Red vs. Blue Season 3 Begins

Thanks to HavokDevNull for the news that Red vs. Blue Season 3 has begun! From the site: "Episode 39 'Best Laid Plans' weighs in at 8 minutes and 45 seconds and is available in Divx, Quicktime, and WMV. You can download it from our Video Page. Thanks for being so patient waiting around for it. "

Comments

It's Hilarious

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly worth the watch. The battle scene is the best.

Red vs. Blue is great

[Chris_Jefferson]

OK, I sound like a fanboy, but Red vs. Blue is actually quite good :)

I feel it's one of the best examples of "some people with some ideas, some time and an internet connection can make something funnier than 90% of the stuff on TV". If you haven't seen the first and second series, you really should.

This should

[Milo of Kroton]

This should how long last? Big video? Seed the torrent before site server death is someone!

Re:This should

[Signal_Noise]

Somebody set us up the Slashdot.

Re:This should

[mollymoo]

This should how long last? Big video? Seed the torrent before site server death is someone!

Yoda! You're back!

Re:This should

[SkipRosebaugh]

He's posting through Babelfish because he doesn't speak English. At least, that's what I think his journal says.

Awesome

[Mad Ogre]

I'm not sure why... but I love RvB. Something about it... It's brilliant.

Ob. Slashdotting comment

[mollymoo]

Woo! Let's link to a 50MB video from the Slashdot homepage.

Would you all mind awfully not downloading it for the next 11 minutes till my download finishes?

Thanks

Re:Ob. Slashdotting comment

[lukewarmfusion]

They're more than used to this kind of traffic. Not only have they been linked from Slashdot many times in the past, but they've scaled up to handle the bandwidth as it grew. From their FAQ:

"The videos are 320x240 to save bandwidth. Our first series, Red vs Blue regularly chewed up 170 Terrabytes of downloads in a month."

For those without any reference, bandwidth can run from "unlimited" (see Serverbeach) to paying $x/GB. When you're talking 170TB/month at approx $6/GB, you're over $28,000 in that month. Of course, if you're doing that much traffic and working with a host that charges you like that you need to switch fast.

this sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

i've never watched this before, and now i'm realizing why. someone should have voiced over a hamster or a wombat or something, at least animals can move around more than video game characters who raise and lower their gun for minutes on end to simulate talking. ... maybe i'm just old fashioned.

Re:this sucks

[falzbro]

i've never watched this before, and now i'm realizing why. someone should have voiced over a hamster or a wombat or something, at least animals can move around more than video game characters who raise and lower their gun for minutes on end to simulate talking. ... maybe i'm just old fashioned.

Here you go.

Re:this sucks

[RatBastard]

Considering the limits of their source material, they're doing a pretty good job. But you have to ask yourself something: What's more important? Quality writing or varied animation? For me it's the writing that makes it funny.

Re:this sucks

[DikSeaCup]

... maybe i'm just old fashioned.

No, you're just unable to appreciate the work that went into producing a very funny series of web shorts.

To put it more succinctly: You're just lame. :)

Re:this sucks

[hai.uchida]

So a home-brewed "underground" cartoon isn't to your taste. So what? If you don't get the joke, move along.

Shark Tale is in theaters now... Of course the story is horrible and the jokes were flat and tired when I first read them in Cracked magazine twenty years ago-- but that doesn't matter, right? After all they put tons of work into the 3-D animation making those sea creatures move around and talk!

What Is It?

[booch]

Why the fsck doesn't anyone bother to tell people what things are? I have no clue what Blue and Red is from this post. Clicking on the link to RTFM, I'm still not told WTF it is. Clue to people writing articles -- you need to tell me why I should care. Assuming I already know everything about what you're talking about is stupid -- if I already knew everything, I wouldn't need to read what you wrote.

Re:What Is It?

[ravenspear]

I have no clue what Blue and Red is

That's because your UID is too low to understand it.

Re:What Is It?

[mollymoo]

Q: What the hell?
A: Yeah, we know.

Q: No seriously. What the hell?
A: Oh. We just write scripts and then use videogames to act them out. It's a new style of animation that some people call machinima. It allows to make weekly pieces of animation with a small group of people.

Q: That was a long response.
A: Yes it was.

From the RvB FAQ.

