Author: narcogen

The Escapist is usually a cut above other gaming sites when it comes to content, especially long content. They’ve done a short review of Wideload’s Hail to the Chimp, and the long and short of it is, they didn’t like it much.

The Escapist has a short article up on methods to combat various forms of motion sickness sometimes related to video gaming. Bungie fans will recall some of the problems fans had with the XBLA version of Marathon:Durandal that caused motion sickness in some players. It was speculated that the problems were related to the field…

I thought this story would fizzle out. If certain people had much any sense, it probably would have. Yet here we are. Eurogamer has an exclusive interview coming up tomorrow with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 boss Don Mattrick. They, of course, asked him about the cancelled Bungie announcement and the studio’s reaction: “Sure they’re disappointed. Any…

Of course fans expect that a Halo game will look good. Maybe it won’t be the absolutely most edge-bleedingly, envelope-pushingly, buzzword-compliantly beautiful game on the market at release, but it will look good. According to Kotaku, then, Halo Wars is a Halo game, and it looks good: Halo Wars has some impressive visual pop to…

Well, it’s been awhile since COD4 and Halo 3 did the flip-flop on Major Nelson’s ranking of top games on Xbox Live, but it’s happened again: Halo 3 is number one, and COD4 is number two. Again. How long that lasts is anybody’s guess; perhaps the two games will get back on the seesaw. Until…

Version 0.20.2 of Aleph One, the open source engine for playing Marathon games on MacOS, Windows and Linux, has been released.

Several websites have picked up a review of Hail to the Chimp by Billy O’Keefe of the McClatchy-Tribune news service, including the Star-Telegram of Dallas, the Miami Herald of Florida, and Macon.com in Georgia. Don’t bother hitting all the links as all the reviews are the same text: Fortunately, “Chimp’s” glitches are sporadic, and they…

Rock, Paper, Shotgun thinks that a Halo MMO might be coming. Writer Jim Rossignol comes up with a laundry list of reasons why, some of which I don’t find entirely convincing. I’d probably play it if they made it, though. I originally thought Halo– the first game– would be something like PlanetSide. It’d be nice…

So a couple days ago I wrote a bit on how Bungie got the rug pulled out from under them at E3. As near as the Intertubes can piece it together, a few days before E3, Microsoft let Bungie know they wouldn’t be included in the press conference. Bungie then enacted contingency plans for their…

Now, I’m not saying the whole Keep It Clean debacle doesn’t deserve a couple thousand more words (which it surely will get) but I felt I couldn’t let E3 week go by without comment on one of the announcements that Microsoft did feel was important enough to show– namely, the impending renovation of the Xbox…

Ah, the heady days of the early and mid 90s, when Bungie was an independent developer and publisher, master of its own destiny. They developed what they wanted to develop, announced when they wanted to announced, and shipped… well, when the boxes were done. Those days must seem so simple compared to now. Because what’s…

Just moments ago the countdown on Bungie.net, which had about 12 hours left to go until some cryptic announcement, changed to an apology from studio president Harold Ryan that reads: For the last several months, we’ve been building towards a reveal of something exciting that Bungie’s working on. We were looking forward to sharing that…

…is apparently how long humanity fought the Covenant over Harvest. It is not, gratefully, the amount of time you’ll have to wait for Halo Wars from Ensemble Studios to come out, since supposedly the game is now set for a release sometime in Spring 2009. So, a little less than one… long… year. Xbox360Fanboy has…

The rumor mill is working overtime as this year’s scaled-down E3 approaches. The latest comes from “sources” who are reporting to GameSpot’s Rumor Control column that Bungie will announce a new, “grittier” Halo universe game: a squad-based shooter that follows a group of ODSTs and doesn’t feature the series’ iconic Spartan warrior, the Master Chief.…

Well, it took an extra few days, but Bungie.net’s weekly update reports that the worldwide campaign kill count has reached the seven billion mark.

The divide between story and gameplay has been a regular topic of discussion around here, so this Moving Pixels blog entry seems like it might be of interest. Called The Great Divorce, it imagines Plot and Gameplay as a couple undergoing marital strife. Give it a read, great fun.

Just playing around with a few toys. One you might want to try out: collapsible blocks. Clicking on the title of a block, either one of the three across the top of the page, underneath the header, or in the left or right hand columns, will collapse the block down to just its title. Collapse…

After the discussions about death prompted by my last blog entry, specifically those mentioning the Iron skull, and whether a gamer who dies even once in a level can be said to have accomplished anything, I thought I’d give the skull a serious try in Halo 3 for the first time. There are some skulls…

A new version of Aleph One, the open source engine for playing Marathon, is available. It fixes a few bugs and all current players are urged to update.

Pyroman and mr smiley’s MST3k-inspired spoof of the cutscene between Floodgate and The Ark.