: It's supposed to be grotesque. Did Blur do that? I think they did.

: It's certainly more fearsome looking than it's more plant-like appearance in
: Halo 2, which compared to everything else was animated horribly.

: Bungie had high ambitions for it. Do you recall the one interview where they
: wanted to give it a slit for a "mouth" and use skulls as
: "teeth" when it talked? Compare that to how it came out. I'm
: sure a lot of it had to do with the technology at the time, but even in
: Halo 3, they just opted to not show him at all!

They also didn't go through with the Space Trooper and the Threshold gas bags.

: Through all of this, I'm trying to think back to how I was 10 years ago.

: 10 years ago, little Rev was 16.

Ten years ago, little Quirel Rasq'uire'laskar was a fourteen-year-old idiot. He doesn't get a say in much of anything.

: At the end of the day, I don't want it to be exactly the same. I can't go
: back and relive that, in that context, in that era. I can't get the old
: subtleties. That's ok.

This is sort of like how Truth was a scheming politician in Halo 2, but a two-dimensional zealot in Halo 3. If Truth had always been that two-dimensional, Halo 2 would have been okay. A lot of people would be satisfied with it. But since we got the Machiavellian Truth, the Zealot Truth couldn't compare.

So yeah, we're losing something awesome about Halo 2, and it's not being replaced by anything interesting. I could go to any movie produced by Hollywood that's nominally in the science fiction genre and get all the bombast and noise I can stomach. Halo isn't Shakespeare, but it used to be intelligent and nuanced. I could pick up a Halo game and expect it to be considerably better than the average Marvel comic. I can't do that with the new games, and now they're sucking a lot of the good stuff out of the old games.