It’s time for REAL TALK.
I’ve been ignoring Halo 4 for the last few days, partly because I’ve been giving Assassin’s Creed 3 every possible benefit of the doubt I can muster (and I’ll get to that in a bit, believe me), but also because I’ve been diagnosed with Stage 4 Shooter Fatigue. Essentially, unless a shooter has amazing graphics, or has a really compelling narrative (or, barring that, at least some interesting characters), or at least is trying to do something different, it’s really hard for me to give a shit about shooting thousands of enemies in the face. In the immortal words of Jay Cutler: “DOOOONNNNTTTTTT CAAAAAARRRREEEEEEE.”
That being said, I listen to gaming podcasts and read all the major sites, and they all seem to really like Halo 4. And my friends seem to like Halo 4, even the ones who don’t really care about multiplayer. They assured me that the game is well paced, that it mixes up the action, that you’re never bored.
So, after finishing a major story mission in AC3 (which, really, I’ll get to, because WTF), I decided to give Halo 4 another shot. Maybe I was being too impatient; maybe I was too focused on my pre-conceived notions about shooters to allow myself to be truly objective. After all, I’d only played the first 2 missions of the campaign; I knew there was still a lot more to go.
So I started up Mission 3. I immediately got a bad feeling when I immediately recognized the form that the mission was going to take. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a ship’s outgoing transmission is being jammed, and there are 2 relay stations on opposite sides of the planet that need to be un-jammed in order to clear up the signal. Right? Like we all haven’t done THE EXACT SAME THING IN EVERY GAME EVER MADE.
But wait! It gets “better”! We finally have new, non-Covenant enemies to shoot! And some of them teleport.
Oh sweet mercy. Oh sweet sassy molassy. Oh sweet fucking merciful crap. TELEPORTING ENEMIES.
Halo 4: fuck you. All future games that feature enemies that teleport: fuck you, too. I’m officially done with teleporting enemies, the single cheapest and most bullshit tactic in games. It doesn’t matter what genre, either – it pissed me off in Diablo 3, and it didn’t exactly sit well with me in Dishonored, even though I could teleport, too. As soon as I fire on an enemy and that enemy decides to warp out of the way of my bullets and land on my head, I am turning the game off, removing the disc from the tray, and setting it on fire.
___________________________
*sigh* The rest of this post will have to wait for another day.
Shouts From The Couch 
One thought on “a special episode of Real Talk”