Dugit wrote:I don't really care what Bungie does next. Just as long as people enjoy playing it.
HINT: THEY WONT
gmanyo wrote:Basically, it will be Halo, but you're a monkey, and you die on the first level every time because poop doesn't do any damage and takes 2 hours to reload.
First, holy shit, what are you eating.
Second, straight from The Ultimate Fanfiction Writer's mouth:
QUOTE(Macsforever)Jason Newitt, hopping out of the Puma-looking vehicle, singing "If bats were blind" -- he'd picked it up for a song at a Warthog rally -- he felt this weird pain, first in his arm then radiating to his chest. Oh no, hadn't he read about this somewhere on the Internet? Those fucking Boulder drivers! They'd be the death of him yet, he thought, just before keeling over into one of those cute little purple covenant computers they like to place with all sorts of antennas and shit to make you think you're not really in a war zone in some ring world in some random ratsass alien community for the idle rich.
Now the weather here has been particularly fine of late, like spring almost, which is why, when Jason went down clutching his heart, his head landed only inches from some sort of shrubbery that had been fooled by this latest evidence of a fake world into prematurely flowering. "Well, will you look at that," Jason thought to himself, dying there on the ground and noticing how the colors of the petals blended delicately into one another at the margins. The sun was golden, the air was clear, the sky was bluer than on earth with only wispy clouds up very, very high. A pelican was going over at the moment, his last he figured, heading west. On second thought, it could be east. Who knew? Voices drifted across the lot in fragments, something about a year-end white sale.
Then a fugue from early childhood unfurled itself across his inner vision. He was standing on an overpass, idly dropping dirt clods onto the windshields of passing cars, and wondering where they were all headed off to in such an awful hurry. When I grow up, he thought, I'll have somewhere to go too. He tried to guess what he'd be and where he might be going then. Maybe a fireman, or a cowboy, or an advertising executive. Maybe to Bangladesh or Arizona. Then the scene shifted to somewhere in a deep wood, with birds calling to each other as the light faded and night came on. Where is everybody, he wondered, and why is it getting dark so soon? He tried to remember whether Daylight Savings was still in effect.
That was pretty much all the onboard recorder in his helmet picked up. The rest was just static with the occasional odd image of various dead marines he must have seen at one time or another, plus at one point, the face of some girl looking at him oddly from a relocation Pelican speeding past in the opposite direction...
Later, at the medical canopy, they said he'd been legally dead for 13 minutes when all of a sudden he sat bolt upright and asked if he'd gotten any new email. A moment later, noticing the medical environment for the first time, he stopped mid-sentence and looked around, confused. "OK, where are my purple hearts, you fuckers!" he demanded.
When Reggie got there he'd learned Jason been accusing everyone on the hospital staff of ripping him off ever since his nothing-less-than-miraculous revival. Finally, after soaking up two liters of a heavily morphinated IV drip, he calmed down a little, but still seemed out of it, distracted. Well, shit, no wonder.
"I had this weird dream," Jason said at length. "It was like I was in this huge white room and everyone I knew was there, but one guy was clearly in charge and everybody was looking at him with this kind of awe-struck wonderment. It was really creepy." "Who was the guy?" Reggie asked. "That was the creepy part," he said, looking down at his hands and then back up at Reggie. "It was Lou Gerstner."
Jason was lucky. This time. And the experience has clearly changed him. He was more reflective -- introspective and withdrawn. The team all noticed he had been spending a lot more time in the headquarters these days, catching up on the work he used to denigrate so vocally. Also, he was much calmer in combat situations.
A few days later Jason stopped Lou Gerstner, the Fire-team leader in the hallway and said, "Listen, I think we'd better come up with an idea for a new insertion plan rather than just come in there with our guns firing."
"Well, sure, OK I guess" Lou stammered. "But what makes you say that now?"
Jason got a faraway look for several minutes. Lou thought He'd lost him again into one of those comatose reveries he'd been given to slipping into ever since the incident by the covenant control room. But just as Lou was about to walk away Jason said, "I think we need to focus on the larger issues."
"Yeah, like...?"
"Oh, I dunno, hunters, trip mines, camouflaged guerilla . Something like that."
"Covenant with trip mines?" Lou asked. It was just a suggestion, but from the way Jason looked at him, Lou could tell right away that wasn't what he had in mind.
"No," Jason said pointedly, getting right up nose-to-nose and looking straight into Lou's eyes. "No, that's not the ticket at all." Lou suddenly felt dirty. Guilty. As if he'd just been called somehow on a life that hadn't measured up to its God-given potential.
"Hey, back up a bit there pal. Jesus H. Christ on a Crutch! Just because you had some near-death thing doesn't give you the right to go around laying trips on people!" Lou was livid. "How dare he? The ungrateful little turd." "It was as if Jason looked right through me, though -- clearly he hadn't heard a single word I said!" And then Jason was off down the hall again, stopping staffers here and there to ask if they'd ever read any Barbara Tuchman.
Deeply disturbing. But it had gotten Lou thinking. They had originally started the team to test a sort of working hypothesis. The Internet on Halo was relatively new and it looked to everyone back then as if it was a fundamentally different kind of medium from, say, television and the major metropolitan newspapers. One thing everyone liked about it in those days was that the only people who seemed to know how it worked were mainly using it to screw around. However, Lou read something much deeper into that simple observation. He thought it was important to fuck off.
Maybe he'd been wrong though. Lou had to admit it was possible. With the prospect of the new Internet attracting a mass audience, the marketing boys had been rubbing their hands in anticipation of the rank-and-file sheep that would soon be here, fat first for the shearing, then the slaughter. But hold the phone, he thought, not everyone's as stupid as you'd like to think, and the options inherent in the medium will bear them out on this. Given the choice of alternative voices, The People will not choose your bread-and-circus lies, your blatherous blandishments, your empty entertainments. But what they'd do instead, Lou wasn't quite sure. He'd wait and see. Whatever it was, it surely would not be More Of The Same. The magic was way too strong this time around to ever be co-opted.
That was before the banner ads, of course. And Pointcast and the Major News Sites. And the websites of the great technical magazines from Ziff-Davis and CMP and Mecklermedia. Not to mention Harper Collins, TCI, Heinz 57 Varieties and Carter's Little Fucking Pills. Hey, kids, welcome to the revolution!
Resistance with covenant is still strong in the mountain regions, though, in the cultural backwaters, wastelands, along the fringes of empire. Lou could tell by the intelligence demonstrated in message board postings and chat room repartee, by the penetrating insight that's passed back and forth via online mailing lists, and the high humor of innumerable not-for-profit websites. Yeah sure.
Never has mechanism managed to pass so successfully for subject matter. If word processing made us into unwilling typesetters, the Halo Web and all its multifarious attachments have transformed us into some high-tech analog of the traveling vacuum cleaner salesperson. We are all selling to each other, constantly. Encouraging our mutually pointless traffic back and forth across a digital landscape more frightening than those that cradle Dali's melting watches, cluttered with flotsam-and-jetsam pitches, late breaking scoops on matters we could give a shit about, superfluous weather reports for people who no longer go outside, and ads for articles of increasingly unnecessary armor and vehicles.
But so what? We still love the Halo web. Where else could we rail away without rhyme or reason, point or apparent destination, and ever hope to get a halfway decent hearing? As to why we might want to... well, there's that nagging question about publishing once again, and that nastily insistent issue of a theme worthy of putting down in a disciplined and thematic manner upon Real Paper.[/quote]
