Sunday, May 04, 2008

• The epic summary of 2W, part 2: LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

  So after reading the title, you're probably thinking one of three things:

  1. Richard's finally gone off the deep end because of the 2W term
  2. Richard's been playing too much Halo and has become a hardcore gamer
  3. ?!?!?!!?!?!??!?!?!?!

  Well I'm happy to tell you that it's a combination of all three... somewhat.  You see, there's this guy.  His name is Jon.  And he's 19.  And he makes the funniest Halo machinimas ever.

  For the uninitiated, machinima is:

  A collection of associated production techniques whereby computer-generated imagery (CGI) is rendered using real-time, interactive 3-D engines, such as those of games, instead of professional 3D animation software

  Specifically, Jon makes use of the theater mode (which captures everything that happens during a game and saves it to the XBox hard drive for later viewing) to make his videos.  In addition to a few action figures from the game.  One of his series is titled "Arby 'n' the Chief", namesakes from the primary protagonists of Halo 3.  In this series, two action figures of these characters are used to act out the storyline that he writes.  Master Chief is portrayed as a stupid, inconsiderate, and foul-mouthed (not to mention horrible spelling and grammar) 12-year-old kid - in essence, a "noob", whereas The Arbiter is portrayed as a reasonable person who likes to talk a lot, but uses coherent sentence structure and all that good stuff we learned in English class.  The series thrives on the interactions between these two characters regarding commentary about various video games on the market (primarily Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4), the Halo 3 community, and just society in general - and this makes for some great comedy - crude, but effective.

  The series started January 7 (coincidentally, the start of term), and now, the 11th episode is in production.  The series is actually a sequel to an original series (by the same guy) called "Master Chief Sucks at Halo", which establishes the character of Chief.  The videos have given me a really good reason to have a good laugh over the course of the term, mostly because of the dichotomy of the Arbiter and the Chief.  The Chief can really be quite stupid at times.  Also, the background music that's used in these videos is often to my liking.  You may have noticed on MSN or GTalk that I've started to listen to "Love Underground" by Robbers on High Street, or the "Super Smash Bros Brawl Main Theme".  You can thank Jon and ANTC episodes 3 and 6, respectively.

  My personal favourite episode of the 10 produced so far is #6: "Brawl".  Here's the video for your viewing pleasure.  Note that this video contains "strong language" and "adult themes", and is not intended for younger audiences.

  If you liked that, here are links to the other episodes:

  Episode 1: Pilot
  Episode 2: Recon
  Episode 3: Attitude
  Episode 4: Melee
  Episode 5: Martyrdom
  Episode 6: Brawl
  Episode 7: Girls
  Episode 8: Legendary
  Episode 9: Newcomers
  Episode 10: Cortana

  I hope you enjoy these videos as much as I did.

  The next part of this 6-part series is dedicated to the epic course that is AER201H1S - Engineering Design.

  • 12:31 AM
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