Halo 4 marks the return of Master Chief, but the story belongs to his holographic Girl Friday, Cortana, the endearing exposition-bot who resembles Tinkerbell with more snark and less clothes. After three games’ worth of alien-bashing alongside the Chief, Cortana has exceeded her natural lifespan. She’s falling into “rampancy,” a synthetic dementia that causes emotional outbursts at narratively convenient moments. Halo 4 has high stakes — Earth might be destroyed, again — but it’s really a story about planned obsolescence, about a machine trying to outlive its natural end date. READ FULL STORY »
