Dear Bungie and Microsoft, First of all I'd like to express my dearest appreciation towards Halo "1" for Xbox clearly. It is probably the game I have replayed most, and it has been an exciting experience each and every time. But one of the things I have always appreciated the most is the whole atmosphere thrown into it, through the use of a complex story-line, superb music and, over all, supreme Spanish dialogs with excellent actors. It is with the utmost disappointment that I find out that not only has Bungie decided not to hire the same great actors that gave a natural context for Spanish (or Spaniard, if you wish) users. Besides that, for whatever other reasons that, I do not doubt, might have seem plausible to you, you opted to give Spain a localization using American Spanish voices with its pletora of idioms for our old friends Master Chief, Cortana and the rest of the crew, using a text that steps over all the terms of its own that Halo 1 introduced to the Spanish audience with its translation. I am very sorry but, to put it straight and simple, that is cheesy. Not only does it ruin the continuity of the two games by wasting some talents that had already been proved more than satisfactory, and by changing the terms that Halo 1 used to describe its universe. Just imagine what your English audience would think if The Covenant would suddenly become Die Vereinigung, and Master Chief's military grade was turned into Ryoshu without any further explanation at all. Still, if it was only matter of "continuity" it could be bearable. But besides that, it is extremely cheesy, unfortunate and of little attention to your base of loyal Spanish users, from Spain that is!, (or, less emotionally, to how your decisions fit the market you are addressing your products to) because it reflects how little you have evaluated how American Spanish would "sound" to a Spaniard audience. First of all, it simply is not what we speak. Surely we appreciate the fact of sharing a language spoken by more than 300 million people. We can understand each other and communicate without barriers. But it simply is not the same. It feels foreign and strange to us. Would you have considered it OK for the whole English audience to use actors with a distinctive and closed accent from some small village in Scotland, reading dialogs full of slangy expressions with opaque meanings? Well, for a start it is a similar thing to us: it feels too peculiar of a particular place and only makes sense (when the dialogs MAKE sense, which is not always the case) when the character portrayed is supposed to explicitly show that s/he is from that very place (and last time I heard them, nothing in the story of Halo 1 made me guess Master Chief is from Mexico or somewhere nearby), while it is Spaniard Spanish that feels neutral to us and that draws away the attention of why his place of birth might be important to the plot. That's what makes it unfortunate. Next is what makes it cheesy. Spanish videogame players will be tying Halo 2 voice talents, wether they are good or not, to cheesy American Spanish TV serials starred by mediocre actors playing overacted mediocre stories aimed to an audience of, mostly, bored housewives. That is the American Spanish we have been exposed to most, and what most people will think about when they find out that Halo 2 uses the same accent that we are most used to place in the former context. This is already being commented in lots of community forums in Spain. It is the easy joke and hence the joke that Halo 2 will be the target of. A joke, that is, for those that do not care about the game. A lack of respect and a ruined experience to those who would want to love it, but who will be reminded of MC's weird origins and Cortana's peculiar speech synthesising engine each time any of them open their mouth. This is not intended to be some sort of xenophobic attack to the American Spanish community. I am sure they do have very talented actors, and that that exposure makes us having a biased view of their dialect, the same way that, most probably, they do not feel confortable with the dubs, intended for Spain, that so many times they unfairly receive. We are different markets that deserve individual attention. This time, they got a dub suited for their audience and we celebrate for them. But you just cannot put a community of almost 400 million people in the same bag. Halo 1 was a landmark in how much care and attention could be put towards the Spaniard community of XBox players, and videogame players in general. Many developers have followed since, bringing proper localizations with excellent Spaniard actors to their games. It came upon us as a rather sad and bitter surprise that XBox's flagship title, what was to become possible the best videogame of this generation, the one we had been anxiously waiting for years, had been dilapidated in such a ridiculous way because of a lack of perspective and care about your fan base. Still, those of us of the minority that can understand English might always decide to buy an imported version with original English voices (which is, whether you can understand it or not, quite preferable to American Spanish to lots of us). But it simply is not the same. A sincerely disappointed fan PS: The only way I can imagine we could have a satisfactory solution is to have Bungie and Microsoft issue, in a nearby future, some sort of patch with Spaniard voices, preferably the ones that, after Halo 1, have become the "original" ones to us, through XBox Live, if its size makes it possible, or through the DVD of the Official XBox Magazine for those that do not play online. The harm has already been done. Please, evaluate this option as a way to repair it. PPS: I would like to bring to your attention an initiative by some signing XBox users of Spain, to make a formal and public petition to Microsoft Corporation and Bungie Studios to mend this very problem. The petition is still barely one day old, has already >450 signatures, and counting. It can found at http://www.petitiononline.com/xbox2es/