Daniel Radosh at the New York Times laments the dependence of games on cinematics for storytelling, and alleges they are stunting the medium's development of its own storytelling vocabulary.

While I agree in principle with his point, essentially this is just another "pig pile on Halo" story; since it's the biggest release in the vicinity, it's used as a touchstone for everything that's wrong in gaming, even when there's little connection between that game in specific and the topic at hand.