Author: narcogen

EDGE has a feature up on th’ AI in th’ Halo series, an interview with programmer Damian Isla, where he brin’s up an interestin’ concept I’d love t’ see in a Halo game– or any Bungie game, really: There were bein’ th’ well-known example in Halo 2 where yer ‘hog full o’ marines would just…

From source.bungie.org: This is a minor feature release of Aleph One, which includes Windows improvements and support for the Unimap 2 format. It is network compatible with Aleph One 0.20.x Go get it.

What started as another one of those rumors within the span of a day became a confirmed truth: following the release of the upcoming Halo Wars RTS game for the Xbox 360 console, Ensemble Studios, known for the Age of Empires RTS series of games for Windows, will be shuttered. A new studio, like Ensemble…

Master Chief Theater 3000 takes a step back in time with Season 2 drawing from Halo 2’s cutscenes.

David Bowman, Design Lead at Certain Affinity, dishes on the Age of Booty blog about their upcoming pirate-themed XBLA game of the same name (previously called Plunder) and some of its influences, including Settlers of Catan. There is no release date yet, but the game is speculatively expected out in the second half of this…

According to Major Nelson’s blog, Halo 3 and COD4 have done the top ten topsy-turvy trick again. Call of Duty 4 is on top (for the moment) and Halo 3 is playing second fiddle.

First part of the finale of season 1 of Master Chief Theater 3000.

Bungie president Harold Ryan tells Variety how to be swallowed by Microsoft and emerge unscathed. Some highlights: thoughts of going independent went back 3-4 years, the preparations went back more than 2 years, and one of the driving reasons was the freedom to work on non-Halo titles.

Palluxo.com has a (late) review of the Mac version of Stubbs the Zombie. Fair warning: it spoils the entire plot, if you happen to mind that, and doesn’t really describe the gameplay.

Hippieman sent me a message on XBL a couple days ago.. the two downloadable netmap packs for Marathon:Durandal, the XBLA version of Bungie’s classic Mac and PC scifi shooter, the grand-daddy of Halo, are now online in the Xbox Live Marketplace.

You know Captain Spark. The guy who records all those audio snippets from Halo games? Yeah, that’s him. He’s weighed in now with a review of Halo 3’s campaign. He starts by getting two beefs of his chest (the over-aggressive Arbiter and the so-called “Cortana Moments”) before getting to what he likes. Well worth a…

Bungie President Harold Ryan denied claims by Microsoft’s Don Mattrick that he laughed and acquiesced with the publisher’s decision to indefinitely postpone Bungie’s E3 announcement. In an interview with Eurogamer, Mattrick once again explains their reasons for delaying the event, with no mention whatsoever of why it was made on such late notice– less than…

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…