Conan O'Brien is not great with video games. Not that that's stopped the carrot-topped talk show host, former Simpsons writer and arch enemy of Jay Leno from trying his darndest to get a handle on the ancient art of gaming, as recently he's ventured into the field with a series of segments on his show called Clueless Gamer, where he struggles to understand the appeal (and the controls) of blockbuster titles like Watch Dogs, Grand Theft Auto V and Injustice: Gods Among Us. It's probably this sudden interest in all things video games - for comedic purposes if nothing else - that landed O'Brien and his hosting partner, Andy Richter, cameo appearances in Halo 4. Okay, so neither of them are actually space marines, and it's difficult to see if their appearances were carried over to their in-game roles, but their style of banter is identical to the chat show. O'Brien and Richter recorded dialogue for a couple of UNSC grunts who appear in the hangar at the beginning of Shutdown, the sixth mission in the game. They stand silently in the background until an announcement which is meant to push the player into the next part of the level, but if you ignore those instructions and instead hang around with these two dorks they start chatting about how a couple of area rugs would really help the feng shui of the big industrial space hangar, and Conan's character worries that they're going to end up at war against an ancient intergalactic evil that the UNSC are gonna accidentally wake up. Just as self-aware and cutting as you'd expect from the comedic duo, and also totally bizarre, because why on Earth would you put these two in a Halo game? Next Tobias Funke will be making a cameo...
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
