Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)IMPORTANT: I don't know why the sellers think the kind of prices I'm currently seeing for this are reasonable, but as of the time I'm writing this review the cheapest price here is roughly DOUBLE what you would pay at the official Rooster Teeth website for the same DVD. (Rooster Teeth is what they call the group that makes this series.)
The Red vs Blue series is a great deal of fun to watch. Characters constantly throw around funny lines and find their way into absurd-but-amusing situations.
The series is an example of machinima, which refers to playing out a story by using the graphics engine of a video game. In this case they used the popular shooter game Halo. They basically use one character as the camera operator, and have him watch the other characters act out whatever needs to be done. The video is directed to a computer, and they later add recorded voices and edit it all together into coherent scenes.
These DVDs haven't been rated, so I'll try to give you a basic sense of what to expect. Since they use Halo to produce all of the images, you won't see anything worse in terms of violence or gore than you would in a game of Halo (which is rated as appropriate for teenagers by the ESRB). Generally, in fact, you'll see quite a bit less violence since Halo is a game about combat, where the violence is constant, and the characters in Red vs Blue spend most of their time talking to each other. HOWEVER there is a substantial amount of profanity. As they got to later episodes and realized that their fan base was turning out to include people somewhat younger than originally expected they cut back on that somewhat, but it still continues to appear. Also, the characters spend a large part of their time insulting each other in one way or another, if that kind of thing happens to bother you.
If you go to the official Rooster Teeth website, they allow you to download the current season's episodes (as well as some older episodes) in a low resolution format, playable in either Quicktime or Windows Media Player. That will give you plenty of opportunity to watch a few minutes and get a sense of whether you'll enjoy an entire DVD's worth.
Note, however, that there'll actually be a small amount of content from the episodes on the website that's cut when it's all edited together to make a DVD. That's because at the end of each episode it fades to black, and in many the character's keep talking for several more seconds. Each episode is only a few minutes long, and so when they're edited into a movie for the DVD they have to cut the sections where the screen is black in order to avoid disrupting the flow. In some cases they specially made an additional few seconds of "footage" to slip in so that they wouldn't have to cut any jokes, but in other cases they simply cut the last several seconds off of a scene. They never remove anything important this way, but if you're deciding between subscribing on the website to get the high resolution versions as downloads, or waiting to buy the seasonal DVDs, you may very well care about those small snippets that are being lost.
Each DVD also includes a commentary vocal track, a few outtakes, some mock-PSAs (Public Service Announcements), and some small jokes that appear if you click the right series of buttons on your DVD controls.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Red Vs Blue - Season One - The Blood Gulch Chronicles
Comedy "A gruff sargent. An unlucky ghost.A psychotic mercenary. A sarcastic slacker. Two morons. A tank... War is hell. In the distant future, ten soldiers battle for control of the least desirable piece of real estate in the known universe - a box canyon in the middle of nowhere."
Click here for more information about Red Vs Blue - Season One - The Blood Gulch Chronicles
