BUYERS of the highly-anticipated Halo Reach will be served by staff trained to ask them what exactly they are doing with their lives.
Released at midnight, the latest instalment in the Xbox franchise sees players do the same thing they have been doing for the last nine years but with slightly different pictures.
Roy Hobbs, a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, is acting as a consultant to local games shop MurderZone.
He said: “I’ll be taking customers through the theory of a godless universe and asking whether the four billion-year journey of evolution that precipitated their existence is best continued by trying to get a power up for a plasma rifle. Then I’ll ask if they want a loyalty card.”
The move is part of a ‘responsible retailing’ campaign to ensure that game players are fully aware of the monumental gift they are pissing away while sat on their sofas.
Hobbs said: “As well as explaining that there is no ‘respawn’ in real life and that regret is not an option once your overdeveloped thumbs are rotting in the ground, we’re also letting the god crowd have a crack at them.”
Priests, rabbis and imams will patrol game shops, knocking copies of Halo Reach out of customers’ hands and pointing out that when the almighty creator willed the universe into being, it was not so Call Of Duty Deathmatch could exist.
Some game creators have pledged that future releases will display real-life achievements in the corner of the screen that players could have managed while they have been playing, including reading a book, forming a meaningful relationship or getting happily shitfaced.
But software developer Wayne Hayes said: “If I was an overweight teenager living in an identikit provincial pisshole with a tawdry family, no social skills and a horrifying IQ, I think I’d want to be a space soldier from the future, too.”
