SketchFactor has posted a press release on Bungie.net that declares that Bungie Studios will become a privately held company. Bungie LLC will have Microsoft as a partner and a minority shareholder and will continue to make games for the Xbox.

If I was apprehensive about anything in Halo 3, it was the Flood.

Halo 1 has reached a certain legendary status amongst fans, but even it has a sore spot for many: the Library, where you navigate endless repeating dark corridors with endless hordes of only four enemies to fight: Human Flood combat forms, Elite Flood combat forms, Carrier forms and Infection forms. The level goes on a floor or two longer than it really has to, and only has a few tricks up its sleeve to make it seem fresh.

If Halo is built on a foundation of "thirty seconds of fun" then the Library was built on six helpings of five seconds of fun: shotgun a Flood form in the face, run away, repeat.

Of course, other Flood missions fared much better; they had better unit mixes, more varied terrain and encounters, as well as vehicles. 343 Guilty Spark had atmosphere oozing out of every pore as the Flood gave you the first real scare of the game. Two Betrayals gave you the dark side of Assault on the Control Room as Flood, Covenant and Sentinels took aim at each other and you while you tried to stop Halo from firing.

The Maw mixed it up by varing your objectives a bit, and by allowing you the chance to watch some interesting fights play out. The Flood themselves, though, were interesting to look at, but not so much interact with. When they didn't see you, they gurgled. When they did see you, they charged straight at you, firing whatever they had. If you had superior firepower and room to maneuver, it was no problem. If you had only one of those, or neither, you'd be in a world of hurt, not because the Flood outsmarted you, but because they overwhelmed you with numbers and clogged up your travel lanes with dead bodies. Or even dead Grifs.

Halo 2 added a significant twist to the Flood, but the game could only get so much mileage out of it. Instead of merely giggling with glee as you set off cascading explosions of popcorn Infection Flood, this time around the little devils scurried around more unpredictably, and raised dead Flood from the battlefield to face you once more if you didn't dismember them with a sword or blow them up with a grenade.

Once so raised, though, they were still the same old Flood. Four flavors, and one tactic.

How, then, would Halo 3 handle the Flood? More of the same?

The Zero Punctuation videoblog at The Escapist proves that it's much easier to be funny when criticizing something than praising it, and their review of Halo 3 is indeed funny. I just can't figure out if it's funny for the sake of it, or whether the reviewer honestly dislikes the game as much as the review says and being funny is just a byproduct of that.

However, all I can think of watching the recycled criticisms (the game is short, the story is incomprehensible) is that I don't see the basis for them. At all. Estimates of game length are all over the board, from 8 to 20 hours. And yet all of these are called "short". Compared to what? Oblivion? Are all games supposed to deliver the same number of hours of play for a single price point? Is it fair to hold Halo 3 to that standard while saying "I don't give a flying shit about multiplayer"?

Would this stuff be deemed funny if someone lampooned the plot of The Return of the King from the perspective of someone who had neither read nor seen The Fellowship of the Ring or the Two Towers and therefore didn't know anything about these wacky short people called Grunts Hobbits and this all-powerful Halo Ring everybody is on about?