Herro 4

I went to the midnight launch of Halo 4 thinking I could snag one of the free T-shirts for the first fifty customers. I arrived at around 12:04, and I was the two-hundredth of so person there. In fact, I was dead last. I didn’t think it was going to be that popular, since it was a console exclusive. Earlier, I was kicking myself for not pre-ordering. Those feelings went away after standing in line for twenty-minutes at the regular line-up. The pre-order line was twice as long as the sales line, and it wasn’t moving. At all. I couldn’t understand why, even with all the people there, the sales line was taking so long. It wasn’t like waiting in line at Starbucks. Everyone was buying the exact same thing. The cashiers didn’t even have to ask what you wanted, all they had to do was immediately produce a copy of Halo 4 and take money from your greasy hands. Somehow, people made it difficult. The pre-order line was for people picking up things they had already paid for. In theory, it should have taken no time at all. In theory. All you should have to do is produce a slip of paper and get the matching product, then jetpack out of the store. One guy was taking up no less than three clerk’s time for over ten minutes. The store was only supposed to be open for an hour for the event. I was personally worried I wasn’t going to get through in time before closing.

I did manage to get codes for in-game armour, which later appeared to be un lockable even without the codes. So really, they wasted paper and ink printing the codes out, and my time entering in the two over 24-digit long random codes into my system with only a controller.

The first thing I discovered, upon opening the game, was that there were two discs, ala Battlefield 2, with no clear indication which disc was for what. Typically, a shooter has one disc for multiplayer. I put in disc one, and trying multiplayer prompted me to insert disc two, which forced me to restart my system, then install the disc, which took about five to seven minutes. I screwed around by modifying my armour before jumping into any matches, and was surprised when I unlocked two achievements just for that. Then, starting the multiplayer in earnest, I jumped on Big Slayer and was surprised to see an old, touched-up map from Halo 3, and thought to myself, “How lazy.” I know people have their favourite maps, but the point of buying and playing a new game is to play a new game. If I wanted to keep playing the same maps, I’d go and play Halo 3, or Halo ODST, which had the same maps. In summation: Three games in the Halo franchise have the exact same map. The only change I noticed, as I looked around dejected, besides the graphics, was a mech suit. I immediately ran screaming and jumped inside, as this is really all I ever wanted out of life. I played around with the controls, thinking they must have nerfed the mech suit somehow so it wouldn’t be as awesome as it looked. Seconds later, I had scored my third kill. It was exactly that awesome, and awesomer still. It even had a button for a power-stomp. I was eventually hi-jacked, but I couldn’t care. I’d already cum.

I went up about five levels in two matches, without my bonus Mountain Dew XP.

The rest of the game then immediately decided it was going to be same-old, same-old.

I tried the campaign today. In the past I remarked that in Halo your character is always in a dramatic, slow-motion helicopter/plane crash every level or more. The level starts with a space battleship crash. That’s the entire level. Not only does it crash, but other ships crash into the ship as it crashes. Then, all those ships crash into another ship, while yet another ship crashes into yours. The next level picks up in the wreckage of all the crashed ships. Sometimes I worry that Master Chief gets off on it as much as he gets off on holographic women, like he’s in a David Cronenhberg movie.

I had yet to see a single new enemy. The game supposedly takes place four years after Halo 3, in which the Covenant lose, and he defeats the Flood. Halo 4 basically says, “Aw hell no!” to that idea, and gives him a billion more of the same three main enemies to fight. Think about how much the Germans changed in between WWI and WWII. The Covenant didn’t change a bit. They still have the same mustard stains on their armour.