: I'm pretty sure he could've shot down the Chief's Pelican on Shutdown. Other
: than that and maybe the floor thing, which I addressed, I don't see what
: he did that was stupid. If that one mistake blows it for you though, then
: sure, I guess he's too tropey for you.

Tropey... not really. It's just that the tropes that went into him weren't used very well. It's like every trope that went into him was used to communicate "This is a bad guy", and not much was used to give him character. And he didn't feel like a credible threat, so, no great hurry on my part.

: What counter-arguments? You gave a pair of quotes and linked to a TV Tropes
: article, which I didn't realize until now and which I'm not going to read
: because I'd like to get something done today besides reading TV Tropes.

Really, Vagueness? You're going to pretend that all I said were those two quotes?

: and as I countered, that wouldn't necessarily be fun...

So, did you find the Hog run at the end of Halo 3 to be boring? Would it have played better in a cutscene?

I'm not thinking of something quite on that scale, and definitely on foot, but I can't see it as boring or frusterating if done properly.

: if he did it in a
: cutscene, it might be interesting,

Maybe. Probably not.

: and you know the Chief's going to survive,
: so what does it change, really?

The point is to make the player feel like he's earned it.

: What's your point?

I'm saying that if the Didact DIDN'T have bigger guns than the Prometheans had, he had the facilities to make them.

"Oh, but he doesn't have the designs to make Sentinels."

Hey, if ancilla are as common as Cryptum made them out to be, he had the processing power to design heavy artillery, even if it was a few centuries behind "Forerunner state-of-the-art".

: Where are you getting days or weeks?

It's a SWAG, Vagueness.
How big is New Pheonix? How many cities are on Earth? What is the Didact's threshold? How large does a city have to be before he'll compose it?

Assume that it takes five minutes to target a city and compose it. That means that he can compose 12x24 or 288 cities in a day. Assuming an average population of 500,000, that's a total of 144,000,000 people composed.
I remember some question about whether the 300 million figure applies to Earth, Humanity as a whole, or was just retconned by 343i. That said, I think it would take more than a day to compose Earth.

: Where does theory come into it? The Librarian's ghost specifically told him
: there were many gifts in this gene socket or whatever that got activated,
: including an immunity to the Composer.

How does that immunity work?

: Who said anything about every level?

I wanted to play it safe and make sure that I didn't miss anything.

: Also where did the soap opera descriptor
: come from?

Terrible lines, cheesy drama. I figured that 'soap opera' was an applicable appellation.

: |:

You going to recommend any good animes? Everyone else does.