Well, E3 is over and from the sounds of it Wii clearly came out as the system that stole the show. The Playstation 3 had a very mediocre showing. Well, let me rephrase that, nothing on the PS3 was extremely outstanding or as head and shoulders above the Xbox 360. Luckily for Microsoft, nobody is buying into the whole 1080p garbage that Sony is spewing. Ironically, most developers aren’t even shooting for 1080p, since 720p/1080i looks great and there is no great visual difference. Also, I found it very amusing that Grand Tourismo: HD’s demo ran in 1080p, but nobody was too impressed by it. It didn’t look as good or any better than Project Gotham 3. It just looked like a highres version of GT4 with better lighting. (more…)

So I was on Xbox Live last night and of course there are some great trailers and demos available to the millions of 360 owners out there. Of course, I was eager to check out the Halo 3 trailer on my high-def tv. I’d already downloaded it from bungie, but a 30″ HDTV is a lot more fun to watch than a 17″ LCD. So, I sign in to Live and lo and behold, the Halo 3 trailer is there for download. It’s around 100 megs. Not bad. (more…)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably have heard that E3, the biggest game expo of the year is happening this week. It’s going to be an exciting week of news. Today is Sony’s pre-E3 news confrence. Expect a new PS3 controller and maybe even a new console case. Hopefully some PS3 games will be closer to playable, but I expect a lot of video footage again this year from Sony. Also, don’t be surprised if Final Fantasy VII is announced for the PS3. It’d be a license to print money for both Sony and Square. That alone could steal all the thunder from the Nintendo/Microsoft events before they even happen. (more…)

Hello all! For those of you who read blogcritics.org, you might have seen the Halo 3 / Halo Online post I made about a month ago show up there. It was basically a reprint of the origninal article, but once again it got a pretty good response. Anyhow, I’ve joined the sinister cabal of elite bloggers known as blogcritcs. How cool is that? Now I get to infest a sinister cabal with my sinister rumors! Wooohooo!!! Seriously, I’m pretty excited about this. It will definately be a great opportunity to improve on my writing and maybe even get some more visitors here. Either way, check out blogcritics.org. It’s a cool site with lots of great people blogging for them.

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.