Like Vagueness said, he wasn't running. :P

: Since when has pride been a synonym for 'stupid'?

Depends on your viewpoint. I view most people as prideful as the Didact as "stupid." They lack the ability to stop building themselves up and looking at things more objectivley.

: The Didact is an idiot.

As to this point and your point above, Vagueness already said what I was going to.

: Or how about the rest of his approach to killing the Chief? You mentioned
: that the Didact was at least throwing Covenant and Prometheans at him. But
: he lured the Chief through an entire army of both in order to get himself
: released. And if he bothered to ask Jul to catch him up on current events,
: he'd know just what the Chief accomplished a few years ago.

Yes, the Chief defeated those who the Didact has already said are beneath him.

And honestly the Didact didn't have a wide variety of resources at his disposal. Just the Prometheans and Jul's remnant. And like he said in the last level, the Didact was more focused on delaying the Chief so that he could fire the Composer, at which point the Didact would have succeeded no matter what the Chief did.

: No, it's not justifiable. Like you said, it's a trope that's been used and
: abused to the point that it's a cliche.
: Now, tropes aren't bad, and even cliches can be used to tell a good story.
: But when they're not used well, the audience is going to be comparing this
: story to the better ones they've read/watched/played. I call it the
: "Bad Coffee Effect".

Well, considering this trope was used to tell a good story, I guess the trope isn't bad. :P

: Now for the Chief's luck.
: I don't mind it being used to explain why he's a one-man-army, or how he can
: jump from a Dreadnought into an African jungle. But when it's being used
: to justify simian-level IQs, I've got better stories to enjoy.

Unless you provide an actual example of "simian-level IQ," I'm gonna pass on this one.

: No, no, that's pretty much what it boils down to.

No, no, that's pretty much too simplified. :)

: Another Villain of the Week is firing a beam weapon at Earth.
: Yawn.

Another alien empire trying to exterminate humanity? Yawn. :)

If you start boiling story elements down to their barest meaning, you're not going to enjoy anything.

: Halo 4 has none of that setup. Sure, those people were blasted, but what
: happened to them? Why was the Chief spared? What sorcery is this?

Um, pretty much what happened to Tillson and the others on Ivanoff Station? They were turned into Prometheans with fractured personalities and not really living. The Chief was spared because the Librarian was able to manipulate his genes and awaken his immunity to the Composer. Same kind of genetic manipulation introduced in Cryptum, really.

: Oh, what was that? It was all explained in the terminals?
: Sorry, but not only were those terminals painful to watch, but they required
: me to exit the game and go to Waypoint to watch them. That is not, by any
: stretch of the imagination, a good way to tell a story.

Yes, the Waypoint exclusivity of the Terminals was one of the game's worst parts for me. They should have been on-disc.

As for being painful to watch... wuh? :) Perfectly fine with me.

: After which you had to escape from the Flood after their sudden but
: inevitable betrayal, fight your way onto High Charity, and then blow
: Installation 04-2 up in order to stop the Gravemind. And if you even got
: that far, you had fought your way through the Covenant Schism.

I was talking about the accomplishment of the goal of deactivating the Ark, not escaping the ensuing chaos. In that case Halo 3 has pretty much every other Halo game beat. :)