The Halo illness previously hinted at continues unabated. Indeed, like any noxious disease it has now laid waste to several friends whose only crime was to stand precariously close to me during the first five days of infection.

It was the promise of a DoubleXP Grifball weekend that pulled me back in and somehow I am now playing more than I ever did at launch, a phenomenon which continues to defy any of my explanations. The days immediately following that first revelatory round of Grifball were spent in a kind of stupor while I stumbled around and grumbled under my breath about which real world activities could be immediately improved by the addition of gravity hammers. If you’d like to simulate this experience for yourself, just think back to the first time you left the house after playing Tony Hawk and began mentally tabulating which items you felt like you could successfully grind on.

My transition back into the world of Halo has been immensely improved by one thing, however, and that’s the discovery of the voice privacy settings for my account. Thanks to that handy little setting, I can now only hear and be heard by people on my friend’s list, and the result has been as though a healing salve was applied directly to my soul. Previously, the space during matchmaking between when a full lobby was formed and the game actually launched stood as a sort of mini-game to me, testing whether or not I could mute all the fuckwits in the time allotted. Not all of my friends understand why I’ve chosen to shun the outside world in this way, and my now-standard reply is that the next time they’re listening to a stoned 14 year old call them a racial slur in their shrill, pre-pubescent voice, I’ll in a zen state of mind, wrapping the silence around me like a blanket.

To the Unknown Hero who came up with this miracle setting: I salute you, sir. Your contributions to gaming and my personal happiness cannot be underestimated.

The Halo fascination is likely to take a small back seat sometime this week after the release of GTA IV on Tuesday, and the already overdue TF2 patch which is supposed to include the new medic achievements and Payload game type. With all the buzz over the Medic achievements and unlockable weapons, it’s going to be a great goddamn time to play a Heavy.

A couple of interesting things about the new Halo 3 beta, in no particular order:

There’s some very interesting integration with the guide that I haven’t seen before. If you bring up the menu for a friend who is also in Halo 3, you will see some specific H3 listings at the very top above the options for sending a message, inviting to your game, etc. The options themselves aren’t particularly interesting — one options lets you view their Halo 3 service record; the other lets you see their uploaded movies — but the fact that this is the first time it’s been seen makes me wonder if the hooks for these sorts of things have been in there all along, or if it’s something recently added in perhaps the 360 spring update. It’s the sort of pleasant surprise one wishes would crop up more often.

Speaking of movies, there are movies. That is to say that you can save records of matches you’ve just played and then upload them to an integrated online file share, and from there you can share them with anyone you please. At this point it looks like users are limited to 25mb and six slots; though presumably that’s subject to change. The inclusion of even the very modest implementation shown in the beta begs a host of questions about the final product. I am hoping that there’s going to be an included video editor allowing you to crop and even combine videos; that one seems likely at this point because an average match record takes up just under half your allotted online space. Besides, the ability to share videos is going to be almost completely wasted if users aren’t allowed to trim down and produce highlight reels. There is also the inclusion of a “theater” lobby that at this point does almost nothing, but the way in which it is structured in the menus suggests that it may be intended for entire parties of players to enter the theater and view films together. As the upcoming producer of “Safety Monkey’s Greatest Warthog Moments, Vol. 4,” I wholly endorse this idea.

Interesting technical aspects aside, the beta itself is great, much as most would assume. Three maps are available with a variety of different game types, and the overall experience does not disappoint. It feels in many ways like a streamlined version of the Halo 2 multiplayer, and that is mostly a complement. The party system allows you to stick with the same group throughout your session, and the experience is so easy and robust that it actually made me feel a little embarrassed on behalf of Gears and Rainbow Six. If there’s a single nit that really must be picked, it’s (still) the “hopper” method of game selection. I respect the kind of frustration that Bungie is trying to avoid by eliminating the server browser list, but dumbing the process down has some unpleasant side effects when you can’t properly filter your disinterests. For example, I’m not particularly interested in playing another game of VIP on Snowbound for as long as I live, and it’s aggravating that I can’t steer my game thusly.

During an extended session last night with my buddies Longman and Lantius, we were fortunate enough to be repeatedly steered back towards the one map that contains a Warthog, and a great deal of time was spent tearing around the countryside whooping, hollering, shooting, and just generally making life unpleasant for the opposing team. I had joked at the end that our group had probably been around long enough to warrant our own MySpace page, and so… well, it would seem I have a lot of free time. Too much, some would say.

On an utterly non-Halo-related item: Did you catch that footage of the upcoming Prince of Persia Classic for XBLA? Fuck. Yes. This is the kind of tampering with my childhood memories that I can really get behind.

Among the things that never fails to amuse me is the power of a corporation to play coy. Take this week at CES, for example, when Microsoft general manager Chris Satchell decided to try and cockblock the 360 HDMI rumors in an interview with Gamespot.

