Bungie's Halo 3 Weekly Updates

This is somewhat akin to a blockbuster holiday movie being advertised in the middle of the summer -- generating early hype months before the film comes out. Similarly, Bungie's hotly anticipated Halo 3 is already being touted as the quintessential Xbox 360 game -- and there's not even a solid release date yet!

A couple months ago, Microsoft financed a CG Halo 3 commercial that was to be aired once during a football game. Thanks to the internet, however, every Halo fanatic saw the clip almost instantaneously. It was posted on The Xbox 360 video marketplace in high-definition 720p resolution as a free download, and was all over video community sites like YouTube as well. As I mentioned earlier, this teaser was completely CG and does not represent actual gameplay footage at all. No, Halo 3 isn't going to look like that teaser.

It will, however, look like the actual screenshots that developer Bungie scarcely inserts into their weekly update. Indeed, a visual representation of this game is pretty rare on Bungie's website; a few print magazines got an early glimpse at the multiplayer mode, and Bungie posted a few tantalizing shots of their own. Most of the content of their weekly updates, though, are in regard to specific details of the game's innerworkings. I.e: how they're handling cheating, how water realistically flow around objects, and how blades of grass are individually modeled. Reading about Frankie's (the singular author of every weekly update) romps through unfinished single player levels may be boring to some, but Halo's ravenous fanbase will take anything they can get.

The Latest Weekly Update (3/2/07)

Project Proposal

I would like to do my new media studies project on the videogame industry. I will focus on the increasingly growing culture surrounding games, specifically the large segment of the Internet focused on gaming – news, reviews, and most importantly, discussion forums in which gamers yell, fight, and talk amongst themselves, arguably more than they actually play the games they’re discussing. To a lesser extent, I will focus on the penetration of gaming in popular culture but my main effort will be to address the communities of gamers on the Internet, and how these fans play an extremely big role in advancing the industry.