In the wake of the signing of a rather expensive HALO film deal, and the delaying of HALO 3 to coincide with the film release, I've been thinking, do we really need a HALO film? Game to film adaptations rarely work well (Tomb Raider while tolerable, certainly was no masterpiece and the Final Fantasy film lost a lot of money). The upcoming Doom film looks immediately forgettable or lamentable (although I hold onto the naive hope that self-reflective scriptwriters will use the line, "The Rock's gonna put the smackdown on your gaming ass!", but I'm not entirely confident on the front!). In the meantime, the wonderful HALO-generated Red Vs Blue machinima series now has competition from This Spartan Life for funniest machinima to date. Host Damian Lacedaemion's HALO-world talkshow with heavy weapons is absolutely fantastic (and, for a communications studies academic, a wonderful critique of sensationalist media!). That said, with machinima getting better and better, do we really want a HALO film, or films created using HALO? I for one, fear the HALO film, but hope to see HALO machinimation reaching new heights!

Meanwhile, Machinima.com led me to the Sponsorhood, a very amusing parody of Rooster Teeth's Strangerhood (which is the oddball, bizzaro second-child of the Red Vs Blue team). The Strangerhood has never really worked for me, and I think the critique explict in the Sponsorhood is rather apt!

Also, the winners are in for the USC/EA Sims 2 machinimation competition; you can view and download the winners here.

[Cross-posted from my blog Ponderance.]