Microsoft's greatest marketing site/time waster since minesweeper

Silverlight may be Microsoft's new media platform, but with its latest video game campaign, it's not showing it with a new marketing site that runs using Adobe's Flash. It's part of a massive campaign to get people to buy the third game in the Halo series, but even if you're not a video game fanatic, or familiar with it, the site is really worth taking for a spin. It revolves (literally) around a massive diorama of some intense futuristic battle. You're given control to roam back and forth using your mouse and arrow keys, and at various points even stop where you are and move freely around in a 360 degree mode. There's also an autoplay button, that will let you sit back and just watch.

Along your way around the battlefield you'll find all sorts of things to click on, including images, text snippets, and videos. Each of them is highlighted in blue, and when clicked on, provides a download link for a related full-size desktop wallpaper or other media item.

The real draw, however, is the scale of this thing. While the diorama might only be a few feet wide in real life, flying around an inch above the ground creates this really neat effect that's half Matrix, half this-is-what-it's-like-to-be-an-NFL-football-that-just-got-thrown-for-80-yards.

[via Digg]

(Credit: CNET Networks)

[fun2program8]

Excellent job by Microsoft

Wow, they make everything seem so real and important. If you didn't know it was a game, you might believe it was real for a second or two.

Microsoft did an excellent job! Top-notch stuff.