IGN.com has an interview up with Chiefs wide receiver Dwayne Bowe.  Mostly it sticks to the general Q & A stuff, questions about his rookie year, his expectations, etc.  But at the end of the interview he makes a pretty bold claim that could lead to a showdown this summer:

IGN: So what kind of video games do you like play?

Dwayne Bowe: I’m big into shooting games; I just try and do whatever I’m not doing on the field. I like to play football in real-life, but it’s my job, I don’t want to do that on the side. So I like to play Halo and Call of Duty and smoke anyone who tries to play me.

IGN: So you think you’re the best Halo player in the NFL?

Dwayne Bowe: I think so, if anyone wants to test me, you can call me, you got my cell.

IGN: Gilbert Arenas has sort of been the preeminent Halo player in sports for a while now. Do you think you could take him?

Dwayne Bowe: I think I have a great chance of taming him. I don’t know how often he plays it.

IGN: So, if we could make a Gilbert Arenas-Dwayne Bowe Halo matchup, would you participate?

Dwayne Bowe: I’m on it. I am on it.

I’m just warning you Dwayne, Gilbert will do anything to win.

Considering all that happened with Gilbert in the last year with video games, both in Halo and NBA Live, it probably shouldn’t come as a shock that his Gamertags were among the most viewed last year. When he stepped up to sponsor an online Halo tournament and waive the entry fee for all the participants, that came as a little bit of a surprise. Maybe that was the inspiration behind this highlight video.

Bungie (the developers of Halo) came out with their response to the accusations of Gilbert cheating in Halo:

Lots of drama abounded (or perhaps rebounded) on Wednesday and Thursday as famous baller Gilbert Arenas got busted for EXP boosting on Live. Although it’s a little sad, it’s not strictly cheating at the game and he’s not really harming anyone. However, we should reinforce our philosophy and comment here.

We explicitly want to encourage people to form parties and play with groups of friends for extended sessions, not penalize them for doing so by denying them progress towards a rating.

EXP is simply a record of successful games played, and not an indicator of skill. There is nothing to be gained from boosting it other than the kind of embarrassment visited upon Mr. Arenas. It should be noted that his skill level, 42 when we last looked, is not the result of chicanery and is an admirable skill level. It seems he just wanted the shiny epaulettes that accompany a high EXP rank.

So there you have it. Is Gilbert a dork? Yes. Is he a cheater? No. While we’re on the subject of video games, D.C. Sports Bog had an interesting piece about how video games helped Arenas keep his spirits up while he was rehabbing from his knee injury.

“The funniest thing that you wouldn’t think, would get you out of it. One day, I just logged on to online video games, decided, ‘Instead of watching this [NBA] game let me just play this video game.’ And one of the kids just said [to another gamer], ‘You just need to shut the —- up.’ And it just made me laugh. I didn’t laugh for about two weeks, and it just made me laugh, because it’s so innocent.”

“You know, there’s no star power, there’s no nothing. You hear these 13-year-olds just going at it: ‘My Xbox broke, I can’t afford it, I can’t afford to get a new one,’ and this and this. And you’re just sitting there talking, and you start interacting, and you start laughing again. Then you just start enjoying. This is what life is really about.”

Finally, while we’ve determined that Gilbert isn’t cheating at video games, We’re Off To See The Wizards thinks he could still be lying about them.

Gilbert mentioned in his latest blog that he has an “Unspoken Rivalry” because Gilbert is on NBA Live 08 and Chris Paul is on the other NBA licensed game coming out this year. Anyways, it looks like Paul’s game has thrown in a little subliminal advertising in their latest ad:

It looks like EA is going to have to re-do the following commercial and replace the Jazz with the Hornets.

Or does he? Gilbert has mentioned his Xbox 360 gamer tag before (Agent Arenas) and looking at his stats on Xbox Live reveals he wins a lot but one person claims he may be cheating:

I was looking up Agent Arenas gamer tag for XBL and I found his stats. It appears as if he just joins up with his tag and a friend, and then uses another XBL account to quit out of matches so he gets first place every time. What’s going on here? Is that really Arenas cheating?

As mentioned before, Arenas does have some swag in Halo and plays video games for many hours at a time so it would be no surprise if the stats were real. If anyone has played him before, let us know how you did!