There's a new Alternate Reality Game spinning up for Halo 3, God Damn them - God Damn them to hell. I know perfectly well that I am being subjugated by a sophisticated marketing effort, that the best one can accomplish in these games is to get a real good look at the teeth before the mouth closes around you. I type this even as the rabbit holes stand open in two other windows. I don't presume to speak for the entire species, but there is something about secrets that does bit the mind.
I tended Bee last time around, and each night held feverish attempts to assemble the puzzles. But the puzzles presented were never complete, like the ones you might find at a yard sale. One may lose many hours in these doomed attempts, and those missing pieces barb you, and set you alight, until your spirit hangs like a burning tapestry in the breast.
I didn't mean to get involved this time, and I was glad of it, but then I read this fascinating comic without knowing it was an entry point into their cursed warren of lies and mystery. Maybe if I fax them a scan of a Halo 3 preorder, proof that their sorcery has taken root, someone over there will release me from the geas.
I trawled through the EB database on Monday, trying to index all the games between now and the end of the year which demand my attention, and it is quite simply too large to post in-line. It's seriously something like sixty titles, and these aren't just titles I'm curious about, they're titles I would buy today if I saw them on the shelf. This mysterious list includes games from all platforms except the Playstation Portable, because after the DS I simply quit compiling it. We're fucked.
Obviously it includes the heavy hitters exclusive to each platform, in addition to delicious "free range" titles like Orange Box, Rock Band, skate, The Club, and so forth. It also includes things that are more tuned to my own palette, like DK: Jungle Climber, My French Coach, or Puzzle de Harvest Moon, and games for whom I will be the sole consumer, such as Culdcept Saga. I say it every year, but with so many vital platforms in play this time around it's even worse. I wonder how many amazing games will be lost in the whorls of this perverse holiday ritual.
(CW)TB out.
