Author: narcogen

The PlayStation Network may have its work cut for it catching up to the onlin gaming experience offered by Xbox Live, but Crackers the chimp is lending a hand with the demo of Hail to the Chimp, the party game from Wideload, now available on the service.

Nebula nominee Tobias Buckell has been tapped to pen the next Halo novel, Halo: The Cole Protocol, due out in Fall of this year. Buckell published his first science fiction novel, Crystal Rain, in 2006, and followed it up with Ragamuffin in 2007.

Bungie Screenshots Verify "Chill Out" RemakeKotaku.com, NY – 21 hours agoWe linked to last week’s MLG San Diego coverage that unveiled the remake, for Halo 3, of Halo:CE’s popular "Chill Out" map. Bungie has now dropped two …

Wall Street Journal Can Videogames Be Funny?Wall Street Journal – Jun 20, 2008Bungie is famous for the laser-tinged action of the wildly popular Halo videogame series — the last installment racked up $300 million in sales its first …

Our friends at Freeverse released a content pack (available 6/18/08) coming to the Xbox Live Arcade port of Marathon: Durandal. Includes netmaps, the jjaro textures from Marathon Infinity, and two new achievements!

I wish this update was one sentence long. One awesome, announcement filled sentence. It’s not.

ShackNews is reporting that Wideload Games’ Hail to the Chimp, originally announced for a May release, is slightly delayed until June 24 so that some final finishing touches can be put on the game. Chimp is to be released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and is priced at an affordable $40.

Be sure to check out sorahn’s new and improved HaloScreenshots.net, where you can conveniently download local copies of your Bungie.net screenshots for inclusion into the site’s collection as well as check out others’ shots.

This really doesn’t have anything to do with Bungie or gaming, per se… but former Bungie employee Pete Parsons just received $1 million in financing for his new tech startup, Fyreball, pitched as an “alternative to email” for tracking web messages and discussions. For the full story see the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

D15AV0W3D over at The Hushed Casket tries to put all three Halo games into perspective, but generally, he thinks Halo 3 corrected a lot of the issues in Halo 2: Enter H3, the end of the trilogy, and Bungie’s triumphant redemption to the lackluster campaign on H2. Enter more user-customization than ever before. Map Forge,…

…because just like tanks, dung beetles beat everything. Or so Michael Mann would have you believe in his latest blog entry at the Huffington Post. Mann has bee providing updates on the monstrous menagerie of characters that inhabit Wideload Games’ upcoming political party game, Hail to the Chimp. The latest entry talks about how the…

Couple of great behind-the-scenes articles pointed out over at HBO: Next Generation interviewed Marty “The Elder” O’Donnell about music in games in general and polishing the Halo series in specific, and Sci Fi Tech put up Faces of Halo that shows us some of the actors and actresses who lent their voice talents to the…

If you were one of the (undoubtedly) many who grabbed the Halo 3 Official Soundtrack from the iTunes Store since it became available in the last 24 hours, take a look at disc 2, track 5. “No More Dead Hereos” From any other game publisher, of course, this would be attributed to a simple clerical…

Mark “Have Blue” Levin of Freeverse has written up a Gamasutra postmortem of their port of Marathon 2: Durandal to the Xbox 360. What’s revealed is that the Xbox version isn’t so much a port as it was almost a complete from-the-ground-up rewrite: Going beyond a port. Without an emulator, huge chunks of the game…

jayWHY and EA sent word that the HBO-COERCE Halo PC server is coming back for a special Thanksgiving event. Dust off your Halo PC discs and jump in!

Bungie’s “big news” for Monday was, as many predicted, the official announcement of the first installment of downloadable content for Halo 3. In this case, three new maps: Standoff, looking quite similar to parts of Tsavo Highway or The Storm, Rat’s Nest, based on Crow’s Nest from the campaign, and Foundry, based on the warehouse…

VVV thinks the graphical improvements to Halo 3 are nice, but that under the hood, the gameplay mechanics are still broken.

Time Out Chicago has an article on the state of the videogame industry in the Windy City. It’s mostly about the development of Stranglehold and the closure of EA Chicago, but Bungie and Wideload do rate a mention: In fact, work on the Halo series, one of gaming’s biggest success stories, kicked off in Chicago…

Trindacut and Narcogen look at gameplay in the vehicle-heavy, story-light level, Tsavo Highway. Regular features include Glitch of the Week and Anger, Sadness, and Envy: features of Halo 3 that makes us angry or sad, and features of other games that make us envious. This is the M4A version of the episode, compatible with iTunes;…

Along with the Xbox 360 dashboard update due out on December 4, you can pick up classic original Xbox games through Xbox Originals. 1200 MS points will grab you games like Fable, Psychonauts, or even Halo. Note to potential purchasers: while what, if any, Xbox Live features have been added to these games are as…