Halo 3 date dubiety

Gates admits speculating

No one knows when Halo 3's going to be ready, not even Mr bag's of gold himself Bill Gates, according to quotes given to technology blog Endgadget at CES. Gates had previously boasted that the PS3 would be faced with Halo 3 upon its launch, though it turns out this was entirely speculative (Robbie Bach called it 'philosophical', but we don't quite know what he was on about). The Microsoft chief clarified the position on Halo 3's release, stating: "No, I have to make sure that any speculation I did about that is -- it's up to the team when they want to ship that, and they're going to take their time to make that a super great product. So even we don't know when that will come out. That's one of many games that are just phenomenal that are in the works, but it's up to the artists to do it when they feel good about it." So there we have it, it'll be done, when it's done, basically.

Continuing his chin-wag with the Endgadget chaps, Gates added that the upcoming HD-DVD peripheral would not fragment and confuse the existing userbase, as it would be purely for HiDef movies, and would have nothing to do with the games. Other senior Xbox people said the same thing yesterday. Of the Xbox 360 webcam, Gates revealed it'll be out this year, and will usher in a raft of messaging options between the console and PC platforms. The world's richest man also said he expected the market share of the Xbox 360 to increase drastically this time around. And that he'd like a cheese sandwich. That bit's a lie.

By Luke Guttridge