There is something called an idiot franchise - that is to say, a franchise which has fanboys (or girls) so loyal and unthinking that anything with the right name on it will inspire the easiest of all partings, a fool and their money. There are some obvious candidates for this... EA games and horror films. EA has been pumping out various slightly different iterations of sports games for over a decade now - to the point one starts to feel less contempt for the company and more for the fans... although, as it's EA... there's still a lot of contempt to be felt for them.

Microsoft seem fairly intent on making Halo their torch blazing idiot franchise. Now, some are going to immediately say that Halo was great etc. The first was certainly something that made the X-box a player in the console market - and let's face it, Halo is really much, much more about the multiplayer than the single player, regardless of the orders of magnitude more that was put into that in the second two games...

So, why say this is the dawn of an idiot franchise? First off, Halo Wars... ok, you might say - RTS games on consoles... those are never really going to be great. Some types of game favour a mouse and keyboard, some a controller - and hey, it had some pretty cutscenes and it wasn't actually MADE by Bungie. Sure but it was just a cash-in... and of course, now Halo: ODST has been done... Bungie have bailed, well almost. They're signing off with Halo: Reach - which they've said little about but will presumably be a Halo prequel and FPS.

Bungie can't really be blamed for what went down with Halo - Microsoft bought them and the game concept changed radically and it became the X-box's messiah, very much the Alpha and Omega. ODST was not a high note to finish on - it's a bunch of characters you don't know, doing stuff you don't care about and really, the ODST boys are pussies compared to Master Chief. The chorus of voices on this game echoes much what the developers said - it's not worth full price. It's just an expansion, pretending to be a game... But... in short order, all these sins will be forgotten.

Why? Because... THERE'S A NEW HALO GAME! Which will be the last one to have anything to do with Bungie - all Halo properties henceforth shall be dealt with by a Microsoft subsidiary. Yes. Microsoft want to milk this cow dry enough that they not only bought the intellectual property from Bungie, they're actually making a company to exploit it. A company PURELY to develop Halo titles... the power of fanboys is as awesome as their ability to let fanaticism override intellect time and again... After all, if Halo: ODST being a full priced release when the game amounted to a fairly limited add-on for Halo 3... then it's fair to say the shark has been jumped.