If Halo 3 were going to have boss battles, who would your opponents be?

That’s an idea that occurred to me after participating in an HBO forum thread that started out talking about a rather idiotic article wondering if Halo 3 would suck, and ended up morphing into a discussion of boss battles.

I’m not really sure how boss battles got into Halo 2 in the first place. Perhaps somebody asked for them. Perhaps it was felt that Halo 2 needed “bigger” encounters than the first game; conflicts with individual characters instead of anonymous Covenant foot soldiers.

Whatever the reason, some of them worked fairly well, and others garnered a lot of negative feedback, particularly the fights against the Prophet of Regret and Tartarus. Most of the criticism stemmed from the arbitrary and repetetive natures of those encounters; how the rules varied significantly from how the rest of the game was played, and how they evoked stereotypical gameplay situations perhaps better suited for other genres.

With Halo 3, there are still a number of recognizable characters in the story who are potentially sources of conflict for our main characters, the Master Chief and, presuming he returns, the Arbiter. Might any of these be the subject of a boss battle? If so, how might Bungie alter the way those battles work compared to Halo 2?

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Russian news site Novosti says that the Russian government is planning on launching an unmanned mission to the Mars moon of Phobos in 2009. The vehicle is expected to arrive on the moon in 2010, and depart for Earth in 2011 carrying soil samples.

The story doesn’t say whether or not the Russians expect to find any leather goddesses on the small moon, but you can bet this is a prelude to landing on Mars’ other moon and beginning secret work to turn it into a colony ship.

Dean Takahashi caught up with Hamilton Chu of Giant Bite to talk about life after Halo. Chu spent three and a half years working on Halo; before that, he was part of the Oni team.

Now, he and Bungie alum Michael Evans are cofounders of Giant Bite, which is working on a project but is mum so far on the details. What he would mention, though, is what he took from the work on Halo and how he wants ot to apply at Giant Bite:

“It’s hard to describe why players enjoy Halo,” he said. “All these things work together and the core mechanics just feel so good. The stuff we did with the controls. The art design made you feel the right way. It all works together.”

“All of us want to bring the great things we learned from past experiences,” he said. “We want to build the quality and the team and the culture. Building it ourselves is intriguing and rewarding for us. The experience of building Halo and the impact it had on players. That was fun and we want to build event-type products again. We want to build something that will have an impact.”

Game-Spectrum, purporting to cover the entire spectrum of gaming, gets a nice interview, along with threats of physical violence, with its interview of Bungie’s own Kevin “KP” Paul, covering his turn-ons, turn-offs, and how he sleeps at night knowing all that stuff about Halo that we’ll never even know we don’t know.