As the philosopher once said, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty". Those areas certainly are a bit less defined these days, as rumors about Bungie, its flagship Halo franchise, and the Xbox it rode in on are flying fast and furious.

• Dean Takahashi, author of books on the Xbox and Xbox 360 and a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, says Microsoft is working on portable media and gaming device to counter Sony's PSP. Microsoft's response? "Highly speculative." Thanks GamePro.com.
• Research firm In-Stat says that the Xbox 360 will eat into Sony's marketshare but that the PlayStation 3 will eventually still reign supreme, while Nintendo falls further into obscurity and irrelevance. Thanks BetaNews.
• Just about every other damn site on the web is carrying a "story" that Halo 3 isn't called that, but is codenamed Forerunner. The skinny on this apparently comes from Game Informer's April issue. The game they describe includes four-player coop and MMO-like aspects. In other words, every vaguely cool-sounding buzzword-compliant feature that's ever been announced, mentioned, or dreamed up for Halo 2 or any other hot game in the past five years but been cut prior to release, is apparently in this game. Most sensible people, even Frankie, have also already written this off as an April Fool's gag; the only real question is whether it's GI's joke on us or somebody else playing them for the fool. Which is a role they play well.

Reading this week's update might tempt you into becoming a cradle-robber. Or at least a crib-robber.

This week's Bungie Update is special.

No, not that special, so get your mind off Halo 3 the unnamed project.

This update focuses on the audio-video setup, or "cribs" of various people at Bungie: Frankie, Shishka, Sketch, and many others, ranging from widescreen DLP televisions with 50+ inches (can you say "compensating?") right down to hand-me-down CRTs.

Dan Chosich also won an as-yet-to-be-named prize for submitting the best fan setup.

Thanks to Frankie who posted it first in the HBO forum, along with an apology for not announcing Halo 3 this week. No apology necessary.

[image:10049 right hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] This week's Bungie Update starts with some information on Play! A Video Game Symphony that is a rival to the Video Games Live concert series from last year You remember, the one you couldn't go to because so many dates were cancelled. Ahem. Marty O'Donnell and Mike Salvatori will be on hand to sign autographs and hang out when Play! comes to Chicago, which will be on May 27, 2006 at the Rosemont Theatre.

The program will include music from Halo, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, Morrowind and others. The series has five scheduled dates, two in the US (Chicago and Philadelphia) and shows in Stockholm, Sweden, Vienna, Austria and Toronto, Canada. There is also (gasp!) information about The Next Project. Still nothing substantive, but hey, at least they've decided to put away the word CENSORED for a few years to give it a rest.

Our next project is going swimmingly. Lots of stuff is up and running, in fact, Sketch just got our debug 360 set up so that we can actually download the latest "build" of the game whenever we feel like it. Our main reason for needing builds right now is to start the documentation of a "making-of" process. Now that might end up simply being an internal record of the game's development stages, or it might be a book, or a DVD extra, we have no clue and no plan for that material at this stage, but we learned a lesson from Halo 1 & 2, which is that we should document everything, from a render to a napkin-scrawl.

I could be wrong, but this may be the first actual confirmation of any actual information: that Bungie's Next Project is for the Xbox 360. As if we didn't know that, but hey, it's something.

While some are joining Bungie, others are leaving to make their bitemark on the world on their own. GameDaily is reporting that developers from the Halo and Half-Life teams, including Hamilton Chu and and Michael Evans, formerly of Bungie, are forming a new studio called Giant Bite.

UPDATE: Frankie, Brian "sketchfactor" Jarrard and David "Evil Otto" Candland poked into a thread in the HBO forum about Giant Bite to note that Evans and Chu actually departed some time ago, and that the Bungie employees page is a bit-- which is to say, "many moons"-- out of date.

[image:10010 right hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] Longtime Bungiefen and former developer at Free Radical Max "mad.max" Dyckhoff has been hired by Bungie as an AI Engineer. What will he be working on? This:

Seriously, Damian and I have a plethora of very cool ideas for things the AI characters can do that will draw you even deeper into the game world. I will be implementing behaviours in characters that will really engage the player – possibly even making them want to marry them.

I guess it IS tight quarters on the other side. You'd better use this.

This has gone beyond amusing into the realm of annoying. Shane Kim, GM of Microsoft Game Studios, responded to a question about Halo 3 thusly:

Shane Kim: I call it The Mythical Halo 3 - we haven't announced any such game yet! Obviously the Halo franchise is very important to us. When you have Bill Gates being quoted fairly constantly, talking about a game, you know it's important to the company. But his recent comments reflect the position accurately. Which is that, if there were a Halo 3 we would be careful about how we announce and introduce it.

Does anybody honestly believe that Microsoft's chairman doesn't know what's going on with a product like Halo and has to be reminded before repeatedly making public statements? Does anyone honestly not believe that what actually went on here is that Gates spilled the beans-- more than once-- and then had to be reined in to respect the right of Bungie Studios to control their own announcements about what games are under development?

Of course Bungie should jealously protect whatever rights for self-determination they received in terms of the buyout; but for everyone else, this game isn't fun anymore. If there is actually a Halo 3 under development, then the final revelation that it does, in fact, exist, is going to evoke universal reactions of "no kidding". If it isn't, then Microsoft has been playing coy all this time when it could have just said it was giving the Halo franchise a rest for awhile to let Bungie work on something else. They haven't said that. In fact, at this time, if it were announced that Halo 3 was NOT under development for the Xbox 360, you'd probably see Microsoft's stock take a hit, as if there's no system-selling game coming out once the supply problems are taken care of, there'll be little reason that all the Halo and Halo 2 fans have to upgrade. They might have survived such negative consequences had they made such an announcement right after the launch of Halo 2. But everyone is expecting Halo 3 now.

Either Halo 3 is currently in development for the Xbox 360, or we've all been so fooled by Microsoft's application of reverse psychology that our brain matter has turned to mush.

Incidentally, Bungie knew that people would be scrutinizing their last update-- a video tour of their offices which for reasons of secrecy doesn't actually feature much of their offices, unless you count Starbuck's, the alley outside, a storage area and the air conditioners part of the office-- for clues about the next project, so the titles "Pimps At Sea" and even "Marathon 4" were prominently featured on whiteboards for our amusement.