the civilian culture that the military is defending.
The diverse alien races being fought are uniform among themselves, each species pretty much acts the same way the spartans do with standard weapons, equipment, and an order of battle. The point being that if The Covenant was to conquer humanity it would still have it's own order of battle and so on, but would effectively be subverted to the whole like those guys were. It's also important to note that The Covenant eventually does not want humanity to join or be subverted... it wants to wipe us out entirely as a threat. I mean think about what the Titular "Halo" weapon is, and what it shows up to do.
As far as Nazi referances went, well understand that the Nazis are generally stereotyped by their military. Their military not being all that differant from any other effective fighting force. For reasons related to our current, unworkable, morality, you rarely see much about the civilian Nazi culture, groups like the Volkssturm, or the slaughters that were inflicted upon them to win World War II. Being disaplined, focused, and kept a bit ignorant is simply military, it has nothing specifically to do with the Nazis.
The bit with the blue eyes, well, understand that this DOES have something to do with the Nazis. According to some things I've read, the very first Halo books got into the backround behind the Spartan program, and how it was based on a Eugenics/Genetics program that the Nazis started in World War II to create their "ubermensch" as super soldiers. Before the arrival of the covenant there was supposed to have been a lot of fighting between human factions, and the Spartan super soldiers were created to try and resolve those wars, using technology that started with the Nazis and had apparently been being worked on sense (presumably starting with Nazi scientists who wound up with the Allies after the war via things like "Operation Paperclip"). Apparently this was contreversial enough where it was supposed to have been changed (or glossed over to avoid directly mentioning the Nazis) in later printings of the novels. In the end though the bottom line is that the guy's eyes turning blue are probably supposed to give you exactly the message it did, being a sign of the origins of the technology being used.
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One final note for anyone that has read this far (which I hope includes Moviebob):
I have read "Starship Troopers" not just seen the movie. The scenario is a lot differant than the one presented in the movies, and if you read it, the aliens they are fighting aren't quite like they are in the movies, and apparently have proxy races themselves.
It should also be noted that while the book focuses on the military mentality, why it exists, and the proper ways of fighting a war (and could be considered very anti-liberal for this reason... it's very much based on reality, rather than moral principle), the weapons being used are not anything like either the movie, or what you see in video games. These guys basically use battlesuits that can jump like The Hulk and fight with flame throwers that literally shoot streams of fire miles long. To put things into perspective a couple of these guys would render pretty much anything you've seen in "Space Marine" games, or even settings like "Warhammer 40k" irrelevent. One of these guys sweeps his flames back and forth and he's pretty much going to wipe out city blocks. The fire is so hot that it't not even going to leave flaming wreckage since when the flame passes it's so hot that it consumes everything, there is nothing left to burn.
To be entirely honest, it's been a long time, but I kind of wish people would stop making referances to "Starship Troopers" whenever some work of military science fiction comes up. The entire style is pretty unique, and nothing close to that take on warfare, the nature of the engagements, and similar thing has ever really been done.
When I first read your comment, I thought you were being serious. Then I laughed my ass off. Thank you.bad rider said:
You could say the same thing about most video games, thats because we need to fight a variety of enemies to keep things fresh. You could say the thing about Donkey Kong Country, sure they have the ridding animals but for the most part its monkeys fighting a team up of alligators, vultures, fish, bees and so on. Its for gameplay, not narrative.
YAY, more MovieBob, I hope future episodes are a bit longer so he can go into more detail about the topic, but I think this is a good start.
Dude, this is exactly the kind of show you should've been doing all along. I love how informative it was. This is a definitely another favorite, right after Extra Credits.
What... so now game producers have to analyse every tiny detail of their products to ensure their products don't annoy or offend someone who's obviously picking nits over something because he dislikes it, has come to a 'revelation' no-one else has actually noticed? Bob is just cherry picking[footnote]In academia, there's a term known as cherry picking- it's when a person deliberately seeks out minute details or observations on their subject to either make it look good, or make it look bad; and I can see Bob's just made sure we never can have cherries again.WaderiAAA said:
Ever.[/footnote] as many issues as humanly possible?
