Author: Louis Wu

The fighting heats up in the second installment of the ‘New Wave’ series by The Emperor – check out ‘The Battle’ in our Fan Fiction section.

Not unexpected, or new, even… but something we should all keep in mind. Ferrex reminds us that PC hardware will NOT perform as well as Xbox hardware – Especially near the Xbox launch date. People shouldn’t be expecting hardware in their machines today to play Halo (or any other Xbox game that comes out for…

Hmm. This has been speculated before… but not, generally, by someone with the inside connections present here… Mike Salmon, Editor in Chief of the Official Xbox Magazine, answered a fan question on OXM’s forum about the upgradeability of launch titles:When MS goes online it will be in a big way and yes games that are…

For those following the story of Xbox kiosks appearing in stores in the last few days… it looks like your chances of playing Halo on them in the near future aren’t very good. An Electronic Boutique employee posted the following tidbit to the usenet newsgroup alt.games.video.xbox today:I work at EB and opened up our X-Box…

Eric Trautmann, who popped up a couple of days ago with some interesting backstory info, has popped up again on the Marathon’s Story forum with some clarifications of his job. He’s part of the licensing team, so he interfaces with folks like Eric Nylund, who’s writing ‘The Fall of Reach’, due out in October, and…

Wondering about the Xbox hardware, and how it compares to your l33t computer? FiringSquad has just put up their Xbox Technology Overview, a massive guide to the inner workings of the Xbox, comparing it (in great detail) to a PC’s hardware… it’s pretty technical, but if you were curious about the nuts and bolts, this…

Heh – FunXbox interviewed Mike Salmon, Editor-in-Chief of the Official Xbox Magazine, and the last question was pretty amusing: FunXbox: How much of an ass do you feel like giving Halo a lower predicted review score, after having played it more recently 🙂 ? Mike Salmon: I consistently feel like an ass – I’ve just…

Draikin sends in an attractive desktop image for our Wallpaper section.

TeamXbox has put up a Poster Gallery of Xbox launch titles. The Halo poster is simply a re-alignment of the elements of the box art… but it’s still pretty cool. Check it out!

Bob loses a recruit, and the Nautilus loses… more. Tursas submits Chapter 11 of his Hermes Trismegistus saga to our Fan Fiction section. What’s with that illness? Check it out, and don’t forget to leave a quick comment when you’re through!

The Bungie folks weren’t too impressed with it… but hey, it’s the first two-page Halo ad, so we’ve captured it for posterity, in a readable format. You can take a look at it in small (800×492, 84K) or large (1500×923, 244K) formats… and for those who don’t like to squint, there are closeups of the…

Tyson Green, aka Ferrex, jumps into the ‘Why no Bots?’ discussion to give a pretty realistic rationale for leaving them out this time around. Would definitely be nicer to have them than not… but it looks like there just wasn’t time. Matt Soell goes further, and suggests that their inclusion has been in doubt since…

Martin Kildén Smith sends in a new desktop for our Wallpaper section. Watch your files, easy to lose on this…

Hmm… another quarter heard from. Over on the Marathon’s Story page forum, there’s been quite a bit of discussion about the leaked Halo backstory information (more, disappointingly, than in our own forum, actually), and a new name has surfaced – Eric Trautmann. Eric seems to be responsible for – at the very least – cleaning…

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…