Month: September 2001

A terse reply from Matt Soell confirms that there won’t be any multiplayer bots in Halo. (Ar-Isildur of *WP* followed up with a second confirmation from Jason Jones, in case anyone decided to doubt Matt.) Hopefully, the single-player replay value will compensate for this… if not, you’ll need to make better friends with your neighbors.

Bummer! Most previous Bungie games had fun acronyms on the packaging materials – fans spent lots of time trying to work them out. This time, unfortunately, there won’t be any – seems they forgot. Inside, however…

Folks asked… so here you go. The Fan Fiction section now has a Comments option. If you read a story, be sure to hit the comments link for it, and leave a note; short or long, doesn’t matter – just so long as you let folks know what you think. Feedback is only useful if…

The Halo SETI Marines hold steady at number 53… the loss of signum hurts a little, but the arrival of Int_21 almost makes up for it. Total crunchers are up, but total units are down… too many people actually WORKING at their computers! Check your results on the 7 day stats page.

Cyberjackie sends in a new desktop for our Wallpaper collection… a bit hard to read in places, but interesting.

This is NOT to get your hopes up, or down, or whatever – this is information. Jon Kimmich, Product Planner for Halo, has just begun to look into the format that the PC version will be released in. (The choices are multi-CD or DVD.) Read his post for caveats, and realize the decision will be…

What the…? Flawless Cowboy, otherwise known as Jaime Griesemer, Halo Designer, jumped into a forum discussion today with some… odd info. People were wondering about enemies that can blow themselves up at death, and speculation ran to the idea that the baddies were doing this to deny you weapons, or something similar. The response from…

Whoa – Halo weapons in Counterstrike. Strykerwolf wondered, on the R.net forum, whether anyone would be interested in a weapons mod for CS that looked like this. All I can say is, nice modeling job!

A week ago, we put up a page that contained the text from Microsoft’s official Halo site. With the discovery of the controlling XML file, we’ve updated that page to contain the entire timeline (up to the crash of the escape pod on the surface of Halo), as well as some descriptive text that appears…

Justin Brimm points out that MacGamez.com has a feature called ‘The 2001 Sizzling Preview’, and Halo is one of the 8 games they looked at. Not a lot there… but the reviewer is considerably more excited than he was before he wrote it, which is good.

Major screwup in the Microsoft Marketing division: If you visit the official Halo site, you’ll find a section labeled ‘Timeline’. At the end of the text, it saysFor more in-depth information on the historical events leading up to this current predicament, simply click on any of the highlighted years below. Please be sure to check…

This week’s Halo Update just came in from Matt Soell… the tone is pretty upbeat; seems clear that development is going well. Things are nearly finished – bug squashing and multiplayer ‘testing’ are the orders of the day. And it warms our hearts to hear of the camaraderie between team members like Marty and Joseph……

Ouch – looks like Microsoft is delaying the US release of the Xbox by a week, according to this Associated Press story. That’s gonna cost something, PR-wise… Thanks to Harry Al-Shakarchi for the heads-up.

Thanks to Xero, who noticed a new poll over at Gamespot: “Which of these Xbox launch game [sic] will you buy first?” Halo is currently in the lead…

Interesting. This Reuters story, gotten to us via Gamers.com through Dorram, suggests that Microsoft might have trouble meeting their projected targets for the number of Xboxes available on the day of launch. Rather than 600,000 to 800,000 units, there might be as few as 300,000. (However, most parties believe that even if they miss the…

The first time we got a note on this subject, recently, I smiled. The second time, the smile faltered. Now, I’m disturbed. There seems to be a whole raft of newcomers to the Halo scene, who have just discovered that in the center of the Halo logo is buried the Marathon logo. They send us…

And the god of the machines thundered across the beach, hefting his weapon expertly, and his bullets bore the wings of avenging angels, hungry for the vindication of Reach.Ape Man sends in his latest short story, ‘The Desperation of Dreams’. A harsh look at the insides of a man of steel. Check it out in…

Mike Weber, Site Director of PlanetXbox, sent word that they’ve put up a first look at Halo. There’s not a whole lot new (although this line I don’t remember seeing in print before:The game’s engine also sports body model reactions, which means if you plug a creature in the chest, the chest area will reel…

TeamXbox trailer mirror update: The files (both the .asf and the .mpg) seem to have disappeared from thecorpse.com… but The Junkyard moves in to fill the void. Ryan ‘Mhaddy’ Matthews writes to say that the .mpg version is now available on the Junkyard’s Downloads page. Thanks, Mhaddy! Update: Silly person that I am, I mistyped…

WereTiger writes to clarify some details about the Game Ranking poll at OXMOnline that we mentioned yesterday: The order of games is arbitrary – or at least, was set by the OXM staff, not the fans that voted. If you check the individual polls, you’ll see a different story – right now, 335 of 977…