mad.max posted a link in our forum to a piece at Salon by Wagner James Au, which talks about the image of Microsoft and the Xbox in the console gaming market. He's come to the conclusion that Microsoft has failed to deliver on its promises:

But the war of ideas is over, too -- and on that front, the one that really counts, Microsoft has lost, almost utterly lost. Gone is the bold promise to innovate and revolutionize gaming -- the chance to create a brand so daring and unique, it would finally seize gamers' attention away from Japan. The spirit of Monkeyboy has trickled down to the Xbox team, and almost fully possessed it.

With two possible exceptions, the Xbox and its premiere list of games are undistinguished, undifferentiated and inoffensive -- and consciously tooled to be exactly all those things. The Xbox is, in effect, the Internet Explorer of game consoles.

What are those two possible exceptions? One scarcely need ask:

In that regard, Bungie Software's Halo and Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee from Oddworld Inhabitants -- both titles produced by studios within Microsoft's games division -- are the only plausible contenders on the console's premiere list. Yet, admirable as they are in their own right, neither quite reaches the status of a killer app -- a game so good as to justify the purchase of the hardware it runs on.

To be sure, Halo is an excellent, squad-based first-person shooter, set in a sprawling game world (a lush, artificial planet shaped like a ring), with an epic sci-fi story about humanity's last desperate stand against an alien coalition, fought on land, in underground bases and in aerial skirmishes above the surface. While it shares much from previous PC shooters -- including the strong narrative of Half-Life, the outdoor multiplayer combat of Tribes and the squad-based sci-fi action of Elite Forces -- it's the first to synthesize so many different elements seamlessly together in a console title.

It's already drawn the interest of PC gamers, who often dismiss console games as brainless kiddy fodder. At the Odyssey tent, one self-described PC loyalist was hardwired to a Halo demo, emptying clip after clip into hordes of dwarlike aliens. He'd already cleared his schedule for its debut, he told me. I'm taking three days off work to play it, dude! he said. But what other Xbox title is he interested in? His expression blanked a moment. Dead or Alive III, I guess, he said, without much conviction, referring to Xbox's visually arresting (but conceptually undistinguished) fight title.

The last word about Bungie in the article refers to them as one of the most respected (and oldest) computer game developers for Mac and Windows but doubts that the name alone will attract the console gaming crowd.