The reach of Halo.

Bungie has compiled some pretty interesting stats on the first week of gameplay for their blockbuster swan song Halo: Reach, and the numbers are staggering. According to their online stat trackers, by 1:30 pm on launch day (9/14) the game had already registered more users online than the entire first week of Halo 3's launch. That may also be due to the fact that there are simply much more Xbox360 owners today than there were when Halo 3 was released back in September '07, but impressive nonetheless.

On top of that, of the 70 million + games that have been played in that week, Bungie claims that over 5,901 man-years have been spent playing Reach online.
That's over 51 million hours!
In one week!

"Halo: Reach...into your wallet"

Apparently the people at Bungie do very detailed tracking of their games, compiling data as trivial as the amount of shots fired, among other things, and a friend of mine who picked the game up at a midnight launch told me that same afternoon that he and his brother had actually beaten the game that morning......on legendary mode (that's hard mode for everybody else), so given the intense fanaticism surrounding the game I'm not entirely surprised.

But, damn...... !

Bioshock Infinite: Trouble in the district of Columbia.

The current hysteria surrounding the US immigration policy, or lack thereof, seemed to reach new heights this year after Arizona put its now infamous "may I see your papers" law on the books, and the issue has already made it into movies such as the Robert Rodriguez 'mexploitation' flick Machete, so I must assume that the team at Irrational Games, creators of the incredible first-person adventure Bioshock, had an ear to the street when they began work on the game formerly known as "Project Icarus"

This week saw the release of gameplay footage from that project, and the news that it's indeed the pseudo-sequel to Bioshock 2-Bioshock Infinite.

Yes, it's awesome.

The opening scene is a brave one for a video game, depicting images of racial caricatures cowering beneath a triumphant George Washington with the ten commandments in his right hand, the Liberty bell in his left and the words: "It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes"
As the games protagonist moves further into the mysterious city of Columbia, more protests signs read: "They'll take your gun.They'll take your wife.They'll take your business.They'll take your life."

With some politicians flirting with the idea of repealing the 14th Amendment, the line reads like a picket sign from an over enthusiastic Tea Party protester and it seems that the city of Columbia is dealing with the aftermath of some type of civil unrest pitting the isolationists against those pursuing a more open society.

Born on the 4th of July 2: Dead on the 5th of July

The theme in Infinite, just like the first two Bioshocks, is some aspect of American exceptionalism gone mad.
Where the first two installments saw Rapture as a metaphor for the height (or depth) of free market capitalism, Infinite's Columbia is looking like a twisted representation of American superiority, and of course its military dominance, depicted in a graphical style reminiscent of 19th century America.

Lead artist Shawn Robertson, speaking in an interview for GameInformer magazine explained that, "when you're trying to build a city in the sky, you need to have some grounding elements to it to make it feel realistic. "I feel like pulling from real history-but not sticking to it- gives you another grounding point."

In other words, anyone who still thinks gaming is a total escape from the issues happening in the real world, well,  it's time to find a new past time.