Author: Louis Wu

Bullseye points out that Firing Squad has put up an overview of Halo 2 from E3. If you’ve been eagerly snarfing up every Halo 2 tidbit to be released recently, there won’t be anything new here… but it’s a nice writeup nevertheless.

Hehe – pretty cool… come up with a cool phrase or quote, and it might make it into Halo 2 as an easter egg. Want the details on this fun little contest? Go read the news story at Bungie.net. Thanks to PanZer for the heads-up on our forum.

The winner of the Online Trivia Contest held last week here has been revealed, over at Bungie.net, by SketchFactor. Congratulations to Thomas Langdon, who pulled the high score (36/49, or 73%) out of the 326 people who took it. (Yeah, it was TOUGH.) We should have it back online to play with later this week.…

In the fervor of last week, we managed to forget to post about a seventh screenshot at Bungie.net; unlike the first 6, it’s at 640×480, because apparently the depth-of-field effect only works at that resolution. It’s very slick, though – worth seeing! (It’s the last shot on the page.)

For those with Gamespot Complete access (it seems many people paid them the $5 monthly fee to get the Halo 2 trailer), there’s a new interview up; Pete Parsons, Studio Manager at Bungie, discussed the trailer, and the future with respect to Halo 2, with a Gamespot staffer. You’ll find it on their media page.…

The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences is now looking for films. From their official announcement:The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences has officially opened its 2003 Call for Entries, accepting submissions of Machinima works for this year’s Machinima Film Festival (Machinima films are films made within a real-time virtual 3D environment, i.e. 3D game…

mehve, otherwise known as Bungie artist Lorraine McLees, points out on our forum that Cortana’s face was modeled after Nefertiti, an ancient Egyptian queen. (There are hundreds of pictures of her – just do a Google image search; here’s one example, on a page describing the queen herself.) Thanks, mehve!

It’s been mentioned that one of the videos shown at the fanfest involved a documentary being done for the Discovery Channel. Forum visitor none posted a summary of the actual piece, as well as showtimes. (Be aware that the documentary will not contain all the footage shown at the fanfest.)

IGN has also put up an Insider-only article containing updates on the Halo 2 info beyond that which you can glean from watching the trailer. Much of this info is available elsewhere (our forum, for example, in the form of reports from the show or the fanfest), but some was new for me. Probably the…

Rage Reset points out that the front page of IGN Xbox contains a poll asking your opinion about the Xbox game of the show for E3. Halo 2 is currently stomping the competition with almost 70% of the vote… but hey, a poll’s a poll.

BOLL has added another 20 panoramas to his HaloRAMA collection. You can view all images in the default mode, or you can check out just the new images. There are some stunning ones in there! (The Flash interface needs to be updated – by BOLL – before it can show these new images, so for…

Xbox LAN AZ showed up in force at E3 and the fanfest; their fanfest pictures are now online. Thanks to Cybrfrk for the heads-up.

Miscellaneous Art, too, was submitted while we were gone. Three pieces – including a shot of Danung, a rockin’ Grunt. Check ’em all out in the Miscellaneous Art section.

Clearing out the desktop queue; there are 9 images built up since we left for E3 (two are variants, so there are only 7 visible on the main Wallpaper page). Some pretty amazing stuff this time around…

Gamespy snagged Hamilton Chu for a discussion of Halo 2, and it went live yesterday. It’s a very nice piece; I particularly liked this bit of game development philosophy:You want to give the player choice — or, in a certain sense, the illusion of choice. As a designer, there’s the one best experience — in…

One of the articles that came out last week that we neglected to mention was a Halo PC piece at IGN PC. There’s some tasty stuff in there… but the most surprising thing (to me) was this bit (in a list of things that are new in the PC version):Flamethrower: You heard correctly. Though Randy…

Evan Grant wrote to point out a small flash game he’s made; there seem to be a few glitches (I could never figure out whether shooting was possible, and the score seems to remain zero no matter how many Banshees I avoid, and in some browsers moving forward quits the game), but it’s pretty small,…

Some time ago, BOLL started work on a Halo-related mod for Sven Co-op, itself a Half-Life mod. He’s decided to give it away, because he no longer has time to work on it. You can read the details in the Sven Co-op forums… or simply download the existing package. Update: BOLL clarified that Sven Co-op…

Gah! We got behind because of E3 -I’m really sorry. There are three new episodes of One One Se7en for your viewing pleasure. (These are the episodes for last Wednesday, last Friday, and today.) I’ll try and make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Dan Chosich created a 50 minute video for the AGP Spring Tournament this year… and has put up the trailer for it on his site. We were asked by Jay Umboh, the president of the AGP, to mirror this… and it’s pretty dang cool, so that’s exactly what we’re doing. You can find a copy…