Frankie O’Connor at Bungie gave an interview near the beginning of this year, and one of the questions I found particularly interesting, especially because I’ve only recently had a chance to play Gears of War myself:

XCN: Are you influenced by other games like Gears of War, would you consider implementing some things like the Gears of War cover system in Halo 3?

Frank O’Connor: We’re always asked about the influence of other games on Halo and recently the ‘other game’ often seems to be Gears of War. Will the cover system influence Halo? The honest answer is no. The gameplay for Halo 3 was decided long before Gears of War even shipped. If we put the cover system in Halo it would ruin the game because it’s not about cover. It’s about big encounters and open spaces and vehicles and so on. Gears of War is about cover. Sticking something like that onto our game wouldn’t be a good idea. Anyway, there is a cover system in Halo – it’s called ducking behind objects and using the environment to shield you from harm. But we won’t be putting a cover button in, and it’s certainly not the X button that we’re often asked about.

Whenever a new game comes out with an ostensibly “new” feature it seems there’s an exchange that runs something like this; where a journalist asks Developer of Last Year’s Hit Game if they are going to implement Cool Feature from the newly released This Year’s Hot Game in next year’s Sequel To Last Year’s Hit Game.

Whether the feature is appropriate for that game or not scarcely matters; it’s a hip and trendy feature. In the case of Gears, it’s the Cover button.

For the complete text, click “read more” below from the front page.

read more

Takin’ a break from Halo coverage, this week the topic is all about casual games on XBLA. There are a lot of sweet games available on XBLA and lots more just announced at GDC. No doubt this is getting more attention from game developers, so we figured we’d assemble some people know what they’re talking about with XBLA to tell it like it is for the next show.

What XBLA games do you like?

It can be a sea of choices for the uninitiated. Maybe you can help demystify which games are good? Write us a short review about your favorite game(s). If it’s good, we’ll read it on the show!

Casual gaming: your opinion

Casual games are getting a lot of press these days. What do you think of them? Do you think XBLA is a better system than Sony’s or Nintendo’s? How important do you think casual gaming will be in the future of game consoles? Make your voice heard!

Deadline is Thursday night

at about 5:30pm EST. As usual, the earlier you get your comment in, the more likely we’ll read it on the show. Just click submit news and tips on the right side of the page and send us your gamertag so we can give you credit. Not much time left, so hurry!

Just when our 20GB hard drives are near full of game demos, HD movies and TV shows, music, and gamesaves, Microsoft goes out an makes a 512MB memory unit for the XBOX 360. It costs $50, comes with Geometry Wars pre-loaded, and will plug into one of the memory unit slots on the front of the XBOX 360.

What’s the selling point for this 512MB device? Who would buy it?

Is this geared for Core system users that think $100 for a 20GB hard drive is too much money?

Where are our mass storage devices for the XBOX360? How big is that free HD episode of SouthPark going to be? How many demos am I going to have to delete just to have room for this 30-minute episode?

And why can’t Microsoft allow us to use network storage devices with our XBOX 360. We can already do it for sharing music, movies, and pictures from our PCs to our XBOX 360s. Why can’t we do it with gamesaves and demos?

Gears of War has sold 4 million copies making it the most sold XBOX title behind HALO 1 and 2. GoW is the best selling game for the XBOX 360. I can’t help but think that this game would have sold even more copies had it shipped with objective-based gametypes and had a few glitches fixed.