Once again more news has transpired in 24 hours than I'm able to handle with the individual loving care that each unique-as-in-snowflake bit of news fully deserves to be treated. So sue me.
Here's what happened:
Bungie cheated HBO out of a Humpday win. Makes you wish there was some large company comprised of adults watching over these boys Luke Smith while at play.
The Zero Punctuation videoblog at The Escapist proves that it's much easier to be funny when criticizing something than praising it, and their review of Halo 3 is indeed funny. I just can't figure out if it's funny for the sake of it, or whether the reviewer honestly dislikes the game as much as the review says and being funny is just a byproduct of that.
However, all I can think of watching the recycled criticisms (the game is short, the story is incomprehensible) is that I don't see the basis for them. At all. Estimates of game length are all over the board, from 8 to 20 hours. And yet all of these are called "short". Compared to what? Oblivion? Are all games supposed to deliver the same number of hours of play for a single price point? Is it fair to hold Halo 3 to that standard while saying "I don't give a flying shit about multiplayer"?
Would this stuff be deemed funny if someone lampooned the plot of The Return of the King from the perspective of someone who had neither read nor seen The Fellowship of the Ring or the Two Towers and therefore didn't know anything about these wacky short people called Grunts Hobbits and this all-powerful Halo Ring everybody is on about?
Stuntmutt attended the Halo 3 launch party in Waterloo and walked away with a free copy of Halo 3, which he immediately went home and played, uncharacteristically eschewing an open bar.
Penny Arcade doesn't hate Halo anymore (well, at first they loved it, then they hated it, then they sort of... well, at any case, now Tycho says:
...next week.
It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this site that I've lived overseas for eight years, and as such, I can't walk down to the corner store to pick up Halo 3, it has to be couriered to me.
Louis Wu at HBO is right-- Halo: The Future of Gaming is one of the funniest videos, ever. It takes a few minutes to set itself up, and commits a few boo-boos in the process (in 1994 Bungie was in Chicago, not Kirkland, and Halo 1 came out in 2001, not 2002) but those are easy to forgive when the jokes start rolling.
http://www.physorg.com/news109430733.html
Real photographs show Sol to be a "no trih xeem" zone.
-- Steve's hoping this isn't just the sleep deprivation talking.
The Master Chief teabags a PlayStation 3 and steals Halo 3 in this Gamebrink video linked over at Kotaku.
Hawty McBloggy compiled a list of top ten things to do while Xbox Live is down, (it's back up already) while GameDaily has a list of top ten things to do before Halo 3 comes out.
Cole at Lasersharks points out that the Wikiscanner discovered an edit to the entry on Halo 3 that came from the Sony Computer Entertainmentoffice in the UK. The edit inserted the phrase "although it wont look any better than Halo 2" into the description of the game.
The edit was apparently to the Halo 3 section of the main page for the Halo series and has since been removed.
Today's Ctrl-Alt-Delete tries to apply the rules of Heroes to the game of Halo and comes up with a predictably violent result.
This, like so many things, is basically HP's fault.
On the Twelfth Day of Halo Christmas, Bungie gave to me:
Twelve Drones a-droning,
Eleven Jackals sniping,
Ten Brutes a-battling,
Nine Helljumpers jumping,
Eight Elites ejecting,
Seven Scorpions shooting,
Six Grunts a-sleeping,
Five sacred rings,
Four Flood combat forms,
Three Prophets,
Two dead Hierarchs
And a personality construct in the Core.
I was listening to a song from Kingdom Hearts (Forze de male, in case you wanted to know) and noticed that the notes at 1:30--1:40 sounded like the opening notes to Halo. Things just snowballed from there...
Then head right over to Something Awful for their sneak preview of Halo 3 where the Master Chief can kill you with his mind.