First GameSpy, now TeamXbox shun Halo 3 when it comes to top honors in its year-end awards roundup. Crackdown-- the game that at first people thought might only be bought by people who wanted into the Halo 3 Public Beta, but then turned out to be good in its own right-- was dubbed best action game.

Mass Effect took the overall Game of the Year award.

Halo 3 had to settle for best Multiplayer Action Game, which I suppose is fine, but just continues the multiplayer-centric myopia around console gaming in general and the Halo series in specific.

Falling just one spot short of GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann getting the axe for his "tone", the story of Bungie flying the Microsoft coop makes #10 on Game Daily's list of big gaming stories in 2007:

Although Bungie has said that right now their focus is on Xbox 360 and only Xbox 360, at some point in the future you never know what might happen. The fact that Microsoft let Bungie leave in that sense is somewhat perplexing. It's not as if they're stacked with plenty of great first-party devs.

To me, though, the idea that a major console manufacturer would let its previously wholly owned #1 first party developer go independent is slightly more surprising than a game reviewer getting fired for a bad review (or for other reasons, depending which story you read).

j41m3z wrote a research paper on Bungie's audio guru, Martin O'Donnell, and posted it in the HBO forum.