Despite my being upset at it’s only being available for Win8 devices, the game itself looks like a lot of fun. The graphics look sweet! Color is fantastic. Sounds of weapons are on par with what we have already. The story line is plausible. The price is great.

Really, my only complaint is it’s not being available for XBOX 360 (Arcade).

Being a fan of over 10 years, running a blog completed dedicated to the Halo franchise, but not being employed for the last 26 months, well…this is going to suck and I’m going to miss out on this. I’d love to be able to play the game, report on it through my blog and have yet another Halo experience.

I can see Microsoft’s reasoning for doing this. My fear is that it will backfire. Using MS’s premier ‘AAA’ title to persuade developers to make games for the Win8 as well as consumers to by Win8 devices is risky at best. If Spartan Assault doesn’t do well in sales, there will be several factors involved, some likely to be overlooked by investors/stockholders, etc.

Win8 devices such as the Phone and Tablet hold a very narrow market share. Not all of those consumers will buy Spartan Assault. With this in mind, I hope MS has a target amount of sales in mind for Spartan Assault. I’m very curious what they will consider a success for this app. I don’t think they believe it will bring in a throng of people to buy a Win8 device. Rather if they can gather whatever their “magic” number of sales is, they can use that as a selling point to developers that MS/Win8 can compete in the Smart phone/App world.

But again, if they don’t hit those numbers, it’s going to hurt not just Win8, but the Halo franchise as well. If “Halo” can’t convince consumers and developers alike to buy into Win8, then really nothing can. In doing so, Halo will look like a flop, further dissuading former fans of the franchise from coming back and keeping new potential consumers from buying Halo at all, be it Spartan Assault, Halo 4, 5, or 6.

I’m hoping for the best here, but I can also look through the fog and see what is likely to happen.

One possible outcome is that Spartan Assault will come out on the XB1 since that too will be Win8 enabled. However, this still doesn’t solve the dilemma of 360 users. Many of us won’t jump on board early. Not just due to the normal early adopter/bug issues, but due in large part to what MS has already announced about the gaming aspect of the XB1. Once again, I have to hope that E3 will shed new light on this and help to allay some fears of we gamers. Given the reports coming from a multitude of websites though, it may already be too late for the XB1. (In which case, I hope that it’s reconsidered to give us Spartan Assault to buy from the Arcade on the 360.

-Sal