Author: Louis Wu

It hasn’t been without roadblocks, but the Maw 700 has finally come to a successful conclusion. Contest 2, in which participants needed to get from one end of the Maw Run to the other with Maximum Style, closed 27 hours ago – but instead of a few screenshots (and a well-defined goal, as Contest 1…

Weekly Review has posted his HBO Weekly Review – and with the exception of the quotes of mine that he took (embarrassingly) out of context, it’s a fantastic summary of the week. (It’s getting rather long, though – I thought summaries were supposed to be EASY to read? Maybe there’s just so much goodness that…

The 2002 Game Developers Conference ends tomorrow (when Bungie’s Jaime Griesemer and Chris Butcher will be giving a presentation on Halo’s AI, and Marty O’Donnell will be talking about Halo’s audio production), but last night, the Game Developers Choice Awards were given out, and Halo won one of the three categories for which it was…

Lophan passed along an interesting URL from the New York Times website (free registration required) – ‘Grinding Terror or Grand Adventure – Choose Your War’. It compares Operation: Flashpoint to Halo, using these two games as representatives of opposing genres of war simulators: But if Flashpoint gives players the kind of ground-level view of war…

Charles Clifford points out an article on Gamespy that explains the Gamer’s Logik confusion yesterday – the product they were talking about was Mech Assault, a new third-person combat game from Microsoft due out in November. It’s not based on the Halo engine, and it doesn’t seem to have a story-based concept behind it:Gitelman [project…

Whoa – a new fad has started. Bezerk Fury follows the lead of Jonathon Cairns, and creates another Starcraft map – this time of Sidewinder. (It’s 40k.) The question is… can anyone do the SOLO levels? 🙂

And the doors are officially… Closed. The Second Contest of the Maw 700 is now over, but for the judging… we’ll be poring over the entries this evening, and will announce the winner either later tonight or tomorrow. We have a total of three entries (we probably would have had four, had it not been…

fAt1, of MPZ Halo, has put up his review of Halo – he was… rather enthusiastic. The review itself says that you shouldn’t expect a numerical score… but I pushed him; he gave it a 10.5/10. We’ve added it to the Reviews database. (Expect a rather large set of additions to the database sometime soon.)

Halo action figures in the future? Matt Soell dropped by to point out that while the most recent attempt in this field failed, Doug Zartman (formerly known as the Voice of Bob, currently a MS employee) is working on finding another partner for this endeavor. Woohoo – plush Grunt dolls you can feed to your…

Ran across another Halo review – Xen Gamers gave it an A, a few weeks ago. We’ve added it to the Reviews database.

Nico D., of Game-presse.de, sends word that Warthog jumping was so much fun, he had to make his own Warthog Jump tribute movie. It’s in .wmv format, 4:30 long, and weighs in at 7.4 mb. Take a look!

Goodness. Alan Wu sent in a map, created by friend Jonathon Cairns, of Blood Gulch in Starcraft format. If you play Starcraft, snag this! (There are a few easter eggs, so hunt around.) It’s 80k, zipped.

Black_Jackal sends in Chapter 1 of his ‘After Halo’ story – you’ll find it in our Fan Fiction section.

Before this gets out of hand… Korps sent in this link to a page at Gamer’s Logik, purporting to contain information about the upcoming Bungie game code-named Phoenix. Now, I don’t claim to be completely ‘in the know’, but I did get the chance to walk through the Phoenix development room back in January of…

Speaking of plots… the Halo Story Page got a MASSIVE update recently – the inbox has been cleared, for the first time in a long time. Mnemesis has retreated to his isolation tank to regenerate the brain cells lost in this endeavor – please read his work, so as to make the effort not in…

The Halo plot hole defined by this quote from Truth and Reconciliation:While the Covenant had us locked up in here, I overheard the guards talking about this ring world. They call it… “Halo.”has been discussed extensively on our forum. (Why could Keyes understand what the guards were saying when the super-duper translator in our own…

Three new tricks in our Gameplay Tricks section – a pair of Out of Map experiences from pete_the_duck, and some vehicle manipulation from Scott Kelly. Check ’em out!

And now, a word from our sponsors… in a manner of speaking. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the Halo community is the ability to see what insane – erm, intrepid people are doing to push the Halo engine. However, because Halo’s got no built-in film feature, stunts have to be recorded as video……

Drunken Elite? TitaniumPez found a pretty bizarre looping Banshee on Halo… nice perfect circles, but he doesn’t seem to notice the player. Hmm…

Alan Wu did the community a nice favor, and extracted all the interesting stuff off the Xbox Japan site we mentioned yesterday. Three music clips (in MP3 format), and a bunch of mini-screenshots… plus one bizarre grunt sound. All in a package only 260k! Grab it today.