For Halloween: Halo Costume

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Halo 3 For Jesus

I've already covered that while we have politicians and lawyers making as much green and hay out of the fact that violent video games are evil, that games should not be violent and that violence in games is always bad and will rot civilization to the core ... that while they continue to beat the constant drum of "think of the children", that the Air Force thinks of the children in terms of getting them to be violent with a little Halo 3 to recruit them into real war.

So violence in media is bad, unless it is serves as an escapist fantasy before getting on with the real thing.

Now the New York Times reports that churches are getting in on the action by offering Halo 3 to their youth groups:

Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo — despite its “thou shalt kill” credo — celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.

-- Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church

The quite wonderful Aleks K rightly points out that this undermines the games industry in their efforts to maintain rating standards. It's hard to fight the good fight when the other side sometimes forgets there is a battle at all.

To be honest, I'd rather have fourteen year old kids hanging out in the basement of a church earning frags than, well, a good number of things fourteen year old kids might be doing otherwise. I just think if we're going to get into a "well, it's OK because" type debate we should have started with "well, it's OK because these games don't turn kids into criminals". The next time the media jumps the gun on some school shooter assuming it was all Counter-Strike's fault - I don't want them to go interview BatJack Thompson, I want them to call this priest. Tell them you've had a flood of kids come through your door playing a M rated game and the worst that happened was that they didn't give a donation that Sunday.

Halo 3 Great, Except When Generally Not

Microsoft can clearly take Halo 3 to the bank at this point ... kinda literally in fact. It has made a truckload of cash for a company which just shelled out big time for warranties due to overheating units.

A shame some of that cash might not, apparently, have been spent on actual Halo fans:

"I'm on my third copy of Halo 3," said Matt Gibbs on the Bungie user forum. "After my second Limited Edition copy was found to be scratched I upgraded to the Legendary Edition hoping it would yield a clean disk, and it did. The surface is perfect.

"But... I'm still getting read errors intermittently at various points... this is happening on a spanking new Xbox 360 Elite -- four days old."

Some owners reputedly exchanged their copies of the game two or more times in an effort to bypass the disc read error to no avail. Others fared even worse.

-- Halo 3 believed to cause disc errors, possible 360 failures (thanks Glinkster)

Apparently the big debate right now is whether Halo 3 is actually crashing 360's or whether it just gave them an excuse to turn on their machines again to crash them. Not really great news for the console just voted to win third place in a no win console war.

Shall we add that the one the best ways to play the game, online, is crashing left and right and in the meantime a debate flares up as to whether the game even runs in anything resembling a high definition mode? That last point possible being more of an indictment on the whole concept of "true 1080P" than anything else, mind you.

OK, so the game hit some snags. The one I'd really lay at Microsoft's feet is the manufacturing. Seriously, who fell asleep at the QA wheel there? 360's make better toasters than game consoles sometimes and you can't ship a game without a profound number of scratches?

Time to fire the one year old puppy from doing quality assurance, Redmond. Might be cute - but here's a free tip. Customers don't care.

Air Force Says M Is For Kids

On Gamespot Recent Updates [News]:

With the Halo 3 launch hype in full swing yesterday, The New Hampshire Union Leader reported on the efforts of a local group of Air Force recruiters to capitalize on the occasion. The Air Force cosponsored a Halo 2 tournament at an area GameStop store, with the winner set to receive a copy of the third game in the series.

However, that tournament was postponed by a GameStop district manager because gamers under the age of 18 had signed up to compete on the game, which is rated M for Mature (17 and older). But whereas GameStop sent eager minors away disappointed, the US Air Force stepped in to help them get their Halo fix.

The recruiters set up a party area in a nearby strip-mall parking lot, where the Union Leader reported that they could scarf down pizza, choke down Mountain Dew, and play Halo 2 on a TV "from the back of a pimped-out military SUV." According to the article, a 13-year-old gamer and three of his fellow eighth-grade classmates were there playing the game, which they'd been anticipating since Halo 2 came out in 2004, when they would have been 10.

Read Full Article, Air Force using Halo 3 as recruiting tool

So politicians get to beat the pulpit and complain that GTA is ruining America's youth with violence ... but if the government wants to use that violence to employ kids to actually kill people .... that's OK.

Nice. No hypocrisy there, no sir-eee.

Halo 3's "Forge" Map Editor

On Gaming Today:

Halo 3 just got a million times better with one simple, yet really sweet
addition. Campaign mode just got a whole lot more exiting than ever before
with the addition of the "Forge" map editing system, which was announced at ...

Read Full Article, GC: Halo 3 Map Editor

We've mentioned before that if you remove all the hype from Sony's "Game 3.0" concept - you pretty much just go back to good old days of programs liked DoomEd. This kind of user-generated content is something PC users have grown to enjoy, if not expect, for some time.

What's a shame is that Halo 3 won't share the same kind of possibility that Unreal Tournament III for the PS3 apparently will have - integration between the PS3 and PC platforms. Don't get me wrong - a Halo 3 map editor is a great thing ... but it's a shame the whole "Games For Windows" marketblitz can't get tapped for something useful (like PC users making maps and mods for 360 users).