Re:What Is It?

[Ford Prefect]

That's because your UID is too low to understand it.

I know what it is, so expect a maximum of 8776 Slashdotters complaining...

Oh crap. If every single one of them posts a complaint, then it's Slashdot Hall of Fame territory for this article!

Re:What Is It?

[0x0d0a]

I think that most people know what RvB is because it's achieved cult status.

Put briefly, it's a short set of video captures made in the popular first-person-shooter videogame Halo that are then dubbed with the voices of the RvB people. Basically, they make sitcoms.

The content is actually pretty amaturish, and frequently not very funny, in my opinion. However, RvB is notable for several reasons:

* It is a video series that is free. There are not many sizeable series of video files that are available for free on the Internet (well, legally).

* It is somewhat funny. Every now and then, RvB comes up with a really, really funny joke (the babies/pacifiers joke seems to be very popular). Their pacing is very uneven, though.

* It is notable in that it is an example of amateurs without the ability to either film the video in real life or to model and render this to be able to create a watchable show. It's used as a bit of a herald of the future, where easy-to-use tools will let people easily express their ideas -- as much as computers have improved ease of writing, so do we expect them to improve ease of video composition.

* Halo is a good game. People like watching Halo characters.

* Halo is made by Bungie. Everybody loves Bungie. Bungie made a series of great games and had the most amazing conspiracy theories and story analysis surrounding them -- no other game company has ever even come close. After they were bought by Microsoft, their "It's done when it's done" philosophy had to go (which didn't help the quality of Halo at all). Their current conspiracy theories are weak attempts to be as interesting as the earlier ones (the new ilovebees.com is blatant and in-your-face rather than just hinted at). However, there's still a lot of love for Bungie left out there.

What's your favorite quote from the RVB series?

[HavokDevNull]

The classic and my favorite has got to be..

"You killed Church you team killing fucktard!"

or

"It's not pink, it's lightish red"

Re:What's your favorite quote from the RVB series?

[dupper]

"I'm a pacifist" - Medic
"You're a thing that babies suck on?" - Caboose
"No dude, that's a pedophile." - Tucker
"Tucker, I think he means a PACIFIER." - Church
"Oh yeah, right. Man, I was TOTALLY thinking of something else." - Tucker

Easily one of the hardest I've ever laughed to anything online.

Re:What's your favorite quote from the RVB series?

[scoser]

"Women are like Voltron, the more you hook up the better it gets."

Re:What's your favorite quote from the RVB series?

[Iamthewalrus]

"How about if we agree that one of us sucks?"

Re:What's your favorite quote from the RVB series?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Did you see something weird Sarge?"
"Yes I did. Once when I was a small child, I saw a man who claimed to be my Uncle do this thing with a garden hose that still haunts me today."
"Woah, woah, woah. I meant did you see something weird just now, like 5 seconds ago?"
"Oh. Then no."
"What was all that stuff about your Uncle?"
"I keep telling everyone he wasn't my Uncle! He wasn't!"

Info

[Liotius]

Red vs. Blue is an online web show, using Halo characters. They use the Divx codec and they are are fairly large in they're amount of work completed as you can see it being they're third season. The ones I've been able to get a hold of revolve around the Master Chief who gives orders to fully vocalized named different colored Halo characters

Re:Info

[CoffeeJedi]

Master Chief isn't in it, that's Sarge, he's barely more intelligent than Donut and Caboose.
Master Chief was mentioned very briefly in the first episode, but it was jut a throwaway line to sum up the events of Halo, and explain why there is now a civil war.

Re:Info

[Anthony Liguori]

I saw both seasons in the entirity at the Alamo Draft House. It's an interesting little story about a group of soldiers stationed out in the Halo world. It's mostly a comedy of errors staring a spanish-speaking robot, a couple ghosts, and some really stupid people. All in all it's a lot of fun :-)

The creators actually stayed for QA after each showing at the Drafthouse. Gus even gave out the shirt off his back to one of the audience members.. it was, er, strange :-)

Read the FAQ

[Fr05t]

http://www.redvsblue.com/faq/?id=3

From the FAQ:
"Q: What is Red vs Blue?
A: If you don't know, why are you here?"

pls read faq

[earthstar]

I didnt know what this red vs blue was all about and I decided to ead the faq @
http://www.roosterteeth.com/faq/

It was hilarious....have a read!

