Halo, Microsoft’s hit video game series, went on sale at 12:01 a.m. yesterday. Just before that moment, Mr. Gates was hand-shaking his way down the line of customers. Among them was Mr. Bollard, 18, who said the 73 cents was all he would have left after buying the game.

Even before the doors opened, more than 1.7 million consumers had preordered the game, which is available in three versions priced from $60 to $130.

“I don’t know how I’m going to feed myself,” Mr. Bollard said.

The success of Halo 3 is critical for Microsoft, which has struggled to get its Xbox game players into homes around the world. While it is primarily a game machine, the Xbox 360 also plays DVDs and movies downloaded from the Internet. Microsoft views the game machine as an entry point into the home, where it may serve as an entertainment hub.

But the game machines have not been profitable.

Microsoft hopes that the new Halo futuristic shoot-’em-up game, which is exclusive to the Xbox 360, will persuade more consumers to choose its game machine over the PlayStation 3 from Sony or the Wii from Nintendo. Although the Xbox — and Halo 3 — appeals to hard-core gamers, Microsoft’s game machine has been outsold lately by the cheaper and less-powerful Wii.

Microsoft has sold nine million Xbox 360s since the introduction of the console in 2005. But Nintendo has sold just as many Wii machines since their debut late last year, largely because their simplicity appeals to a broader group of players. The PlayStation 3, which also was introduced in late 2006, has sold about four million units.

Halo 3 might also help to restore the Xbox 360’s image, which was tarnished by serious design defects that caused as many as a third of the machines to suddenly stop working. Microsoft said it had corrected the problem and was fixing defective units at no charge.

For the serious gamer at least, all was forgiven yesterday morning. More than 10,000 stores across the country, many of them converted into miniature carnivals Monday night for fans awaiting the game, opened their doors to long lines of Halo fans who started camping out as early as Sunday afternoon.

Microsoft said it would not announce sales figures until today, but the new game has been expected to be the most lucrative introduction of any entertainment product. The previous game in the series, Halo 2, set a record for first-day sales in the entertainment and media industries when it brought in more than $125 million in the United States in its first 24 hours.

“In our first few hours on sale, all signs indicate that we will indeed have achieved the biggest entertainment retail day in history,” Microsoft said in a statement.

“This is the Mecca of the video game world right here, right now,” Carl Gunther, a 23-year-old marketing researcher from Brooklyn, said Monday night as he joined hundreds of other fans in a long line outside a Best Buy in Midtown Manhattan.

“Halo is the ‘Star Wars’ of this generation,” Mr. Gunther added. “Thirty years ago my father waited in line to see ‘Star Wars,’ and I know I’ll tell my kids I stood in line to buy Halo 3. It’s like saying you were at Woodstock or something.”

Microsoft’s shares rose yesterday by 1.7 percent, closing at $29.56, on the expectation of strong sales. The Halo franchise, which has sold more than 15 million copies since its introduction in 2001, has been Microsoft’s most successful foray into the entertainment business, anchoring the growth of the video game unit.

Sony of Japan, one of Microsoft’s main competitors in games, has struggled to provide comparably popular titles for its PlayStation 3 console. Games exclusively for the PlayStation 3 this holiday season include the fantasy diversions Lair and Heavenly Sword.

While Sony and Microsoft have focused mostly on young men, the core base of video game players, Nintendo of Japan has pursued a different strategy of appealing to broader demographic groups with easy-to-use products like its Wii console and DS (for dual screen) hand-held player. Super Mario Galaxy, potentially the Wii’s biggest seller of the year, is expected to be introduced in November.

Halo 3, a science-fiction game set in a future when humanity is battling for its survival against a hostile alien species, has generally received excellent reviews in game publications. The game has been produced in 17 languages and is being released in Europe today and in Japan tomorrow. One potential hiccup is that in some cases the packaging for the $70 version can scratch the game disc; Microsoft said yesterday that it would replace any unusable discs.

In Atlanta, an arc of young men lined a balcony at Lenox Square, the city’s biggest shopping mall, as they awaited the game’s debut at a GameStop store. Ari Velazquez and Dan Gibson, roommates at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said they had converted their apartment into a sort of high-tech video game cave, sealing windows with blankets and cardboard and stocking up on ramen noodles, chips and white-cheddar popcorn.

“We expect that, like, no one’s going to go to class tomorrow, and the teachers are going to know,” said Mr. Gibson, 20.

The narrative of the Halo series is fairly standard science-fiction fare. Halo 3 begins in the year 2552 and an alien alliance called the Covenant is continuing its quest to dominate the galaxy by activating immense ring-shaped doomsday devices called, unsurprisingly, Halos.

An interstellar commando known as Master Chief, controlled by the player, must stop them, not through negotiation but rather with an arsenal of high-powered weapons.

Halo 3 completes the saga, and the fate of Master Chief and the series’ other characters has been a subject of as much speculation among game players, as the eventual outcome of Harry Potter was among readers of fantasy fiction.

“We’ve been in Internet seclusion for like weeks,” to avoid any leaks about the game’s plot, Mr. Gibson said. Mr. Velazquez gestured toward the balcony in the Atlanta mall and added, “If I found out the ending of the game right now, you’re going to have to hold me back from jumping.”

Joseph Hunter, 19, a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, said the series has “sort of become an obsession” and said entire dormitories at Morehouse face off against one another in Halo combat.

Regarding Halo 3, he said, “I knew that if I didn’t have it, my life would be over.”

Halo 3 is rated M for mature, which means the game is not intended for sale to unaccompanied consumers under 17. Most customers in line appeared to be in their 20s and 30s, but there were also children accompanied by parents or other guardians.