It's clear the guy dislikes Halo- but now he's just gonna look for the smallest freakin' details to put the franchise down. Any thing can be perceived as advocating something if you read into it enough- Bob just can't get over the fact that Halo is so popular, and yet he dislikes it; he's pissed because the vast majority of gamers don't agree with him. Hell, I can relate.
No, you're just reading into it all to much. The eyes were an easy way for the director to symbolise the change from a mundane soldier into super-powerful killing machine. It's meant to reflect a change in the overall state of the soldier, their mind, body, life, all changed. And blue is a noticeable, easy to see colour.
It's meant as a fancy effect.
And do you think any game studio is gonna look at their products and go... "OOH LOOOK... THAT'S THE EYE COLOUR OF AN ÜBERMENSCH!" They didn't design the game to be racist, and it's only a really skewered interpretation of it that makes something so mundane seem so bad. Developers aren't gonna check to make sure the most minute details of things to make sure no bulls*** views on it are made.
I still love ya' Bob, but please never mention Halo again.
Nom Nom Nom. Over 310 comments already? This one's a keeper.
Not sure about the faces though. It seems a visually distorting anti-focus from the main message.
This isn't necessarily true. Consider Extra Credit's diversity episode. Besides the one marine that just happens to show up in every halo, where's the black guys? Where's the asian guys? Latinos? middle eastern? How about female marines (besides the pilots and cortana) or... what about a gay spartan? a lesbian spartan?12th_milkshake said:
Like bob said, they've taken some time to push the boundaries of the characters a bit in this game, but you can't tell me you didn't notice that all the marines are either white, british or australian! (I find the mexican ones to be debatable)
Before you counter argue with me that there's not sexual diversity within the covenant, think about it. It's a religious group that has assimilated several different alien races. This means that they have their own background concerning that and... in all likelyhood (speculation here) had their own genocide. Either that, or some of them are asexual or something...
some food for thought
Well I don't know about most people but I sure as hell do, I absolutely love it.Karisse said:
I will say good one to bob for actually being semi fair about halo, instead of just trolling it like in EttM, which is both impressive and quite pleasing.
I also did pick up on the whole racial subtext thing going on in the Halo universe but, it is worth noting that the spartans were created BEFORE the covenant showed up, to basically enforce a totalitarian, almost republican ideal of control over human colonies, the UNSC were painted as the bad guys in the books and comics a whole lot of the time, especially when the mass child suicide missions signed off by Colonel James Ackerson in Ghosts of Onyx pretty much explains just how much worse the ONI (and by extension, the UNSC) had become since the Human/Covenant war had started, so the idea that the almost racist undertones picked up on is valid as a slight on the series itself is partially true.
As they say, history is written by the victors, the winners are almost always made out to be the good guys, so there is no way to say that any particular war was won by the bad guys, just as is true with Halo, at the end of Halo 3, the Covenant has been broken, and will always be remembered in human history as a genocidal collective of aliens (which, to our credit, they were), but the SPARTAN project? It will be the greatest success in the field of nanotechnological science ever, the soldiers will be remembered, not as children who were taken from an early age and raised to be near faceless super soldiers, but rather heroic veterans of a terrible war who enlisted in a top secret project to make them the best that the human race could offer, the war crimes committed by the humans would be forgotten by everyone but the remaining spartans and Dr Halsey, that is, if ONI doesn't order that those with knowledge of the project mysteriously "disappear" after the human race begins to rebuild. Because unfortunately that is how the system works, and throughout the history of the halo universe, that has always been shown to be how the ONI do things, and that is the beauty of it, the humans aren't the heroes of the war, the UNSC are not the "good guys", they are the winners, just as blind and ignorant to the machinations of their political overseers as the races of the covenant are to the prophets actions, lest we forget, the prophets knew all along that there was no "great journey" and were completely aware of the nature of the human race to begin with, they just chose to use their religion to their own ends to instigate a holy war, not unlike certain modern day figures.
I appreciate that going through all of this information would take ages, and indeed would not really be worth it for someone with a recorded hatred of the Halo series, but I do think it is worth noting that the humans are never portrayed as the heroes of the war, people like GySgt Edward Buck is shown as a hero in ODST because of the lengths he goes to to protect his team and his friends, but Ackerson? Halsey? they are not the good guys, and certainly don't get seen as such.
thoughts?