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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Bungie, Part I

There is a new "ViDoc" out from Bungie. It details the rise and eventual fall of a company that only made decent products when they weren't burdened by the enormity of success. It is the story of a company that was founded by a bunch of college buddies renting out a cramped, stinky room, and ballooned into a faceless monolith that charges $70 to have explosive diarrhea once every few years.

Whenever a new Halo game was in development, Bungie would release "Video Documentaries" about their progress. They're certainly not the day-to-day in-depth look you'd get from Peter Jackson's video diaries, and they're more PR than anything, but I looked forward to seeing how much this company could lie through its teeth when saying how "awesome" Halo 2 was. I wrote my thesis on how that was such a steaming pile of dog shit that the games industry still hasn't quite recovered. Because of that one game, we have Xbox Live, and thus a dependence on violent, stupidity, and sequels to gray and brown FPS military masturbation.

It is a 60-minute long look at how a small company of RTS game designers ruined video games.