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The characters presented in Halo: Reach are two-dimensional. The most important characters are nothing more than stock characters seen throughout fiction. The writing is horribly uninspired.

Reach was a failure, a terrible send-off to the series that was rushed out the door a year too soon and with severely misguided decisions like Forge World that added little value and distracted from the more important work.

We're seeing this reflected in its rapidly dwindling pool of players and the glut of used copies now available in stores. This is not the history of the Halo series. I remember how Combat Evolved held its trade-in value for years because no one wanted to trade it in."

First and most importantly, let's can the hostility. We're talking about a video game here folks. We should be mature enough that we can endure it being criticized and respond with a rational and civil argument. Seriously, bashing each other is not going to help. In some cases, this is an agree-to-disagree situation.

Re: Reach & Nick's Thesis
Reach has a remarkably weak story. It's short campaign is riddled with stock characters I don't care about making sacrifices that seems gratuitous rather than important. Heck, it feels like Bungie outlined the story with, "OK, so how do each one of these characters die?" before they even considered their personalities or the overall plot. One of my friends made the argument that Jorge is a deeper character and should be regarded as an exception, but big-strong-guy-with-big-gun-and-heart-of-gold is a stock character. I'm sorry, guys, but it is. There's nothing special or meaningful about him. He's just another cheap archetype stuck in the story to get-'er-done on a project that REALLY needed another year to complete properly.

Reach is a good game, but it's not a great game. It's single player campaign is a short throw-away, it's Firefight mode is neutered (there is no survival/horde mode like ODST, despite the misleadingly named "Firefight Classic"), and the multiplayer suffers from a severally broken spawn system and poor map designs. This is NOT the Bungie project I am used to, and I can only say sadly that they rushed this game out the door. They didn't have the resources to produce ODST and Reach at the same time, their managers didn't prevent massive feature creep (they admit Forge World wasn't intended as a feature of the game), and they didn't have the fortitude to delay the release of the game one year to finish it. They rushed something out and hyped it as the ultimate Halo.

Look, I like playing Reach. I am going to keep playing it. But I am realistic that this game could have AND SHOULD HAVE been a 10. It's more like a 7.5. And Bungie hasn't even admitted that the spawn system is completely broken, so I guess they have no intention of fixing it. :( I'm really surprised I don't see more discussion of this given Reach's spawning is far worse than Halo 3's.

Re: ODST
Relevant or not, I would say ODST had far and away the best acting, deepest characters, and most emotionally engaging -- the most HUMAN -- story of all the Halo games. It's a terribly underrated and under-appreciated title. It's hard to believe the story and characters were written by the same studio as Halo: Reach. I suppose it goes to show that Reach, being a much more expansive and ambitious title, suffered for a lack of focus.

Re: "Mum" vs. "Ma'am"
Just a little background on this. Jorge speaks his English with an an English-accent. To the English, "ma'am" is a common term of respect to address a woman, and it's pronounced just as we would "mom" or "mum". Nick heard right AND Jorge was not referencing Dr. Halsey as his mother. He was showing her respect. It's reasonable to be confused on this point if you aren't familiar with English English. Jorge does seem to have something of a child-to-parent relationship towards Halsey too.