: You can't go back. You can't undo five or six years of continuity with a
: reboot, because nobody actually likes reboots. You can't go back to the
: way Halo used to be and make it as popular as it used to be, because Halo
: has changed. The old fans have gotten older. They've drifted away, because
: their tastes have changed or because 343i dropped the ball when they tried
: to cater to those tastes.

What about in comics?

: How about another ODST game starring Alpha Nine? It starts out in a makeshift
: hospital room with Buck congratulating the Rookie on surviving a Mauler
: bayonet to the jaw, and wishing him a swift recovery. Then Dare calls. ONI
: is short on muscle and she needs Alpha Nine for another job. Covenant
: hardware is accumulating all over Africa as scavengers pick the
: battlefields clean. Hundreds of thousands of tons of Covenant technology
: is flowing into ONI warehouses and back alley weapon shops to be sorted
: and examined.

: And somewhere in Cairo, someone is killing all the weapon dealers.

As long as it's a real detective story and has nothing to do with military service and honour and duty.

: "Meh. Boring. Let's go see what the Forerunner are doing."
: -343i

Pity they just turned out to be monkey dicks like the Didact.

: I rather like the idea of the Ark Portal being disabled for now. It's just
: too important and too much of a game-changer to re-enter the story too
: soon. I'd even put the kibosh on finding new Halos for a while. Assume
: that they're evenly distributed throughout the galaxy, and we've already
: destroyed the two closest to Earth and Covenant territory. Oops. =P

Well we might be safe from an array activation...

: "We are the only ones with a complete understanding of our technology.
: Your warships, your weapons, the food processors that feed your colonies,
: all of it relies on us to continue. And now that we can drop the pretense
: that our technology is handed down by the gods, why don't we improve that
: armor you're wearing?"

But weren't the Brutes the only race to:

• raise to advanced civ
• bomb back to stone age
• raise to civilisation
• and then bomb themselves back again

11 out of 10 for tenacity but it looks like self preservation can't get the better of their innate nature. I quite like that idea - a race that just wont learn. :-)