No doubt there is considerable enthusiasm for the rumored couple minutes of Halo 3 at this year's E3, but I couldn't help thinking about the Goddamn deathmarch the people over at Bungie have been in for what has got to be going on eight years now. I guess I shouldn't invent motivations for them. As people are bored by the time we have created the third panel of a comic, we may represent a statistical abberation. Maybe they still like Halo. You know? Maybe they are unstoppably enthusiastic. Maybe they are angels and they can fly around the fucking room.
As a mental exercise: I really like caramel, but if I had to bathe in fucking caramel and eat it for every meal and fucking wear caramel for clothes, and then go to a building made out of caramel and work with sentient hunks of caramel I may find my taste for caramel diminished.
I don't doubt that Master Chief will carry himself in a valiant manner. I heard that he fights a polar bear in this one, and though slow to anger ursus maritimus - the White Devil - can prove a canny opponent. But Halo is no longer a game, or even a franchise - Halo is Microsoft's beachhead in an increasingly savage conflict. Bungie is ordnance. And what is ordnance if you do not expend it?
This and other thoughts culminated in this comic, which could be a part of a larger series but is probably content to be a single strip. One of the best things about E3 is the ability to thank a person directly for their contributions to my idle hours. Very often I will disappear into a game altogether, which I guess it itself a kind of compliment, but I am not given to expressing sentimentality here in the post without it being deeply couched in some kind of irony or insult. E3 allows me to thank the Avatars of an Irrational or an Obsidian directly. This comic is an attempt to do the same.
You might have heard where the thinking has gotten on the contentious Wii issue. While grazing fertile Kotaku, I saw a link to a "naming and branding blog" called Snark Hunting, whose lumbering host Igor suggests (for various reasons) that the name could not possibly be Wii. This notion has supposedly been debunked, but the idea brings such comfort that I am loath to be rid of it. I perceive the concept as being mantled in a soft fur - eminently pettable.
(CW)TB out.
