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Halo fans explode with glee at the merest tidbit of new information on the upcoming Halo 3. So they’re understandably all a-twitter this week with Bungie’s release of a mini-documentary on the making of the Halo 3 E3 preview trailer.

That’s right, a seven-minute documentary about the making of a 2 1/2- minute trailer. It’s interesting enough to watch (see it for yourself at Bungie.net), showing footage from the trailer from different angles and going into detail about how the musical score was made.

But how much is too much? Bungie dudes, we love you like brothers, but every minute you spend making documentaries about trailers is a minute you’re not spending making Halo 3. Get back to work! If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding!

Any woman who stands by her man after he leaves protein stains on an intern’s dress can’t be all bad. So we’re willing to give Hillary Rodham Clinton the benefit of the doubt with her well-intentioned but kind of silly media safety guide for parents, released this week in time for summer break.

Sen. Clinton is offering parents advice on how to monitor and restrict inappropriate content on the Net, on TV and in video games. For games in particular, Hillary says the ESRB ratings aren’t good enough, and you really ought to check out the independent ratings at commonsensemedia.org.

Which, as far as I can tell, pretty much line up with the ESRB ratings. But they do have some useful specific info, if you’re a parent who needs to know how much cleavage Lara Croft reveals before you’ll buy Tomb Raider: Legends for Billy.

Ultimately, anything that helps parents decide what’s appropriate for their kids is a good thing. And maybe more parental involvement will mean fewer lunatic lawyers demonizing the games industry as a whole. Ha ha, yeah, right.

The ballyhooed Xbox Live spring update became available this past Tuesday, adding a sprinkling of new features and tweaks to Microsoft’s online gaming service.

Some of the improvements were desperately needed, like the ability to download content in the background while playing a game or what have you. Unfortunately, there are still some glaring omissions and even a few new problems.

For example, while you can now scroll much faster through your music catalogue (an absolute necessity when your 360 is networked to your PC’s massive MP3 library), you still can’t fast forward or rewind within a song. Are we still living in the age of vinyl LPs?

And Microsoft’s attempt to better categorize downloadable Xbox Live content is very hit and miss. Though some of the stuff is now more logically organized, the service’s video content is spread all over the map and split between multiple menus. The older movie trailers are still there, for instance, but good luck finding them.

A second major Xbox Live update is due out in the fall, so hopefully some of these lingering issues will be fixed. Because you can bet Sony’s upcoming online gaming and content service for the PlayStation 3 will be learning from Microsoft’s missteps.

Via Our Friend 

Filed under: General