Matt dropped into the HBO forum to say that some Bungie Store preorders of the Halo Soundtrack had shipped as early as last Friday. So get your orders in!

In addition, Brian Blackstar Josselyn pointed out that the track listings are up at Tower Records' website, right under where it says track list not available. Somebody better warn Marty, though, because they list the composer as some clown named Martin O'Donnell... :)

We've just added the recently captured QT5 version (4 Mb, 480x360) of the television commercial for Halo that's been airing in the Canadian market this spring and was captured by Bill and Bob Maguire. Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO for the notice.

The latest poll up at Shacknews asks which platform had the most impressive games at E3 this year.

Currently the Xbox is in third place with 419 votes (15%), edged out by the Nintendo GameCube with 533 votes (19%) and getting demolished by the PC (1504 votes, 56%). Despite the console content, it looks like Shacknews really is a PC gaming site.

Trailing the Xbox were the PS2 (167 votes, 6%) and the GameBoyAdvance (56 votes, 2%).

So according to this poll, the E3 showing for the Xbox this year better than that for a one year old console or a handheld game.

In a forum thread at HBO discussing recent claims that Halo saved game files had been hacked to gain access to infinite ammo and other things, Mat MSN Noguchi had the following to say:

All things considered, I doubt anyone has managed to hack the save file of any game yet.

Besides, there are much easier ways to hack Halo :)

Louis Wu replied that it was mean to say that without providing details, but I think it's safe to say that if there are other easter eggs or exploits left to find, Bungie will probably leave the fans to find them on their own.

There have been a couple of interesting recent developments concerning the attempts to hack the Xbox for a variety of purposes: to modify game files, install custom programs and operating systems (Linux), play foreign games and DVDs, and, yes, even-- to make illegal copies of games and movies.

CNET has a story about Lik-Sang's mod chip for the Xbox.

XBOXHACKER has an item up on a white paper available from an MIT ftp server that documents something called the XBOX LDT bus . I have no idea what that means, but apparently it's about the Xbox's boot procedures and security system.

The white paper itself has been slashdotted because of this story, which you might also find interesting.

GameSpot has a story up about a survey conducted by Greensfield Online. Apparently it contained some questions for consumers about concepts for new Microsoft products. One such product was an Xbox connection kit, which would let Xbox owners connect their systems to a PC for the purpose of accessing MP3s and other files. Apparently the connection would be made via ethernet

Like anything else like this, take the mention with a grain or two of salt-- last time I read anything about it, the audio files in the Xbox were Windows Media Player files and not MP3s.

Randall Glass made a new version of his infamous Warthog Jump movie, called Warthog Jump Revisited. We're mirroring the large (240x320, 30fps, 17Mb) version right here at Rampancy.

Halo was so long-hyped, so widely acclaimed, and so eagerly anticipated that it was rare to see it, as well as its rectangular abode, the Xbox, as roundly made fun of as both were in the frames of Penny Arcade.

Their criticism of the Xbox has waned some in the intervening months, although their Awards cartoon still poked fun at Halo, featuring the Xbox's flagship title next to a picture of.. of... well, a toilet.

However, in today's news post, Tycho of Penny Arcade fame does give Halo some props for its control scheme:

I got a couple mails asking about Medal of Honor: Frontline, which is kind of a sore subject with me. Being on the PS2, the graphics might not be as good as the PC version, in raw terms, and controlling an FPS on a console has been difficult for me in any game but Halo.

A well deserved comment-- regardless of what I or anyone else said (or still says) about mouse and keyboard controls being superior, Halo's controls are easy to learn and are surprisingly comfortable.

Oh, and the comic is worth a look too, for the pictures of Gabe's secret in Filth Weekly...

Various news sites around the web have, of course, been covering E3 this week, foremost among them CNET's News.com. Here are a few items pertaining to the Xbox and/or Bungie:

Everybody loves the Xbox-- but develops for the PS2 (CNET.com):

We love the Xbox; we love Microsoft, said Jeff Brown, vice president of corporate communications for leading games publisher EA. The worst thing that could happen to EA is to wake up one day to find Sony out there by itself. But when you make decisions short term, you have to look at the installed base. It's pretty clear if you're running a business selling games, you're simply going to sell more units on the PS2.

