"Halo 4" Review

by Alex Hill

1/5

Halo 4 is not the worst video game. It is the worst TYPE of game. An unbearable, spineless endeavour that can't even be bothered to be obscene. A design-by-committee Frankenstein's monster of cribbed video game fads, and franchise-destroying change for its' own sake. Not even Halo: Reach struggled to reconcile what its' audience needed from the most basic controller input. This is a travesty even for the people who made Windows.


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2012 Blacklist

Before I announce my Fave Things of 2012 list, here now are several things that would have been my favourite of the year, if they didn't fuck up spectacularly in some way. Here are the things that I have disqualified.

Here is this year's Blacklist:

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An Open Letter To Doritos

My name is Alex Hill. I live in Canada, and I am here to tell you what a pain in the ass it was to try and contact anyone even vaguely involved in the production of Doritos. I've spent the last hour trying to solve a completely unrelated problem with the Doritos Halo 4 Double XP promotion. That was my intent before the gauntlet. Now I am sitting here hoping your corporate headquarters gets struck by lightning and burns down.

I have been met with nothing but incompetence and frustration with the sorry excuse for customer service this brand employs. Your websites are a Kafkaesque labyrinth of despair and idiocy. Dead ends and non-existent e-mail contacts that I could only find through Google detective work. Nothing on any official web-page regarding this brand revealed information anyone could ever need to take part in this brand's cross-promotion, or even how to contact customer support. Many of these pages assume you are an American citizen and won't allow contact unless you have a U.S. Address.

At first I was just kind of upset that I'd been cheated out of some points in a fantasy video game. Now I'm actually hoping someone at Doritos gets set on fire. That is how badly Frito Lay, Pepsi-Co and everyone else whose fingers are in that pie are at having an internet presence in the 21st century. I don't know what sub-humans are employed in the creation of this product, or its' promotions, but they need to be on fire.

No really. Fire. Screaming painful agony. Maybe it's not a fair thing to wish upon another person, but it would go a long way to making up for the bullshit I just went through.

Eat 10,000 dicks.

-Alex Hill

Halo 4: Pre-Order Pandaemonium

I have never seen any product enter the free market this terribly. Halo 4 is stumbling into stores this November like a drunken ex-husband on thanksgiving, knocking things down and shouting racist slurs to Grandma.

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Halo 4: "Armour"

I've got a couple of articles on the way that are unusually optimistic(or at least positive-thinking) by my standards. Garrus, the Gamecube, and Phantasy Star Online are all on their way to this blog.

But for now, let's shoot some more fish in a barrel:


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Halo 4 Wallpaper

So I get an e-mail from Microsoft telling me about "my piece of the Halo 4 puzzle". Forgive me if I can hardly contain my excitement. <_<

Well, if nothing else, the Halo series usually has some decent Alternate Reality Game promotions. Hell, Halo 2's "I love bees" practically put them on the map. This could be somewhere just barely not approaching the level of fun if I somehow found other people with other pieces to put this thing togeth-

Wait, what's this? If you open a new tab with the picture, it literally says something like: "h4_11"? And if I just adjust the numbers in there, I can get the entire picture?

So, they're confident enough to give you a vague puzzle to promote their upcoming software, but not confident enough that anyone would cheat? No wonder 99% of Reach players are console-modders. Well, I've got nothing better to do:


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