Rampancy

Another interesting article mentioned by HBO's Louis Wu is at GameStudies. This one takes a look at Halo, and suggests that it's more genre breaking than it seems-- with an emphasis on the work break :

All in all, Halo triumphs in understanding the anatomy of the FPS, pulling many of the right strings. It even manages to implement the FPS control system to the Xbox gamepad very well. Halo doesn't lack innovativeness. Rather, its innovativeness lies in its ability to mix. The game does not come up with ground-breaking yet simple design solutions, e.g. substituting the generic seek conflict convention with avoid conflict , as Thief - the Dark Project did. It does not have (under-used) gimmicks like the geo-mod feature in Red Faction, or the role-based multiplayer scenarios of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Halo is not so much about combat evolved as the subtitle suggests, but about genre evolved . As a consequence, a requiem for the FPS is in order. Anyone to the rescue? Warren Spector, Deus Ex 2, Thief III?

While the author did elicit some much-deserved groans by calling Halo the Terminator 2 of FPS games (groan) the rest of the article is a good read.

As our unofficial countdown indicates, the Forerunners.org website is now online. If you have a Bungie-related website you'd like hosted, these guys are the ticket. You get all sorts of luxuries for free, including web space, e-mail, and forums. Sound good? Click here for more information.

It's possible that the Halo50k competition, so named because they plan to give out $50,000 in prizes, may drop the $400 entry fee they were going to charge. It seems they may be on the verge of getting corporate sponsorship for the tournament. To accommodate these arrangements, the tournament has been postponed from November 2002 to February 2003. Registration is temporarily suspended, and if the new schedule doesn't work out for teams that already registered, their money will be refunded.

Thanks for the heads-up to Louis Wu at HBO.

Goodness. Remember Battleground: Halo, the once-proud but in recent times mostly dead Halo fansite? Whodathunkit, they've gotten a visual revamp and started posting news again. Go check 'em out.