Outside a Circuit City store in Miami on Monday night, Patty-Jo Toor, a nurse from Orlando, accompanied her son, Neil, 16, and two friends, Phillip Allanson, 15, and Alex Ferguson, also 15. She said the group had set up an Xbox 360 in their hotel room so the children could play all night after buying the game.

“All three of these kids got good grades in school, so I brought them here,” she said. “They are worth the drive.”

Naturally in this self-conscious media age, for some fans the lure of transient celebrity was perhaps as appealing as Halo 3 itself. Outside the Best Buy store in Manhattan, the first person in line, Uche Nwachukwu, a 28-year-old Web site designer from Staten Island, said he had been waiting since 6 p.m. Sunday.

“I camped out for Halo 2, and I camped out for the 360 itself, but I was always third in line or fifth in line,” he lamented Monday afternoon, standing by his red folding chair with a bag of Starburst candy on the seat. “This time I was determined to be first. I won’t lie to you, I wanted to be on TV and in the newspapers. I’ve slept about 20 minutes since I got here, but it’s been worth it.”

Rachel Pomerance in Atlanta, Geannina Munizaga in Miami and J. Michael Kennedy in Seattle contributed reporting.

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Halo 3: The ‘Third Wave’ of Destroying the U.S.

Bill Gates in Your Soul

http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2007/09/26/halo-3-third-wave-destroying-u-s.html

For all those individuals salivating about the new Halo 3 video game, ask yourself the question: what is the difference between man and beast?

Reviewing numerous trailers and detailed articles from Negroponte’s disgusting excrement— Wired Magazine, on the launching of the new video game Halo 3, the first thing that comes to the sane mind, is: What kind of perverse mind would develop such a thing to lure in so many youthful and vibrant minds? Could not these youthful minds, spend their precious time working to push the frontiers of science, by discovering fusion power or rediscovering the universal principles in Classical physical science and art? What about the space program? Are people being inspired in these areas, to conquer the difficult scientific problems, mankind has never been challenged by before? Could this not be another form of distraction, to deter one’s mind away from solving or even thinking about the global economic breakdown crises? Thus, what is the intention?

The mediocre details of how much money will be made by the immoral computer and Hollywood-related industries, have been documented, by LPAC in several places. The more substantial subject for investigation is: How does one young adult get corrupted into becoming a psychotic-mass killer, or a mere useless drone for the likes of Anti-Nation-State Fascists, such as Felix Rohatyn, George Shultz, or even their dupe, Dick Cheney? The most obvious answer to any thinking individual— is to dehumanize the image of human beings.

There are many tedious details and complexities that go behind the production of such games as Counterstrike, World of Warcraft, Entropia Universe, EVE-Online and Halo 3. However, once that dehumanizing process has been accomplished, the ability of making useless wars (like that of Iraq, today) and mass killing of innocent people, as in the case of the Virginia Tech incident, are stepping stones for the unleashing of a New Dark Age.[1]

Russell’s X Generation

[LaRouche%27s+Triple+Curve+Function] Take a look around you for a moment. It is quite apparent, if not fully obvious, that the physical economy of United States, coupled with the financial system is collapsing at an accelerating rate, worse than what we experienced during the Great Depression. Two clear indications of this are the not-so-sudden physical collapse of the Minnesota bridge, and the Depression-style housing and banking crises, all of which could be dealt with rationally, with the employment of LaRouche’s Emergency Reconstruction Act of 2007 .

With that reality, an investigation by the current LaRouche Youth Movement counter-intelligence team is ongoing, to look at the deeper implications of this “Brave New Cyberworld.” Two things come up that are prevalent with the creation of these games. One, is the mental psychosis of the vulnerable adolescent or young adult, who are gullible to these fictions. The second is the fostering of specific types of “virtual world” games— supposedly designed for mere entertainment, such as the hedonistic Second Life, or Halo 3. Either way, the dehumanization process occurs in any instance, by the first-person shooter games’ precision to kill another object, or by the adoption of an arbitrary set of anti-scientific, anti-principled rules, like that of Second Life, or even the great Ministry of Truth—Wikipedia.

The influence of such satanic and perverted characters, as the British Round Tables’ late Lord Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells—and their lackeys Norbert Weiner, John von Neumann, and the still existing nut-case Marvin Minsky— in crafting the kind of “information theory hoax,” which fostered the insane immoral beliefs of technological and population “equilibrium,” i.e. depopulation, mixed with the axiomatic computer-linear thinking, has created a potential self-doomed society. Historically, the destruction of human society has never been blatantly direct. The more conniving method by the oligarchy is to get the population to induce its own doom. [2]

The vicious attack on the human mind by this cybernetics cult has been one of the key tricks by the oligarchy, that has arrested the development of the youth, today, preventing any consistent intellectual and political motion to change the world.

If you take any significant interval of history that has produced a morally humane impact on the people and its posterity, you will see the knee jerk reaction by the oligarchical forces to diffuse that impulse. Look at the reactions against Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Now compare that with the totally irrational attacks on Lyndon LaRouche[3]and his initiatives, typified by the incompetent bozo Kepler site that obviously plagiarized the LYM’s physical scientific program.

Our generation must reject this evil cultural warfare and begin to reflect on what has been controlling our beliefs and opinions. We must focus on how we can change this nation, before it disintegrates. Take the Virginia Tech incident as a warning. We all mourn in the memory of those who were victims, but we must not let the negligence and apathy of this evil intention decide our posterity’s fate.