Halo Reach beta welcome video is mortifyingly down wit' da kidz

Features
By published

Bungie's intro vid is cool like your dad at a rave in sandals

But at the Halo: Reach beta hands-on preview event the other week, I was forced to. You see we were presented with this video as an intro the beta's new features. It was supposed to be cool, and talk to its audience on a real, one-to-one level. In actual fact, it was so awkwardly, agonisingly desperate to be cool that I had to suppress a laugh so hard that I nearly burst my throat all over the wall in front of me. And that would have been a shame, because I was eating a nice cake at the time.

Imagine a vicar at a warehouse rave. He's wearing sandals and socks of course, but he's also adorned with a backwards baseball cap and a huge gold chain. He's dropping words like 'dope', 'ballin' and 'pimp' into every other sentence without knowing what any of them mean. At one point he talks about doping his pimp balls. He's saying all of this in an upper crust English accent and putting out shouts with the DJ for some Spandau Ballet, who he's just got into. That's how cool this video is.

Above: Aisha would probably say something really cool about this

You've got Aisha Tyler (apparently an actress and comedian; being British we had to look her up) proving how much she likes video games and is Just Like You because she talks like a twat. Every proclamation of badassery that comes out of her mouth is more trite and spine-twistingly embarrassing than the last. It's like watching a car start to crash in slow motion, then realising that the car boot is full of kittens, then realising that the car is heading towards an orphanage, then realising that the orphanage is a converted petrol station. But then it all becomes so bad that it's actually pretty hilarious, and the kittens turn into clowns and the orphans turn intoAnt and Dec.

If it's trying to be cool, it fails. If it's trying to be ironic, it doesn't layer it on anywhere near thick enough. But in a weird sort of way, we're really glad it exists. Even if it probably did cost more than our cars.

David Houghton
David Houghton
Long-time GR+ writer Dave has been gaming with immense dedication ever since he failed dismally at some '80s arcade racer on a childhood day at the seaside (due to being too small to reach the controls without help). These days he's an enigmatic blend of beard-stroking narrative discussion and hard-hitting Psycho Crushers.