First GameSpy, now TeamXbox shun Halo 3 when it comes to top honors in its year-end awards roundup. Crackdown-- the game that at first people thought might only be bought by people who wanted into the Halo 3 Public Beta, but then turned out to be good in its own right-- was dubbed best action game.

Mass Effect took the overall Game of the Year award.

Halo 3 had to settle for best Multiplayer Action Game, which I suppose is fine, but just continues the multiplayer-centric myopia around console gaming in general and the Halo series in specific.

Falling just one spot short of GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann getting the axe for his "tone", the story of Bungie flying the Microsoft coop makes #10 on Game Daily's list of big gaming stories in 2007:

Although Bungie has said that right now their focus is on Xbox 360 and only Xbox 360, at some point in the future you never know what might happen. The fact that Microsoft let Bungie leave in that sense is somewhat perplexing. It's not as if they're stacked with plenty of great first-party devs.

To me, though, the idea that a major console manufacturer would let its previously wholly owned #1 first party developer go independent is slightly more surprising than a game reviewer getting fired for a bad review (or for other reasons, depending which story you read).

GameSpy wants you to know they love Halo 3. They really do. It's just that 2007 was just too good a year for the console, and well... a game that executes really well on a known formula while tinkering with details and adding some new features just isn't quite enough to make the top half of a top ten list this year.

Halo 3 is a carefully tuned refinement of one of the most successful game formulas of all time, and innovative gameplay mechanics don't really figure into that equation. So, while Halo 3 accomplished amazing things in terms of its impact on the burgeoning Xbox Live community by introducing the Forge (object-oriented level editor) and an impressive set of video-editing tools, the frenetic multiplayer remained mostly the same, with just a few tweaks (HD graphics, deployable equipment, new guns) to bring the experience into the new generation.

Ironically, the Halo game even Halo lovers love to hate-- Halo 2-- got comparatively more accolades than either the original or the final chapter, despite the fact that many fans like both of them better.

Oh well. So Halo 3 takes the #6 spot, behind Mass Effect ("brilliantly stylish"), Rock Band ("magical balance between musical experience and videogame"), Orange Box ("best gaming deal of 2007"), BioShock ("a beautifully designed and wonderfully thought-out world") and Call of Duty 4 ("It isn't set during WWII!").

Ask many Bungie fans what they think makes their favorite games different than others, and you might get an answer like "addictive multiplayer". From a perhaps smaller, but no less dedicated or vocal group, you might get "the story" as an answer.

Not everyone agrees.

Dallas News technology writer Victor Godinez thinks videogame writing has a long way to go, and points up Halo 3 as an example:

Halo 3 is a lot of fun to play, and the multiplayer will likely go down in history as a truly great technical masterpiece.

But the single-player mode was a confusing muddle from a plot perspective. Every time this complaint pops up, legions of fans rush to point out this or that video explanation of the plot on YouTube, or they suggest you go read the Halo novels or scour Bungie's Web site for plot clues.

No.

The game should be a self-contained and comprehensible artistic work. The fact that a game with Halo 3's development budget (which it's safe to say was in the tens of millions of dollars) ended up with such a cut-rate story shows there's still a limited pool of writing talent in the industry.

This probably deserves (and will likely get) a longer and more detailed response, but I'd say that the Halo series of games stands well alone, aside from support materials like the novels, but not separately from each other.

So as a series of games, I think it is a self-contained and comprehensible artistic work. However, Halo 3 makes about as much sense in isolation from its prequels as the Return of the King would all by itself, which is to say, not a whole lot.

Halo 2 and Halo 3, to be comprehensible, depend on the previous games, and this is only natural and acceptable. I'd argue that Mr. Godinez-- who writes about games on his blog-- either didn't play the first two games, or didn't pay much attention when he did.

With the release of the Foundry map, especially targeted for users of Halo 3's map editor, Forge, Rampancy.net opens its Forge Maps database. Users can submit their maps with a screenshot, descriptions, and links to the map posts on Bungie.net, as well as rate maps submitted by other users.

Submit your own maps today (registered users only-- we have to know whose map it is!).

Then, you can browse the other maps in the database. You can search and sort them based on what weapons, vehicles, or equipment they contain, as well as by rating, by author, by title, by popularity, and by what original map they are based on.

Rampancy is happy to have HawaiianPig's Foundry-based map of mongoose mayhem, DeathCross, as its first official entry.

If you have any questions at all about how to submit your map or how the database works, email me at narcogen@rampancy.net, send me a private message, or just post a comment.

If you're not nearly as behind the curve as I am, then you already know that Wideload Games' upcoming party title Hail to the Chimp has released a new trailer that you can see on GameTrailers.

What you may have missed is Michael Mann's latest blog entry at the Huffington Post that seems to show that HttC owes no less to the humor of Terrance and Philip than did their previous outing, Stubbs the Zombie:

In our "Stuff the Ballot Box" gametype, you deposit clams into a well; the first character who collects 75 is declared the winner. Another has a giant stink cloud, otherwise known as "The Stench of Corruption," which stalks the player with the fewest clams. You don't want to be surrounded by this cloud as it is smelly and nobody likes the stinky kid -- especially clams, who jump from your clutches until you are out of the race. Other gametypes are more intellectual, including one that has a similar mechanic to the game Othello.

Sounds like a neat-- if aromatic-- gameplay mechanic. For the sake of realism, though, shouldn't the stench of corruption follow the player with the most clams?