David Bowman, Design Lead at Certain Affinity, dishes on the Age of Booty blog about their upcoming pirate-themed XBLA game of the same name (previously called Plunder) and some of its influences, including Settlers of Catan.

There is no release date yet, but the game is speculatively expected out in the second half of this year.

According to Major Nelson's blog, Halo 3 and COD4 have done the top ten topsy-turvy trick again. Call of Duty 4 is on top (for the moment) and Halo 3 is playing second fiddle.

First part of the finale of season 1 of Master Chief Theater 3000.

Bungie president Harold Ryan tells Variety how to be swallowed by Microsoft and emerge unscathed. Some highlights: thoughts of going independent went back 3-4 years, the preparations went back more than 2 years, and one of the driving reasons was the freedom to work on non-Halo titles.

Palluxo.com has a (late) review of the Mac version of Stubbs the Zombie. Fair warning: it spoils the entire plot, if you happen to mind that, and doesn't really describe the gameplay.

Hippieman sent me a message on XBL a couple days ago.. the two downloadable netmap packs for Marathon:Durandal, the XBLA version of Bungie's classic Mac and PC scifi shooter, the grand-daddy of Halo, are now online in the Xbox Live Marketplace.

You know Captain Spark. The guy who records all those audio snippets from Halo games? Yeah, that's him. He's weighed in now with a review of Halo 3's campaign. He starts by getting two beefs of his chest (the over-aggressive Arbiter and the so-called "Cortana Moments") before getting to what he likes. Well worth a read, go check it out.

Bungie President Harold Ryan denied claims by Microsoft's Don Mattrick that he laughed and acquiesced with the publisher's decision to indefinitely postpone Bungie's E3 announcement.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Mattrick once again explains their reasons for delaying the event, with no mention whatsoever of why it was made on such late notice-- less than a week before the event for their exclusion from the press conference, and less than 24 hours from their separate announcement before that, too, was cancelled.

Mattrick described Bungie as "disappointed" rather than angry and tried to suggest that Ryan laughed and agreed with the decision. After the interview was posted, Ryan remarked to Eurogamer that he neither agreed, nor found it funny:

"Keeping things clean, I certainly didn't agree with the decision to delay our news until sometime after E3," Ryan told Eurogamer today.

"Bungie is always concerned first and foremost with our fans. Whenever we are prevented from exceeding their positive expectations it is not a laughing matter."

Nice to see Ryan sneak "keep it clean" in there. Now if only MS could keep things clean...

The Escapist is usually a cut above other gaming sites when it comes to content, especially long content. They've done a short review of Wideload's Hail to the Chimp, and the long and short of it is, they didn't like it much.

The Escapist has a short article up on methods to combat various forms of motion sickness sometimes related to video gaming.

Bungie fans will recall some of the problems fans had with the XBLA version of Marathon:Durandal that caused motion sickness in some players. It was speculated that the problems were related to the field of vision and framerates being different between computers from the era in which M:D was originally developed and the Xbox 360.

In short, the suggestions are: sit further from the display, have some ginger, and just grin and bear it-- the effect can lessen with time.

I thought this story would fizzle out. If certain people had much any sense, it probably would have. Yet here we are.

Eurogamer has an exclusive interview coming up tomorrow with Microsoft's Xbox 360 boss Don Mattrick. They, of course, asked him about the cancelled Bungie announcement and the studio's reaction:

"Sure they're disappointed. Any software creator would be disappointed," Mattrick, boss of the Xbox 360 business, told Eurogamer at E3 for an exclusive interview set to run later this week. "Harold [Ryan, Bungie president] just laughed and he said, 'Boy, just a sign of growth inside the business, we agree'.

Last week Ryan wrote on Bungie's website that the team was disappointed by Microsoft's last-minute decision not to unveil the game.

Pressed on the decision to pull the new Halo title from the E3 briefing, Mattrick said: "We didn't feel we needed to show Halo to have a great show, to pay homage to our core audience, to have a lot of news, so it was an embarrassment of riches and we couldn't fit it in. How great is that? I think that's awesome."

Yup, that's funny stuff there. Disappointing the only developer who has so far allowed Microsoft to make money on their incursion into the living room because they were audacious enough to go independent-- and because you've got enough other stuff? Hilarious.

What exactly was that other stuff, anyway? Because all I seem to read about MS' showing at E3 now is how there wasn't a Bungie announcement, and... oh, yeah, Final Fantasy.

Offtopic: I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Final Fantasy tanks on the 360.

Of course fans expect that a Halo game will look good. Maybe it won't be the absolutely most edge-bleedingly, envelope-pushingly, buzzword-compliantly beautiful game on the market at release, but it will look good.

According to Kotaku, then, Halo Wars is a Halo game, and it looks good:

Halo Wars has some impressive visual pop to it, more colorful than when we last saw it. The game's visual effects, in motion, look spectacular. It may not have the immediate visual sex appeal of something like Halo 3, with it's micro-sized units and overhead perspective, but it looks good.

Of course, how an RTS game controls on a console is really the central issue, and Kotaku says that's another area where Halo Wars excels:

Halo plus real-time strategy plus gamepad controls may sound like a recipe for a franchise misfire, but Ensemble Studios has polished Halo Wars to the point of an immediately playable console title. While some may argue that, like first person shooters, RTS games should only be played on a mouse and keyboard, Ensemble has done an admirable job of nailing the controls. We got a chance to go hands-on with the game at E3 and came away surprisingly pleased.

That does sound pretty good. Those of the faithful who won't be able to stomach games in the Haloverse outside of Bungie's watchful eyes might have problems with some of Ensemble's choices (indeed, some are already, including myself) but the bottom line should be whether a game is fun and interesting to play, and it sounds like so far Halo Wars has a good chance of rising to that challenge.

Well, it's been awhile since COD4 and Halo 3 did the flip-flop on Major Nelson's ranking of top games on Xbox Live, but it's happened again: Halo 3 is number one, and COD4 is number two. Again.

How long that lasts is anybody's guess; perhaps the two games will get back on the seesaw. Until something else comes along to unseat them again (however temporarily-- the only game on the horizon I see that can do this is Gears of War 2) the determining factor on a week to week basis might become DLC.

Version 0.20.2 of Aleph One, the open source engine for playing Marathon games on MacOS, Windows and Linux, has been released.

Several websites have picked up a review of Hail to the Chimp by Billy O'Keefe of the McClatchy-Tribune news service, including the Star-Telegram of Dallas, the Miami Herald of Florida, and Macon.com in Georgia.

Don't bother hitting all the links as all the reviews are the same text:

Fortunately, "Chimp's" glitches are sporadic, and they don't severely impede play if you're taking on friends. (Four-player support is available online and locally.) Moreover, the absolutely frantic nature of the mini-games lives up to "Chimp's" billing as a party game. Given the inviting price ($40) and the fact that traditional party games on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have ranged from terrible to non-existent, "Chimp's" positive fun-to-flaw differential makes it easy to recommend to anyone hungry for a game of its distinction.

O'Keefe does have complaints about Chimp's pathfinding and thinks a lot of the mini-games are too similar, but thinks that won't get in the way of those who are looking for a funny party-style game for the 360.