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Despite the media hype, Halo emerges
The new Xbox game, Halo 2, was released to the masses yesterday. Now, I'm not a huge video-gamer myself, but there were several reasons for me to notice the release of this particular one. First of all, a teaser for a story about the game was on the top of the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Tuesday -- a big, bright, vivid photo of the box that Halo 2 comes in; on the box, a picture of the main character (the "Master Chief"), both hands full of machine gun, fires blazing in the background. Next to it, the bold statement Halo 2 just might be the best game of the year." My initial curiosity was to wonder how anyone would know that a videogame was the "best of the year" on the day it was released. So for fun, I started poking around doing some informal research. And I learned some interesting things. The staff of Bungie Studios, the individuals who did the programming for Halo 2, have been working on it for three years. Three years. Locked away inside a free-form office; locked away inside a separate building outside of Xbox's main arena; locked away doing 20 hours per day of scheming and programming. Just a few dozen people living off of takeout food and a dream--the dream of a better game. (I am quickly taken back to an unconfirmed rumor I heard once about Walt Disney locking up his animators in a separate building way out back and feeding them LSD while they came up with story lines and character sketches). These three years come to a close to some serious fanfare in addition to cash revenue. Evidently, a million and a half copies have been "pre-ordered." That's a pretty clear sign of success. And the news coverage: Several of the many major newsgroups I checked out online had some sort of news about it. MSNBC, ABCnews, The New York Times. There was even a "Midnight Madness" release party in Times Square. Type Halo 2 in the Google search bar and it comes back with more than 5 million hits. Pages and pages of reviews and articles, opinions and criticism, loves and hates. And this is only the day the game came out. I was baffled, amazed and impressed. On this same day, sites full of cheats, codes, walkthroughs, previews, and reviews were easily found throughout the net. On this same day, there were cinematic trailers for the game. Once again, my curiosity asks why anyone would make a cinematic trailer for something that's not cinematic? But I suppose if I were selling millions of some sort of over-hyped product, I wouldn't mind a little bit of senselessness accompanying it. Not withstanding all of this buzz, however, there is another eerie matter that surfaces with the advertisement, promotion, publicity and release of this game. Going back to the yesterday's P-I, I couldn't help but notice that the Master Chief on the Halo 2 illustration at the top of the paper was the exact same size as the soldiers in the photograph accompanying the main story of the day -- "Troops roar into Fallujah." And I couldn't help but notice that the backgrounds behind the Master Chief and the U.S. soldiers in Fallujah were similar -- smoke and destruction. Tomorrow must be better. |
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