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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"Red Vs. Blue Season 9": Review

by Alex Hill

2/5

I try not to review individual seasons or episodes of TV shows or web-based content, but I think this is a special case. The folks at Roother Teeth are the poster boys of Machinima (machine cinema, animating pre-made video game content for the purposes of fan-fiction). For eight seasons, they trotted out the same characters in similar situations, but have always managed to draw entertainment from the well. It was almost always amusing in a juvenile way, and the dialogue was always a fast-paced collapse of logic in the face of stupidity. If you didn't like a joke at first, they'd build and build on it, and a new one was always around the corner.

This is also the second season featuring Monty Oum's frenzied choreographed fight sequences, utilizing motion capture and other assets not found in the Halo series these guys normally work with. But they happen to a completely new cast of characters, in a different time period, in scenes that appear randomly and out of order inbetween the machinima parts. They don't overlap or compliment Church's exile in any way, or vice-versa.

Season nine of Red Vs. Blue has identity issues. It's two barking heads on the same shoulders.


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"Halo: A Fistful Of Arrows" Review

by Alex Hill

4/5

Over the course of a year, a man going by the username "Leviathan" has been digitally painting a short fan-comic. It's called "A Fistful Of Arrows". His goal was to shed some light on the fate of a character the source material could not be bothered to care for. In the process, he has explored in unblinking detail why these characters and situations could have been something great. He took characters who were largely forgettable, and found out why they should have mattered. He wrote dialogue and events for the same characters from a multi-million dollar corporate turd, and did so with sometimes shocking precision.

One man on his own time did a better job with the same material, than people who were paid over the course of four years. Levi Hoffmeier paints circles around Bungie and Microsoft Studios. He rummaged through the hollowed-out carcass of a truly wretched game, and fashioned it into something valuable.

Bungie, Part II

Part I is here.

I remember many years ago reading an article about how Bungie started playtesting their games with, I kid you not, actual soccer moms. Unfortunately, Google can only locate snarky forum posts that use this sort of information as ammunition. That's the kind of things 12-years try to use as an insult for a game someone else likes. Maybe Marcus Lehto is trying very hard to pretend it never happened, like George Lucas with the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Can you imagine priorities this stupid in another medium? That's not even selling ice to an eskimo. That's marketing a white-supremacist romantic comedy to Spike Lee. That's selling a book to a Tea Party rally.  If Bungie were a car dealership, they would be trying to appeal to the armless demographic by making every steering wheel a bear-trap.

Halo 3 stands today as the single most hyped anything in the history of consumerism. If Jesus comes back, he won't have as much build-up as this insipid swill received. It didn't fix much of what was wrong with the last game. It was still a confusing series of bullshit confrontations where it's impossible to tell how much damage has been inflicted. It still lied about the functionality of its weapons, in a genre where that's kind of important. And there's still virtually no engaging story or characters to speak of.

But at least it was pretty to look at again, and had a good soundtrack, so it was only mostly a failure. And more importantly, it revealed that the folks behind the games actually WERE good at something:

Community pandering.

Halo Reach: Appendum

The following is a list of thoughts I had surrounding Halo: Reach, and its developer. Mostly stuff I felt did not belong in the review proper. Little things. Big things. Most of them are needlessly stupid problems that would have been inexcusably easy to fix or remove, but which for some reason no one working at Bungie could be bothered to.

"Halo: Reach" Review

1/5

This is an ugly, miserable experience. Here is a game that breaks its own rules in practically every meeting of two players. Here is a game where, when the enemy uses the Shotgun, it functions as a combination of Sniper Rifle and Orbital Laser. When you use the same damn gun he's using, cheese comes out. Like Play-Doh through a meat-grinder. Nothing in this game functions the way it's supposed to. Halo: Reach actually justifies rage-quitting.