Sony rules, Microsoft drools, says Sony (CNET.com):

The console wars are over. I liken the gap with our competition to the Grand Canyon. -- Kaz Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment of America

MS to spend $2B on Xbox (CNET.com):

[Marketing director for Microsoft's games John] O'Rourke said future Xbox Live titles include an Xbox versions of Star Wars Galaxies, the highly anticipated multiplayer role-playing game being developed by LucasArts, and Sierra's shooting game CounterStrike, one of the most popular online PC games of all time. Microsoft is also preparing online versions of its popular Xbox titles Halo and Project Gotham Racing.

Online console gaming not a real business yet, says Electronic Arts (CNET.com):

Online gaming is a parlor trick at E3 this year, said Jeff Brown, vice president of corporate communications for leading game publisher Electronic Arts. This is not a real business. This is not going to be a real business until 2004 or 2005, and by then you're going to have a new generation of consoles.

A short article at computerandvideogames.com is confirming what's been said by Bungie all along, that there will be no separate Halo Online title, but the version of Halo that will first use MS' Xbox Live gaming service will be a full sequel.

In other words, Halo 2 looks officially announced at this point, even if there are no other details available.

Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO for the heads-up.

There's a reason why the practice of explaining how a football team could have won a game they lost-- after the fact-- is armchair or Monday morning quarterbacking.

That should be kept in mind when reading the Monday Morning CEO column at Red Mercury.

However, that doesn't mean there aren't a few salient points sneaking about.

The point of the MMC piece from May 20 entitled Xbox Economics seems to be that the Xbox isn't exactly a hit-- and that consoles that aren't a hit tend to end up being quite a bit less than just not a hit .

It also picks up one interesting technical point that gets glossed over a lot when comparing the approach of MS to the Xbox's design to the more traditional console approaches of Sony and Nintendo:

It appears that Microsoft is in a dangerous price war that it is losing. But what would happen if one of their competitors suddenly combined two of its major computer chips in to one chip, tripling the output of their manufacturing plant? That competitor's costs would fall dramatically, and they could drop the price of their console much faster and much lower than Microsoft could.

Sony has done exactly this with the Playstation 2. Two of their largest chips will now fit on to one chip. Sony invested $1 billion in their own chip fabrication facility. Now you know why. Microsoft, on the other hand, grabbed a bunch of off-the-shelf chips from a variety of vendors and shoved them together in an absolutely huge, expensive, heavy box that looks a lot like a PC and would probably maim a small child if it fell off the top of a TV. Even if Microsoft could combine the nVidia graphics chip with the Intel CPU, do you think nVidia and Intel would go for this? These chips are owned by different (competing) companies, and the chips are manufactured in different places. If this combination were even physically possible, it would never happen for obvious competitive business reasons that are completely out of Microsoft's hands. Microsoft's box is, and will continue to be, expensive to make, because they don't control the silicon. They will not catch up to Sony or Nintendo on manufacturing costs.

Interestingly enough, MS' approach to building the Xbox was very similar to that of IBM's towards producing their own PC: parts-bin innovation. They took off the shelf elements to put something together as quickly as they could to get in the game against Apple. And although they eventually ended up with a whole host of clone companies to compete against, today the Wintel architecture clearly owns most of the PC market. Which isn't to say MS would welcome Xbox clones... but the proprietary natures of Sony's and Nintendo's hardware designs does allow them more control over costs.

So, give the article a read, but with equal parts Xbox Kool Aid and salt.

Thanks to FunkDaddy who pointed out the article in the HBO forum, and to Ferrex who provided counterpoint.

Xbox.ign.com has a rather detailed article about what MS intends to do with Xbox Live.

All Xbox Live games will use voice communication, using a Voice Communicator module that plugs into the top slot on the controller. Your Xbox Live ID will be transportable to different Xboxes via the memory card. The system will track stats, and match players who have equal skills a good connection to you.

Developers will determine just how massively multiplayer their Xbox Live titles will be. The gaming servers are all controlled by Microsoft (and to some degree Sega with their crop of XBL games), so that the game creators simply have to request the bandwidth they'll need to get the desired result. NFL Fever can only support eight players on two Xboxes at the maximum and only when they're going to head to head. That is you in St. Louis can team up with your buddy in San Antonio to take on some schmuck in Santa Fe. If you and your friend want to beat up on Santa Fe, one of you is going to have to hop on a plane because cooperative gameplay in Fever can only be done with 1-4 players on one Xbox and opponent(s) on another. A game like Unreal Championship is going to have an entirely different set of rules and parameters as determined by the nature of online first person shooters.

No more word in the article specifically about Halo, but Xbox Live does sound like a promising service, should it deliver all it promises.