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The first is an RTS for PC and Xbox 360, the second is going to be a new game that is being co-created by Peter Jackson and Bungie (not sure what genre it will be). Here’s hoping that these games will turn out to be as great as the previous games in the series.
The trailer for Halo Wars (the RTS) is online, although I haven’t downloaded it yet.
It seems I was wrong; according to the Halo Wars website, the game is exclusive to 360. Unless that only applies to consoles…
Good move on Microsoft’s part.I don’t know what to think yet.I’m downloading the trailer, maybe I’ll have an idea then 
It’s actually going back to Halo’s roots, I can only imagine it will be close to the game as it was originally planned?
A RTS about Halo sounds interesting but there aren’t really any details available yet, guess we’ll have to wait and see. I’m not sure what to think about the Halo game Peter Jackson will work on, although I wonder if it has anything to do with the movie. Halo: the game of the movie of the game? One thing’s for sure, I guess Halo 3 won’t be the end for the franchise (not that this comes as a surprise).
Remember Street Fighter the Movie? shudder
But Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh are actually good writers. I can only imagine the sort of poetic action that Jackson will bring to the series. 
As long as it’s not merely an excuse to repackage Halo with the movie’s plot and models of the live action actors then absolutely.
Hmm… that’s debatable. While, I love the LOTR and King Kong movies, the scripts were the weaker points of those movies IMO. I mean, there were some very good lines, but there were also some that could have been done a lot better. The “modern” speech in the Lord of the Rings springs to mind.
Anyway, I just watched the trailer of Halo Wars. Looks good. Is this supposed to be the before Halo 1, or are those spartans other survivors of Reach?
It’s supposed to be before Halo 1, apparently around the time of the first contact with the Covenant. Though that brings up several timeline inconsistancies so perhaps it’ll change.
Solo - You really thought so? LOTR has great writing in it, just take a look at any of Theoden’s lines.
Halo certainly has a similar sort of epic (in the poetic sense… particularly all the scenes with dialog from the Covenant) feel at the LOTR movies, so I thought it would be a great fit.
I think I’m a bit more interested in Jackson’s game. I have a feeling it will be like King Kong the game. Like a FPS/third person action game.
[quote=“Abadd”]Solo - You really thought so? LOTR has great writing in it, just take a look at any of Theoden’s lines.
Halo certainly has a similar sort of epic (in the poetic sense… particularly all the scenes with dialog from the Covenant) feel at the LOTR movies, so I thought it would be a great fit.[/quote]
There were lots of great lines in the LOTR movies, but the noteworthy ones all seemed to come from Tolkien, rather than the additional dialogue that the movie writers added. I don’t have a copy of TLOTR book on me to check, but if you can find some noteworthy lines that Theoden said that weren’t based on what was in the book, I’ll certainly retract my view about those.
It’s not that the writing in the LOTR movies sucked, more that Peter Jackson and co seemed to think it was necessary to dumb down the script in order to appeal to a broader audience. In many places it didn’t have the same medieval style to the dialogue. Also, the writers were far too “in your face” than they needed to be, flashing the ring around every other moment, making characters speak about obvious things that were happening around them, etc. While you could argue that these things helped translate the story to a visual medium, a little subtlety can go a long way, and raise questions for the viewers, rather than have everything spelled out for them.
I have gripes about some of the changes to various characters as well, Frodo’s in particular. The comedy, whilst amusing while watching it, didn’t fit in with the seriousness of the world a lot of the time. Something like Legolas single handedly taking out an Oliphant would be very unlikely to happen in Tolkien’s world. The lack of respect the characters had towards the stewards… Gimli slouching on the throne, Gandalf whacking Denethor in the face, etc, I can?t imagine those scenes ever being written by Tolkien because they don’t make sense when keeping things consistent with how his world works. The Lord of the Rings trilogy were good, entertaining action films, that translated the themes of book into movies very well in most places, but they could have been so much better if they were treated less like a Hollywood film, and more like the serious, ancient themed saga they were based on.
Saying that, I don’t think Halo will be as hard to turn into a movie (or in this case, movie style game) as LOTR was, especially considering that it was a story written in modern times to begin with. The writing and characters of Halo 1 and 2 are much more in line with what you’d find in many action films, and given Peter Jackson’s love of monsters, epic battles, etc, I can only imagine good things coming out of this, so long as Bungie make sure he keeps things consistent with the universe of the current games and novels.
