Halo 3 news: Master Chief Doth Cometh

800 Million is the amount of hours played in Halo 2 multiplayer over Xbox Live. It's still going on strong since its release 2 1/2 years ago. The usual lifespan of a game is about 3 to 6 months.

You can find Steph and me, playing it almost every night at 10pm, even on school nights. My gamertag is Apollo13spins. We play side-by-side with a TV and Xbox of our own, so we get the full-screen experience. It's fun to yell at the screen. Yes, you can call it an addiction. We are both sci-fi fans and love the high of battling other real players online with laser guns. Not to mention, guns, rockets, grenades and vehicles too. It's not as tactical as Gears of War or Ghost Recon Advanced Warfigher, but it's easy to just jump in, and play. Personally, I find the first person point-of-view easier to control, than the third-person of GoW and GRAW. I sold GRAW on eBay to someone who appreciates military action more than me. Gears is an amazingly beautiful game enough to keep, and I sometimes re-visit it to remind myself how terrible I am at it. Still, I believe Halo 2 has a much, MUCH longer replay value.

Today, begins the 3-week long beta-testing of Halo 3. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to partake by getting in on the "Rule of Three's" way to access the beta, or by purchasing Crackdown for the invitation. I am happy enough, for now, with Halo 2 and its recently added two new multiplayer maps added last week. One of the maps, called Tombstone, makes for a crazy team battle. We were creamed last night by a team who clearly practiced and mastered the terrain.

Also, today Bungie announced the release date of Halo 3 for September 25, 2007. This will be the Day of Days because videogame releases are occasionally compared to movie openings - both are major studio productions of media entertainment. It is quite possible that Halo 3 can surpass the opening day earnings of Spiderman 3 which took $59 million in the US. Halo 2 took $125 million on opening day in 2004.

More Heroes for NBC

NBC is hurting bad, being in fourth place, amongst the network battle for television viewership. Besides the guaranteed hit of the Law & Order franchise (going on 18 seasons which I realize is one more year than the Simpsons!), there is only one winner this past season that swooped in and came to the rescue - the comic-book-style inspired series, Heroes. NBC is having trouble with the comedy genre ever since the success of Seinfeld and Friends, so now they are announcing more fantasy/supernatural-themed shows instead for next season. "The Bionic Woman" is being updated for our times. "Journeyman" is a news reporter that travels through time. "Chuck" is about a computer geek who somehow downloads secret government information into his brain. Personally, I very happy to see that being a geek is the new cool. NBC is turning into the Sci-Fi channel, which, incidentally, NBC Universal owns.