I am in an especially antisocial mood this weekend, having spent quite a bit of it on the road, and the rest of it bored out of my gourd at an, admittedly very pretty and scenic, office deep in the countryside. This has been one of those weeks where you kind of have to show your face just for the sake of it, and I hate that sort of thing.
On top of which, I have been playing yet more of HALO: Campaign DEvolved today, and that has left me in an unusually foul mood. As I pointed out in my long-form review of this particular fork-up, we now know where Halo Studios is going with future games, and all of the signs are EXTREMELY bad.
Everything about the remake SCREAMS “lazy cynical deeply corrupt cash grab”. It lacks all of the features that made the original HALO series great for non-campaign gamers – multiplayer, four-player split-screen co-op, Forge, Firefight, Theatre Mode, etc. All of that is missing.
The level designs look amazing, to be sure – this is how HALO: Combat Evolvedalways should have looked. The lighting and textures finally do justice to the setting, tone, and epic scale of the combat. But the modernity for modernity’s sake really just pisses me off. If I have to listen to Cortana tell me, yet again, what I ALREADY KNOW I am supposed to do, because I have played the original game, and the remaster, so many times that I have lost count, I might just uninstall the damn thing.
Yeah, Bloobs, I KNOW I am supposed to secure the grav lift when going up to the Truth and Reconciliation! Shut up and let me fight!
And don’t even get me started on the prequel missions. I simply do not want to play them. Lieutenant Williams pissed me off so much that I want nothing to do with them. It is true that her animosity toward the Master Chief – and the SPARTAN-II programme in general – is well rooted in the lore, because of the whole historic beef between ODSTs and SPARTANs, but a bull-dyke girrrrrlboss mouthing off like that, outside of ODST armour, is just ridiculous. All of that is before we get to the sheer absurdity of female ODSTs in the first place.
THIS is what ODSTs were really like:
Playing the V-card does not work in that kind of company.
Well, it was a great 25 years – except for H5:G, which we shall not discuss. Or, more accurately, it was a great 10 years with Bungie, followed by a sort of WTF moment from 343i, followed by a “seriously, dude, you’re f***ing with us on purpose now” moment, followed by years of frustration and blue balls, and now, effectively, rigour mortis has set in to the deceased corpse.
The problem, of course, is that Microslop will not let the dead rest in peace, and is insisting on… doing things to the corpse, which, again, we shall not discuss, because that’s just gross.
Good song, that. Great example of old-school doom metal.
Anyway, the point is that the world moves on, and so must we. So let us get to the lovely lady of the week.
This here is Victory Peyton Adcock, age 27 from the FUSA, and she is a really for real model, doing, as I always say, whatever it is that models actually do.
Happy weekend, all.
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