Gamespot: “What can you tell us about the HDMI-enabled Xbox 360 rumors that have been going around?”

Chris Satchell: “We’re always working on prototypes and new technologies and just playing with stuff in Redmond to see what’s interesting. I think at the moment we have the widest available connections on the system. If you want to get great HD, I think we’ve got a good solution for that. In the future it’s interesting to see where standards evolve to. I think one of the problems that the whole industry, us and entertainment, are facing at the moment is we’re in this world where standards are evolving very quickly.”

“At the moment, everything you might have seen is just looking at our experimentation back in Redmond, not really a product that we’re thinking about announcing.” (emphasis mine)

“Experimentation?” He makes it sound like a couple of Xbox devs got their hands on some screwdrivers and snuck into the shed out back when J Allard wasn’t looking one afternoon. This is not experimentation. Experimentation is what you did back in college with a couple tabs of ecstasy and another dude. When you produce enough HDMI-capable Xbox 360s that they can be safely leaked to the public from someone’s home, that’s called pre-market testing.

I understand that corporations need to keep these sorts of things secret until they can be unveiled. I’m no MBA and many of the subtle nuances are lost on me, but it’s not hard to imagine how leaks can tip competitors hands, affect stock prices, etc. To that end, being coy is always going to be a somewhat standard strategy. However, I think that attempting this level of deflection after full videos have already leaked onto the net makes you look a bit stupid. Reading Satchell’s comments, all I can think about is the song “It Wasn’t Me.” When a spouse or parent walks in on you when the bra is off and you’ve got a hand down her pants, the time for inventive excuses has already passed.

Here’s the thing, though: We’ve already got established language to handle these sorts of scenarios. When that mean, scary ol’ reporter looks you in the eye and asks you about the blatant, obviously true gossip, you fold your arms behind your back, stare down at the one toe that’s nervously scuffing the floor in front of you and say “We don’t comment on rumors.” Then we all wink and chuckle at each other and go on with business as usual. We’re not that fucking stupid, after all.

I’ve been keeping pretty close tabs on the news coming out of this year’s CES, and tonight I stumbled across a description of some hands-on time that Kotaku’s Michael McWhertor spent with both the 360 and Vista versions of the upcoming Live Anywhere tech demo title Shadowrun. The impressions posted were surprisingly positive, which is nice, but the fact is that it doesn’t matter: The title is still overwhelmingly pre-destined to suck.

The core issue really has very little to do with the quality of the gameplay delivered. If there’s one universal thing about nerds that you need to take to heart, it’s that we’re incredibly anal about a consistent story experience. What other demographic could produce people who will complain bitterly about the canonical standing of the multiplayer portion of a Star Wars video game? To that end, we’re also susceptible to being particular about the ways in which a particular franchise is used commercially. Even the most devoted Sam Fisher fan has no interest in a Splinter Cell kart racer, and similarly I doubt that anyone out there is holding their breath for a Lord of the Rings themed football title. The possible exception to this rule would be the wide variety of entertaining Mario titles, but Mario ceased being solely about platformers a long time ago. Regardless, of all of the different ways to think about and interact with the Shadowrun IP, in my mind a Counter-Strike styled FPS ranks just slightly below Shadowrunner’s Intramural Soccer League in terms of legitimacy. I suspect I’m not alone in this.

A new Shadowrun game is not only great, it’s encouraged. But don’t play us for dumb: When you’re resurrecting a respected IP simply to allow your strange, unrelated ideas to wear it like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, we can see though it. And we don’t like it.

Proof of a new Xbox 360 iteration — codenamed Zephyr — leaked through the intertubes this morning courtesy of Engadget. Zephyr features an HDMI port, smaller core processor, and may OR MAY NOT come with a 120GB HDD. The article doesn’t mention it explicitly, but I know what you’re thinking and the answer is no: The HD-DVD drive won’t be built into the system. Just trust me on that one.

So, there you have it. Encouraging news for those of you with A/V hardware on the bleeding edge, but hardly surprising. After all the effort and money they’ve put into the Xbox platform, there was no way that Microsoft was going to concede something like this, even if it is essentially just a bullet point on a feature list. Since I love making predictions so much, I’d guess they’ll announce this new unit along with a variety of new, larger hard drives sizes and concurrently with a price drop on the original units. The Zephyr’s 120GB HDD will be used to justify the increased cost over an original 360, masking the marginal increased cost of adding HDMI.

I was initially moderately outraged at the idea of having to buy a $400 device twice if I wanted something simple like HDMI output. However, that outrage subsided pretty quickly when I remembered how many times I have personally purchased a slightly newer version of the Game Boy from Nintendo. The fact of the matter is that many of us are into them for a hell of a lot more than $400.