A lot of sites today are posting about the rumor that the next Bungie project is going to be a Halo game that isn’t Halo 3, but does exist in the Halo universe as more of a prequel. I know what you are thinking, sequels suck but prequels are worse and I agree. This project is being called Forerunner, a refrence to the race of beings that created the Halo rings in the first place. Most sites are calling this pure rumor or speculation. It’s possibly an April fool’s joke.

Now, being that I am the mole and I love to banter about such rumors I have to put my two cents in on what is likely to happen. As you may already have read, I was pretty much right about the PS3 annoucements earlier this week, so maybe I can go 2 for 2 on rumor prediction for the week. Ok here goes:

The next game will be online. MMOFPS if you want to call it that. Let’s just call it Halo Online. Ok, so Halo Online will be all about being a huge multiplayer battleground. The battle will probably be for Earth and the player can pick a side and battle in huge battles - 100+ people trying to take over a base and 100+ people trying to hold the base. Instead of getting tons of XP to level a character as you would in a MMORPG, players will need to carry out missions to get better equipment, tanks, and just more bases. The game will probably launch this fall, let’s say around November or at the very least will be announced at E3. Halo Online will be as big as World of Warcraft and will be Microsoft’s first “billion dollar game.” Don’t be surprised if this game gets 10 million subscribers paying $10-15 a month within the first three years. That would be over a billion dollars a year in revenue.

I know this all sounds a bit crazy, but here is the reasoning. Bungie originally promised huge multiplayer battles and epic battles for earth in Halo 2. That didn’t happen, but I’m sure Bungie tried to make it happen. At the same time World of Warcraft has been making huge waves in the gaming world with it’s 6 million subscribers worldwide paying $15 a month just to play. A couple years ago those kinds of numbers would have been seen as pure insanity, but Blizzard’s near-perfect execution of the MMORPG genre in World of Warcraft made 6 million subscribers a reality. Bungie is one of the few studios who could make the same thing happen to the MMOFPS on a console. After all, Sony and Nintendo pretty much wrote off online console gaming before Halo 2 came out and lauched online console gaming into a viable business. Now even Sony is raving about how the PS3 games are going to be “Live” and online(just like Xbox games have been for the last couple years).

In short, Halo Online is just too big of an opportunity for Microsoft to pass up. It’s a billion dollar idea that if they don’t do they would be completely foolish. The Halo fanbase would go crazy for it and it would be the biggest game of the next generation. If Bungie and Microsoft make Halo Online happen, the Xbox 360 will will the next-generation console war. Period. Not only that, but a version of Halo Online playable on Windows Vista would ensure that gamers who don’t have an Xbox 360 will still upgrade to Vista.

I’ll try and keep this short, but there will probably be some followup postings in the next week or so about the ramifications of today’s annoucements. Yes, the PS3 is delayed until November worldwide(I was pretty much on the money with that) due to Blu-ray DVD copyright protection issues. Yes, the PS3 is going to have a big online service that is more media-centric, but will probably have some cool gaming features. Yes, Sony still doesn’t want to pay for the infrastructure to have games hosted on their servers. No, there was no iTunes integration for the PS3 announced. There was also more media-centric stuff annouced for the PSP, but I honestly don’t care about the PSP anymore. It’s not a good enough gaming device or a good enough media device for me to use it as either, much less both. I think the real winner in this is Microsoft, but I’ll get to that later…

It seems that we are hearing about high definition everything these days. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are both launching this year and every major media company is really starting to push the high-def revolution. This year might be the year when enough devices take advantage of HD and enough HDTV’s are within the budget of most consumers. However, is it really all wine and roses for this forthcoming technology advance?

In a word, no. The dirty little secret of this push to high-definition is really a push to DRM and closing the so called “analog hole”. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are going to use a content protection scheme that degrades the quality of the so called “high definition” movies to something much closer to DVD quality if you aren’t using a HDCP enabled connection to your television. Now, if we all owned HDCP enabled HDTV’s this wouldn’t be a problem. However, most of the HDTV’s sold in the last 5 years DON’T have HDCP enabled HDMI(or DVI) connections. What’s worse is that many HDTV’s being bought by consumers today still don’t have HDCP and thus the shiny new Blu-ray and HD-DVD’s they are going to be buying in the next year aren’t going to even show up in high-definition.

So, what is the movie industry going to do about this? Well, they are going to try to not really tell anyone until it’s too late, which I think is a mistake. You don’t hear Sony talking about how Blu-ray isn’t going to be high-definition on most televisions, instead they keep refering to it as “true high-definition”. However, it wouldn’t be fair to point the finger squarely at Sony. Toshiba and others aren’t doing much better to educate consumers about what is really going to be required to experience this high-definition revolution.

Ironically, the only comapnies that seem to realize that most HDTV’s don’t support HDMI/HDCP are the cable/sattelite television companies and Microsoft. Despite the seemingly constant evil of Microsoft, they have actually came out as pro-consumer in the high-def debate. They at least recognized that most HDTV’s use component inputs for their high-definition input when they built the Xbox 360. I for one thought that was a very intelligent decision. My only hope now is that the HD-DVD addon drive for the Xbox 360 somehow bypasses the content protection and allows the watching of HD-DVD in 1080i or 720p. Otherwise, the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle is going to end up being one of the biggest wastes of consumer dollars ever and the winner is not going to be either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. The winner is going to be the cable and sattelite comapanies that offer video-on-demand or perhaps a video download service such as iTunes offering movies in HD.

It’s the morning of the next great Apple announcement. What should we expect to see today? Video iPod? MacBook(iBook)? MacMini? iTablet? Well, all of those are great possibilities, but are they fun enough? A couple of them are, but as the mole I try to look deeper into the conspiracy theory to find the hard(ly) published rumors that slip through the cracks of most journalistic efforts.

So what could it be? Don’t be surprised if we see iTunes show up on the PS3 or the Xbox 360. Both systems are extremely media-centric and want to be the center of your digital life in the same way that the iPod and iTunes already are. Now, since Apple has partnerships with both Sony and Microsoft for various things, either company could have made a deal with Apple to get iTunes on their system. However, it’s more likely that we would see iTunes on the Xbox 360 for two reasons. One, it’s already on the market. Two, Apple owes Microsoft big. It wasn’t too many years ago that Microsoft gave Apple the cash infusion that it needed to stay alive, not to mention that Microsoft signed a 5 year deal to support OSX with Office. Apple wants iTunes and iPod to be everywhere. The iPod already works great with the Xbox 360. If iTunes shows up on the Xbox 360, it will sell 100 million consoles for that reason alone. That’s 100 million people buying movies from iTunes. That’s just too much business for Apple to turn down.

Any other great conspiracy theories out there? Think I’m crazy? MAKE A COMMENT!

Hello, I am the mole. This is my blog. Are you bored yet? You should be since nothing has been posted yet. Don’t worry, that won’t last long. Once I start writing, you are going to wish you never heard of the mole. Really, I promise.

What should you expect from my fantastic little piece of the internet wasteland? Being the mole, I focus on rumors, lies, and deceit. That’s right, the fun stuff. However, unlike some other sites on the internet that focus on people, the mole focuses on the joys of consumerism. iPod, Playstation, Xbox, Hybrids, HDTV, and all the other joyous products that make our lives more interesting and our credit card bills higher. Sure, you might be broke, but your toys kick ass right? If you responded yes, then you and I probably have a lot in common. If you responded no, then buy some kick ass toys and read more of the mole!