This inverted perspective extends, brilliantly, to the manual that comes along with the game's "Limited Collector's Edition." While the game's plain-jane $45 version comes with a guide written from the human perspective, the bulked-up $55 edition (it also comes with a DVD) has the exact same handbook written from the alien perspective. Both books cover the same materialthe weapons, the combatants, the Byzantine back storybut with hilariously different interpretations. The human guide calls the littlest aliens "Grunts" and says that "they will often panic when faced with superior forces." The alien guide calls them by their actual name, Unggoy, and purrs that they "will as ever fight well with their comrades." More pointedly yet, the aliens refer to their defeat in the first game as "The Atrocity at Halo." Who wrote this thing, Noam Chomsky?
Of course, you could argue just as easily that Paul Wolfowitz wrote the humans' guide. The narrative seems awfully familiar: a "good" force, convinced of its moral superiority, hacking through a faceless, undeterred horde that's driven by religious fervor. Ahem. Halo 2's designers have denied that their game was at all inspired by the Iraq war or that they're taking any partisan stance. I think they're telling the truth. Though some of the early locales do look, creepily, like burned-out Middle Eastern cities, it's hard to argue that a game that makes killing so much fun is antiwar. The game's storyline owes as much to the florid style of Star Wars as it does to the florid style of modern geopolitics. And, as I've written before, the concept of seeing yourself through the eyes of a foe isn't an entirely new one in video games.