Lets hope so, or if this is meant to be another group of Spartans, for example, there’s a good explanation behind it. Whatever happened to the second group of Spartans anyway (I realise they came after this time period)?
The second group of Spartans? What do you mean?
Unless I’m getting things confused, Dr Halsey was going to train up a second group of Spartans after Master Chief’s group went through that transformation when they were about 13 year old. I can’t remember what happened to them though.
Yeah I really need to re-read the books, but I don’t think Halsey is involved in the training of the Spartan IIIs (If indeed they even exist, which the cover of the new Halo books suggests they do). Looks like they’ll be in the new book, so we’ll have to wait till then.
I’ll have to look up the specific lines, but unfortunately my DVDs are on loaner to a friend 
I know what you mean by some of the scenes not flowing quite as well as they could have, and some of the more light-hearted scenes not fitting quite perfectly, but given the source material, I think they did a very admirable job. Face it - the LOTR books are not meant for a mass market audience. Tolkien spends pages and pages just describing the way certain hills look in the distance, or goes off on tangents about the customs of the world (which help build lore, of course, but make for boring storytelling). Jackson and Walsh did a great job of distilling what really made the story interesting, and punched it up just enough to keep people entertained for three 3-4 hour movies (it’s hard enough to get people to sit still for a 2 hour movie, let alone 3+ hours).
I thought the 1st LOTR was amazing a master piece in every sence of the world and Jackson and Co did wonders to fit all that into a 3 hr film, its was the last 2 films that went bit downhill in my book , but still one can’t away what Jackon done, when really not even a 40 hr films would be enouugh to put everything from the book.
Anway Peter Jackson will always have my respect for Bad Tase and the awesome Brain Dead .
Jackson’s project does sound really interesting actually, hopefully all the vague potential hinted at adds up to more than a glorified “choose your own adventure” experience in practice. Brain Dead/Dead Alive is awesome I agree, as is Heavenly Creatures. I’ll even pick King Kong as his best dramatic achievement overall, though about 20 minutes of it was a waste of time and CG.
I can find dissatisfaction with a lot about the LotR trilogy, but it’s so much better than I ever would have believed a film adaptation could end up so I’m happy to suspend criticism. It also qualifies as an historical achievement without precedent in filmcraft for the sheer logistics of it, and it’s nearly inconcievable anything will ever match it on the same terms.
At any rate I can’t think of anyone from the film scene who’d be better to try something like this.
Certainly, the book was never intended to be made into films. Tolkien himself sold the rights to the producers of that animated version without much concern about who the buyers were because he believed the scope of TLOTR prevented it from ever being done justice in film.
Cutting out scenes from the Lord of the Rings wasn’t the problem. If anything, that helped convert the story into a film. Removing unnecessary scenes like the Old Forest and the pages and pages of poetry helped keep the story focused, which is essential for a movie. The problems I have with the movies were mainly some the scenes that were modified, and the original message distorted, when they would have worked so much better if they were kept closer to the way Tolkien wrote them. Things like the emphasis on sorcery being used to win against Sauron/Saruman as opposed to mortal men overcoming the obstacles themselves, the use of more modern and Hollywood inspired dialogue to replace lines/wording that the “mass market” might not understand, etc. I think the story could have sold reasonably well just by being based on name alone; did they really need to bend parts of it to modern themes and movie conventions to get people to watch it?
Btw, I hope this doesn’t sound like I hate everything about LOTR movies… far from it. I think the team at WETA did an amazing job at bringing Middle Earth to life, the soundtrack managed to fit the story almost perfectly, and some of the emotional scenes that the writers wrote were done exceedingly well (the scene after Moria in particular comes to mind).
Have you guys listened to the BBC radio play of The Lord of the Rings? Now that is a good adaptation of the story Tolkien created. Furthermore, Brain Sibley manages to tell the story of all three books in around 12 to 13 hours, which isn’t too much longer than the three extended editions of the movies put together. If someone made a mini series with the world, music, etc of Peter Jackson’s films, and dialogue closer to one in the radio play, I think we’d have best adaptation of Tolkien’s book yet.