Year: 2005

Been a while, but Mat Noguchi (Desk Mess Consultant on the Halo 2 dev team) has updated his blog with some thoughts. He discusses how studios approach the ‘how do we get the most out of our creative people?’ problem – disjointed but fun read. Thanks, Cybrfrk.

Stuntmutt always said he stole his best work; I certainly remember seeing today’s One One Se7en gag in a few old Warner Brothers cartoons (just swap in Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and Bugs Bunny where appropriate). Nevertheless… it’s certainly topical and relevant in today’s XBL milieu.

Phoenix_9286 has posted episode 6 of Last Stand, his Halo 2 comic. If you haven’t read the rest, links are in the text blurb below the comic on the DeviantArt page.

AsiaOne has put up another interview with Brian Jarrard, aka SketchFactor, collected during his recent tour of Asia to promote Halo 2. This one does a much better job with translations than the last one did – there are no obvious gaffes like “most of [our games before Halo] were not successful” or “[Microsoft] cancelled…

The Junkyard continues its Spotlight series (after a 3-month break) with a look at Ross Mills. Tattoos, The Princess Bride, and Fable – go see what ELSE defines this guy. Ross’s instincts for self-promotion have not failed him. Thanks, Mhaddy.

William Vitka is a columnist with CBSNews.com – we mentioned his very first piece, a look at the power of Halo 2, back in November. Recently, he began publishing a series of interviews focused on the issue of violence in videogames; a series of questions was sent to a variety of people with opinions on…

Dennis Powers continues his introspective machinima series ‘The Halo CE Chronicles’ with Episode 7, ‘Remembering the Future’. The Spartan comes to grips with the loss of a friend, and his AI companion attempts to understand the human concept of grief. Pretty scenery, and a thoughtful (though action-free) episode. Proof that Halo machinima doesn’t have to…

Icy Guy and RMC 12 submitted another 12 multiplayer dialogue snippets for our Dialogue Databank – go listen.

coolp dropped by our forum to let people know that TalkXbox.com is looking for a new Strategy writer to continue their series of Strategy of the Week articles. Read the forum post for more details.

Geez – you’d think we weren’t fans, or something. Thanks for reminding us, Toby.

Must be a weekend for in-depth looks. Speedy posted a treatise on our forum on The Mechanical Aspects of the M12 Warthog LRV. When was the last time you saw a physics analysis of a video game model?

Wow, very nice – mortey points out a thread in the Halflife2.net forums showing screenshots of an in-progress map for Half-Life 2 deathmatch, based on Halo’s Prisoner. Great work!

Stephen Loftus continues his in-depth analysis of the Halo game world with a piece called ‘The Pillar of Autumn Conundrum’. In it, he looks at the UNSC ship with an eye to reconciling various size anomalies – he finds that Bungie did a great job of remaining consistent with scale issues… but took a few…

Dark Helmet, longtime Halo trickster and current High Impact Halo admin, sat down with Ducain for a 1-on-1 interview recently. Nice read; go visit to see what drives people like DH to blow up hogs (and lots of other stuff). Thanks, Ducain.

Yesterday, WraithX posted three new Swahili clips he found in the final tunnel in Outskirts – and rehema once again translated these to English for us. We’ve added all three (with their translations) to our Dialogue Databank… along with a multiplayer sound submitted by Remotemonkey. Coming up on 800 Halo 2 snippets!

Has it really been a week since I posted a Fan Fiction update? There are 28 new pieces today, so yeah… maybe.

Wow. There’s an article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer today that talks about the big-business aspect of video game development… but buried in it are a bunch of tidbits that I haven’t seen anywhere else yet. It talks about the newest job opening on Bungie’s Jobs page – they’re looking for an AI Engineer (we haven’t…

Over at GameFAQsASCII.com, there’s a Character Battle – Arbiter vs Mega Man. Only 75 people have voted at this point – wouldn’t take much to sway this one. Thanks, Harrison. (I gotta say, I really don’t understand the point of polls like this; I’m posting this one because we got a half-dozen emails about it,…