The second one has a mission where you just kill "rogue" American soldiers followed by the next mission where you are in the middle of a battle of Russian and American soldiers and are supposed to kill both of them.

General Shepard was portrayed as a bad apple betraying “true america”. Alas at least nowadays that game is mostly taken as shipping material.

(Also curious how the series barely has the stomach to depict American cities destroyed or harmed and has to resort to European cities, despite most of the playerbase being from the US).

You already found the answer.

Halo is kinda tragic to me because unlike CoD it at least has good gameplay & writing in it, even if it is pretty much just USMC recruitment propaganda.

Which is part of why Reach is my favorite installment because it doesn't do that "RAH RAH MARINES" bullshit like the Master Chief Trilogy or ODST do. It's got a darker, less hopeful atmosphere with a more neutral depiction of the military - which I appreciate. My favorite mission is actually the one where you're isolated from your squad and have no real objective and are just trying to support the Army in whatever way you can to try and get as many civilians out of the city as possible in the face of the Covenant's genocidal attack. It really establishes the stakes as you stomp through a ruined city littered with corpses literally watching innocent people being slaughtered for no reason as the local soldiers struggle against an overwhelming onslaught. You actually forget for a minute that you're playing a super-soldier because you end up feeling like just another grunt, no longer on some super special secret mission but instead just trying to survive and save lives in a devastating war you know you're losing. It hits in a way that no other Halo mission has ever done before or since, especially when you finish the mission and get the relieved thanks of the people you managed to save and know that even though you couldn't save everyone you still managed to make your efforts count for something.

Reach is ultimately what convinced me that Military Science Fiction as a genre doesn't necessarily have to be "RAH RAH MARINES" bullshit, like it often is. It can tell genuinely compelling stories from the perspectives of soldiers in combat that aren't just fascist propaganda and the only thing it's missing is writers willing and able to tell those stories.

Honestly now I want to write an article about Reach lol.

Yeah some excuse Halo as fighting Bush/evangelical inserts when in fact its more like fighting evul caliphate that “hates our freedom”.

Muslims, Asians, Russians, Latins, etc.

Anyone sufficiently un-Western, really. Even better if they're communists.

I played the games as a teenager because it’s what all the super cool American kids did.

There are definitely threads of that in the game, but it for sure glorifies American/British military action in West Asia and let’s face it, a massive amount of CoD players are either literal teenagers or young adults that have very limited world experience and knowledge of geopolitics.

I've never heard this take before but it sounds like cope tbh.

Admittedly it's been years since I played the game but I played enough when I was still in my Western Chauvinist phase that I can basically flawlessly remember every detail of the campaign and from what I can remember none of it felt like criticism at all. If that really was the intention then I think it was a poor attempt, especially given the message appears to have been lost on just about everyone.

Deconstruction aka a tepid “war is bad”. Riveting, never done before. So daring.

May I introduce you to Fursan Al-Aqsa, a game made by a Palestinian where you get to shoot the IDF? It may be the only game where you get to fight as the good guys against western imperialists.

I went to Medium specifically to get off Substack.

As much as I prefer Substack's design, layout, and features the website is unfortunately owned by Nazi sympathizers. Not only do they permit Far Right publications but they actively promote them and the owners have gone on record saying they don't care when confronted because they're making money off the Nazis.

That's why I left Substack and won't return unless they denazify, which they probably won't.