Pixels. They are the thousands, maybe millions, of little points that make up a TV screen. For the longest time, all we cared about was how those pixels projected images from our home consoles to out TV sets and whether or not the images that those pixels made were any fun. But then, somewhere along the line, around the mid-1990s, developers realized they could only go so far with two dimensions, sixteen bits and only so many pixels, and so the era of 3D was born. And in that rough decade, the debate of graphics vs. gameplay has always been amusing and though-provoking, and the merits of each have given us some true masterpieces. However, there are always the snobs and the insane. No franchise in the past seven years has eliected more debate that Halo, but I have to say that out of all the idiocy I have seen from the fans, this one takes the cake.

Halo 3 not HD: runs at 640p, pixel counters claim

Halo 3, one of the most-hyped (and not all undeservedly) games ever, has been determined to run at "only" a "paltry" 640p instead of 720p or "true HD," 1080p. How did the sycophant basement-dwellers who determined this figure this out? They actually COUNTED THE PIXELS. As the Joystiq article says, remember when we just played games and enjoyed them as is? :P

I know that games can look bad, but it's one thing to actually think a game looks bad and quite another to magnify and pick apart a screen image just to make a point that no one cares about. I'm just glad that the people at Bungie see this for what it is: a crock. When this "horror of horrors" broke, Bungie responded. The last paragraph is the most interesting:

"In fact, if you do a comparison shot between the native 1152x640 image and the scaled 1280x720, it's practically impossible to discern the difference. We would ignore it entirely were it not for the internet's propensity for drama where none exists. In fact the reason we haven't mentioned this before in weekly updates, is the simple fact that it would have distracted conversation away from more important aspects of the game, and given tinfoil hats some new gristle to chew on as they catalogued their toenail clippings."

I'm glad the people at Bungie (or at least, the person who wrote that response) has got a sense of humour. I leave you with this quote from the Beyond 3D forums (http://forum.beyond3d.com/):

"I don't understand how this would prove that Halo 3 was less than 720p. Wouldn't the angle of the line (or in this case edge) you are looking at relative to the horizontal axis have to be exactly equal to or an exact fraction of 45 degrees for you to see a direct correlation between the change in vertical position and the number of "steps" you would see in the image?"

If you understand what the hell this person is talking about, you don't deserve to play video games.