With Halo 3 not only stealing the thunder from every other game on the Xbox or Xbox 360, but personally tasked by Bill Gates with submarining the PlayStation 3 launch (guess he didn't know about the proposed $600 price tag, or else he wouldn't have bothered) it's not surprising that a little studio called Wideload that made a funny little game called Stubbs the Zombie might, for at least, awhile, go unnoticed.

Stubbs sold well enough, to be sure, but the gaming press often spoke more about the studio's outsourcing-heavy business model than the game itself. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

So while the hype over Halo is such that Bungie gets taken to task by supposed fans even when they don't say a word (because saying nothing is the best way to hype a game, didn't you know?) then the silence must be deafening in Chicago, where Wideload was actually able to update their website last month without scarcely causing a ripple.

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Normally the very entertaining Halo Story Page is rather like the equivalent of the Bungie fan community putting on funny costumes, lounging in easy chairs and sipping snifters of brandy while contemplating the treachery of Cortana, the inscrutableness of Gravemind and the machismo of Keyes family officers of both genders.

Wait, it's not the equivalent of that, it's exactly that.

However, today they've got something a bit better than that. Yes, hard to believe, but they do.

Joe Staten, along with Frankie and Robert McLees, at the request of mnemesis and Finn, granted the HSP an interview that contains some silliness, some pretty solid information, and some heavy hints about the Halo Story.

Let's sift through some particularly salacious morsels and read between the lines, shall we?

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Since an announcement at Xbox.com appeared and was just as quickly removed, the Halo community has been awash in discussion about the apparent appointment of Neill Blomkamp as director of the silver screen adaptation of Halo. Neither Microsoft Game Studios nor Bungie Studios have chosen to comment on the announcement, although Blomkamp himself has granted two interviews on the subject: one to Ain't It Cool News, and the other a gracious response to two questions submitted by the Red vs Blue fan community, which was keen to know whether the movie would draw from the games or the novels (and from which of each) and also if there could possibly be any easter eggs in the movie for RvB fans.

Official Secrets And Common Knowledge
The withdrawal of the official notice as well as refusal to comment by Microsoft and Bungie would seem to smack of a premature announcement, rather than an erroneous one. If the later, Blomkamp would seem to be just going along with the joke, and having us on until such time as an official announcement is made. If the former, one wonders why Microsoft simply doesn't ask Peter Jackson and Blomkamp from refraining from giving interviews until there is an official announcement.

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Yesterday I responded to Ozymandias' reasons why he couldn't endorse modchipping for adding new functionality, such as that supported by the excellent Xbox Media Center software, because it would harm Microsoft's business model, in which they subsidize the hardware and depend on you buying software and accessories. The assumption here is that every hacker who uses his Xbox for running Linux and XBMC spends less time gaming and buys fewer games. The real allegation there, of course, is that all hackers are really interested in is pirating games.

Ozymandias listed one other reason he thought someone might want to modchip an Xbox, and, not surprisingly, he doesn't condone this one, either.

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