No, I meant something along the lines of "Jason Jones cutout in Halo 3 and Marty cutout in ODST" but I was being dumb.

: I said just a few posts ago that when you first find one Cortana makes note
: of it.

Oh wait, she does? Huh. I don't remember that at all.

: Hard to argue with you there, except... what do you mean about the player
: being helped to be made aware of their presence?

The game doesn't really point the way, but there are objects in the world that react weirdly to the presence of the terminals. For instance, Cortana's lines on Halo are sort of strange when entering that phase pulse generator area and then reacts curiously about the terminal itself, and 343 Guilty Spark floats to and interacts with the final terminal on The Ark.

: and the audio logs in ODST only tie into the main story in one short
: sequence (right around the lab) in helping to explain one character.

Even on a purely plot level, they explain how the ball got rolling in the game. And that's to say nothing of their important to the overall narrative; they form a parallel structure which completes the weird Inferno thing the game has going on.