All the kvetching about how much less powerful the machines showing at E3 were compared to production Xbox iron aside, it does seem as if perhaps Halo and the new machine might be suffering a bit from overhype. Penny Arcade weighs in again today with their impression of the pair. The summary was eh .

In more detail, it goes like this:

At this point, whether many of the games are simply at an awkward phase in their development or some of the launch titles are just fluff and filler, even Halo looked kind of rough. A little bird - a little anonymous bird - told me the version of Halo on the showfloor was not the most current revision, but I'm not sure that it matters overmuch.

Actually, as far as we knew, this was a fairly recent version of Halo, even if the version of the hardware it was running on wasn't.