With a Whimper

Carlos let me back into his house this weekend so I could play with his big pussy again. After he got mad at me for too much heavy petting, Carlos and I watched Willow for the first time in 15 years for some reason (which was fun and enjoyable and infinitely better than the last movie I tried to write an entry on (Assassin's Creed)). Once the movie finished things took a turn for the usual and he showed me his (C)1976 Starship Troopers board game again, which I had forgotten he had.

He'd never played it, as no one should, since like many SF board games it was clearly written by and for autists with approx 4-5 hours needing to be spent just on learning the goddamn rules for starting the game. This is pre-ironic Starship Troopers, btw, so imagine a time back before Paul Verhoeven was able to make it a palatable satire of fascism. Centimeter-sized cardboard hexagons with confusing numbers on them, yellowed sheets of paper for the players (no one) to jot down the strength of their Terran or Arachnid armies, a multi-piece gameboard with hexes that looked more like a shitty beehive, the works. I read through the rulebook and called him over since I discovered someone had started to underline things so his copy was no longer 'mint', and sadly discovered that the highlighting of what you would think are important rules wound up filling almost the entirety of the first 5-6 rules pages, pages that cover simply how the fuck you're supposed to go about performing a turn in that game.

You know when you get a used textbook and the previous owner tried to highlight the useful passages, and like Reese in Malcolm in the Middle ended up just underlining every sentence on every page? Like that.

We also discovered that whatever poor soul used to own this thing had written notes in the campaign sections of the book. Copious notes in the first few missions, noting which side received which units, then lesser marks as the missions grew in number and complexity. The last few scenarios had zero notes. Either this poor bastard had run out of friends willing to try to crack the enigma of a terrible game and discarded it out of frustration, or they made a blood pact to rid their lives of this waste of resources collectively. I refuse to consider something even more sad happening, this wasn't some estate sale of a dead relative since it's barely used for good reason. No love is attached to this game.

At this point, I specifically began to make fun of the extremely amateurish depictions of Robert Heinlein's power armor (or as the rulebook refers to him "the dean of science fiction writers". The old crusty dean, IMO, worth far less than the institution gifts him. Prove me wrong, I've read everything from The Roads Must Roll to Friday. Stranger in a Strange Land fucking sucks nowadays. Fuck you.). I get that initially the concepts and imagery of science fiction were difficult to convey and depict, but it was 1976. Kubrick had ultimately proven 8 years earlier that science fiction was art, goddamn imagineers under Disney's whip had already churned out countless memorable and imitable futurist designs of civilization we'd never reach. By 1976 you shouldn't professionally have things that look like some 7th grader's notebook doodles where your supposed immensely powerful Mobile Infantry are clothed in what looks like the Michelin Man's ghetto cousin. Where the fuck are servomotors supposed to be located in a shitty segmented anthropogized marshmallow holding what looks like a cardboard cutout of a 1st grader's idea of a gun?

ALL this culminates in my main point of the night, where Carlos told me that he had all 5 Halo games for his xBone, and asked if I wanted to play with him. And I did. I played with him good, to the point he had to go change his laundry, and left me alone to play with myself. And now we all have to hear about it. I'm going to start this chapter with a story.

*I have a personal note here I excised because it's sappy and not hilarious, but it's merely a complaint about my own health circa 2002 and is meaningless to how much this story winds up sucking.*

There are multiple books written of the Halo universe, which I owned, hardcover, (most of which are not bad) that delve into the backstory that Bungie kind of tried to insert into their games, half-assedly, kind of, mainly relying on dumbass nerds. There's even a spinoff called Halo: Reach(don't play it). Bungee kind of tried to half ass their way into making the definitive shooter videogame of this generation, and they did, and it's all their fault. Redpills, gamergates, all the toxic shit that spills out of /pol/, it's all on them, since it's doubtless a single piece of shit hasn't ever played a Bungee game.

We played through the first 4 Halo games, some were remastered (Halo CE stunk, Halo 2 was good to the point of possibly being extraneous) Halo 3 was not remastered and more entertaining because of being able to play with the Arbiter and the nostalgia but more for the fun of melee attacking grunts with that bladed Brute weapon (brutes suck and are terrible). Carlos then had me play the beginning of Halo 4 and it... well first off made no sense since how the fuck is the opening level supposed to start with the quasi-interesting possibility of a stranger trapped in a strange land but then devolves into the Master Chief fighting the same enemies once again, except this time some of them are enemies with teleport powers.

Then he had to go get his clothes out of the dryer, and I started Halo 5. Halo 5 sucks. I've only played the first level and it's trash. The opening cutscene is sub Avengers 2 level, daring anyone to continue watching an invincible army of armored Hitlers effortlessly eliminate a confusing army.

What's WORSE is what happens after the cutscene. Carlos almost tricked me to starting the game at the last level and it's only slightly less confusing.

COMPLAINTS: Halo plots 2, 3, 4, & 5. Only the first Halo is not met with any significant criticism regarding its storyline. The continued Halo story is proof of stupid fuck morons with less pigment than talent having a distressing amount of influence on nothing of consequence mattering. Every Halo story after the first obe makes little to no sense, and the endings are so emotionally unsatisfying it's like Lost: the bideo gaem. They create mystery, and actually accidentally invent a cool culture behind the Covenant, and then do NOTHING with it. And somehow, Halo 5 is at the bottom of the garbage bag and is soaked in gross-ass stinky water that condensed out of the other turds you dumped in there and forgot to take out for multiple trash days. And you know the biggest problem? The Halo series could have gone somewhere, and been actually good.

Instead they castrated themselves by insisting on focusing solely on the extremely short timeframe of the Master Chief as he travels between Sci-Fi adventures of murdering hundreds of thousands of aliens with their own weapons. My biggest problem is that they for some reason use the likenesses of the fucking voice actors as the characters. Do you know what's interesting about animation? That I can recognize a voice coming out of a character that is in no way a copy of someone . There's no fucking point for Nathan Fillion or Luke Cage to actually BE Spartans, particularly since they shouldn't ever have their stupidass helmets off, anyway. The point we've reached in culture where we're required to have our voice actors mocap themselves so people can recognize them is depressing and stupid. Halo 5 is only a few years after the Master Chief defeated the greatest threat the universe has ever known and he & Cortana sacrificed themselves, doomed to live on a derelict ass-half of a spaceship for hypersleep eternity.

If you wanted to make a GOOD Halo you'd have fucking restarted the series hundreds of years after the end of 3. A trilogy ends for a reason, it's supposed to give us some sense of closure and finality, and instead Master Chief resets to shoot new villains rather than new protagonists that might actually be antagonists fulfill the actual point of the Spartan project, which was ensuring the iron fist of the interstellar fascist dicatatorship. THEN they accidentally come across the prehistoric Master Chief, and everyone realizes what they're created for shouldn't be what they wind up accomplishing, and it turns out the new AI based off Dr Halsey is actually the bad guy.

Instead all we get is a shitty interactive movie where the Spartans are so ridiculously huge they look like Gods of Egypt characters. Seriously, the new Spartans are so inhuman they don't look like augumented homo sapiens, but a completely alien species which is ironic since the new Spartans are already adults when they enter the program. Fuck you. Carlos swipe right.

The fleeb contains all of the fleeb juice. Fuck donald trump.