Author: narcogen

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.

…or is Sarcastic Gamer just happy to see you? More of you than they can handle, apparently, since the site is no longer accessible, leading me to depend on a report from Kotaku that the site, along with CVG, is citing the usual “sources” that a new Halo game will be announced at E3. Halo…

The word on the street (or at least in the Bungie.net update this week) is that Cold Storage, the remake of the classic Halo 1 multiplayer map Chill Out, will be released this July 7, Bungie Day, for free.

From 5:00 to 7:00 PM Eastern next Friday, July 11, you can play Hail to the Chimp online with the developers, Wideload Games. The play session will include Bungie alums Alex “The Man” Seropian, Matt Segur, and Doug Zartman.

The team at TeamXbox rated Wideload’s sophomore effort, Hail to the Chimp, a 7.9 out of 10, scoring highest for audio and innovation. One of the game’s greatest strengths might ironically become one of its weaknesses: While the game presents a unique take on the party game formula, Hail to the Chimp is actually at…

It’s tough for a game to be funny. So it’s no slight praise when GamesRadar says that Hail to the Chimp is funny– if you’re in your 20s: Through it all, the comedy keeps flowing, often in the form of commercials or news reports. Just how funny these bits are is debatable here in the…

The news isn’t all bad for Crackers the chimp, though. 1Up’s reviewer gave the game a B+, and the average of users and editors on the site is an A. The site praised the game for the humorous news segments as well as the unabashedly strange gameplay elements. And when this plays into the objectives,…

Game Over. Insert Coin. The balance between carrot and stick, reward and punishment, in game design was so much simpler back in the arcade. Take the gamer’s money and give them a limited number of chances to progress, usually called “lives” since failure nearly always means death. When the player runs out of lives, they…

More or less at random I happened upon The First Hour blog, which reviews only the first hour of a video game. Game #12, reviewed back in September 2007 (just in time for Halo 3 to come out) was the original Halo. As an extension to that blog, Beyond The First Hour reviews games after…