Author: narcogen

It’s difficult to find words to express the privilege I feel to have been involved in this site and to have been a fan of Bungie for more than fifteen years and of Halo now for ten. So on the occasion of this, Rampancy.net’s tenth anniversary (first post here) I thought I would just make…

Since Halo 3 was released more than 18 months ago, devout fans everywhere have been asking themselves one question: Floodgate or Cortana? The answer can now be revealed, confirmed by both Netcraft and Louis Wu: The Ark. Yes, I know that wasn’t one of the choices. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the…

Gravemind put all his ideas about what would be the ultimate Halo game. I thought I’d take a look at some of those elements and see which I liked, which I didn’t, and why: My preferred compromise would be a Resistance-style “sectional bar” health system, with the player using health packs to fully restore their…

A detail-oriented critic of the Halo series, Gravemind has now collected his ideas into a kind of roadmap for his ultimate Halo game to combine all the elements he finds the best from all three games, as well as eliminating the faults. Interesting read. If y ou don’t like the light text on dark background…

At Edge Online, N’Gai Croal in his blog discusses some interesting issues relating to realism, verisimilitude, and detail, many of which echo some of my own experiences. Because even those titles which are widely seen as exemplars of game realism, be they Crysis or Mass Effect or Grand Theft Auto, are themselves stylised in some…

According to Edge, Microsoft has settled with PalTalk holdings, the company that alleged that Halo infringed on patents they held that covered interactive gaming.

Halo fan and Halo fan fiction author vector40 pointed out that one of his college textbooks, Understanding Videogames by Simon Egenfeldt-Nielson, features a piece of Halo fan fiction by UNSC Trooper– a fiction featured in, of course, the HBO fan fiction section. It’s a poem entitled Hymn To The Fallen.

Another mostly positive review for Halo Wars up at Spong: I still enjoyed Halo Wars. I even enjoyed the cut-scenes that powered the single-player’s short, 15 episode (mission) game along. The simple reason for my enjoyment is that Ensemble Studios (rest its soul) has produced an intelligent game that can be slipped into with or…

Soulskill has posted a review of Halo Wars over at Slashdot. Generally his opinion was positive. He sums up the game thusly: Ensemble succeeded quite well at establishing a control system that is powerful yet doesn’t fight for intellectual real estate with the actual playing of the game. It’s not a ground-breaking new entry into…

Bloomberg News is reporting that PalTalk Holdings Inc. of New York has paid about $200K for patents belonging to Mpath, which reportedly had discussions with Microsoft once upon a time about technology for “ways to control interactive applications over multiple computers”. PalTalk is now suing Microsoft for violating those patents; they say MS had discussions…

Slashdot is reporting an “explosion” of emulators running under Yellow Dog Linux on the Sony Playstation 3. What does that have to do with Bungie? Because with Linux running on the PS3, you can install Aleph One on it and play Marathon.

…and what they are not doing is investing in original intellectual properties. Actually I think that entire phrase is a contradiction in terms, at least in terms of how Microsoft can invest in something. Invest, in their case, means buy, and once something has proven itself worth buying it’s no longer original. Take a look…

We have a well defined, carefully orchestrated, properly planned universe to explore not exploit. –Frank O’Connor, July 2008, GameFocus I can tell you that if you could think of a game that would work with a party atmosphere that would not gut the franchise, or milk it, we would think about it, seriously. Jason Pace,…

Reader Cryptic of the Bungie Community Group club writes to let us know of that group’s unofficial Community Forge Contest. The contest is for map variants based on the Mythic Maps due out soon; purchasers of the Limited Edition of Halo Wars will get access to them on that disc. The contest winner will get…

This article boils down to this paraphrase: Everyone agrees sequels are bad. I mean, not all sequels are bad, but sequels in general are bad. And just like every game downloaded by a pirate is a lost sale, every dollar budgeted for a sequel is a dollar less for one of the kind of fun…

Thank goodness Sony is a Japanese company, because they can at least claim that English isn’t their native language when someone points out the nonsense in claims ilke the latest regarding PlayStation 3 sales. Things start out fairly innocuously: “In terms of units, it is true that PS3, as compared to last year, is slightly…

BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka’s advanced the possibility that someday gamers would play games on one ubiquitous console. There are “valid reasons,” he says, why the market would trend that direction, with the exception of “Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo maybe having some issues with that [as] they might want to continue their platforms.” You think? This…

mrsmiley sends word that the Happy Halodays grand winner has been announced.

Jonathan Blow, One man creator of the oh-so-pretty Braid platformer, as amazing for its interesting gameplay as its surreal visuals, says, essentially, that videogame stories are bad and probably wouldn’t get much better with better writers since trying to tell a story in a game is a bad idea. One might wonder whether he’s paraphrasing…

The gaming and tech press are all aflutter with the news that videogames beat DVDs… except they don’t, at least, not in all the areas that matter. The data that lead to the “games beats movies” conclusion, much like the one-day comparisons of game blockbusters like Halo 3 to the one-day takes of top films…