Slashtorrent.

[merdaccia]

50MB downloads linked by /. ? No wonder they can't do the math.

Maybe /. should start running it's own BitTorrent tracker, and ask permission from the content owners to host it. When/if they say yes, the story can be updated with a link to the torrent, ending their misery and ours.

Re:Slashtorrent.

[erick99]

Now that is a good idea that deserves some discussion.

bad compression ratio

[Karma Sucks]

Why do the redvsblue videos have such a bad compression ratio for such bad quality video? I mean the file size is just comparatively huge. Not to mention that the movies are framed up and down by large black strips.

I've seen recompressed DivX videos of these same movies in much smaller size elsewhere on the net.

Something I've always wondered...

[EvilCabbage]

Who owns this stuff?

I mean, these lads create this animated piece by using somebody elses protected art / characters, which (to my understanding) means they cannot ever sell this stuff in order to make a living, anyone confirm?

Don't take this as me assuming these guys are trying to make a living off it, I'm just genuinely interested in who "owns" the end product.

Re:Something I've always wondered...

[CoffeeJedi]

they have Microsoft's and Bungie's total permission and endorsement. The Halo team loved RvB so much that they actually commissioned original cartoons to promote the game. Go to any store that sells XBoxen and watch the little promo video long enough, and the RvB gang will appear and start doing their schtick about why you need to buy an XBox.

That can't be it...

[Andy Dodd]

A little bit of reading and it was pretty easy for me to figure out what it was. So expect a maximum of less than 1000 posts.

Jumped the Shark

[Torgo's Pizza]

RvB reached it's peak midway through Season 2. Don't get me wrong, I think the production is great and I've watched every episode so far. But the writing has really gone downhill. RvB is best when riffing on gameplay elements or on the characters.

Where RvB failed is when they tried to introduce some sort of miserable plotline of evil poltergeists, "body hopping" and robot love affairs. It's good for a small chuckle, but it's become to hard to follow and the plot actually gets in the way of the jokes.

I nearly gave up watching, but stuck through it to Season 2. The lameass cliff-hanger convinced me that I'm really not missing all that much if I don't watch Season 3. I'll give their Sims 2 project a shot, but RvB is definitely on life-support.

Red vs Blue Upgrade!

[Mulletproof]

I hear RvB will be updating their animation software 11/09/2004. I've even hear they'll be adding new cast members, like Covenant actors with the upgrade. They've even got new vehical designs in the works, secret reliable sources tell me. Weapons too.

I actually liked their whole first season,

[88NoSoup4U88]

but season 2 showed some minor episodes (imho).

Hope they can recover, and show us some kickass episodes.

For more machinima (the term used for creating movies with game engines) action, check out
www.machinima.com

Re:Dodgeball

[Doc Ruby]

In politics, one ironclad adage is "never let them see your bare chest". Along with "never get caught in bed with a dead girl, or a live boy".

Re:Bitorrent?

[Warren_Canuck]

Could be because Micro$oft is footing the bill for the downloads.

Note: this is only their files server and not their website.

$ host files.redvsblue.com
files.redvsblue.com has address 207.46.174.151
$ whois 207.46.174.151

OrgName: Microsoft Corp
OrgID: MSFT
Address: One Microsoft Way
City: Redmond
StateProv: WA
PostalCode: 98052
Country: US

NetRange: 207.46.0.0 - 207.46.255.255

RvB

[colonslashslash]

What can I say? I'm delighted, I loved season 1 and 2 of RvB, I only found out about it a couple of months back from a Halo fanboy friend, and it had me in stitches. (Particularly the aformentioned pacifist / pacifier / pedophile joke)

I showed it to some friends round my place the other night, and whilst none of them being Halo fanatics, nor particularly hardcore gamers, they appreciated the humour and we had all had a good laugh.

As mentioned in a previous post, this stuff is better than the large majority of the crap that gets pumped onto our terrestrial / cable TV's all year round, kudos to Rooster Teeth. Keep up the good work.

Does anyone know if they will be doing anything similar with Halo 2 when its released, or are they moving off the FPS scene and sticking with the planned Sims 2 sitcom?