Author: narcogen

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…

In response to those who’ve asked me what do you think of Halo 3 I wrote a long piece on finishing the fights. Halo, being a first person shooter with a linear story has a number of “finishes”, though. There are the conflicts the player is a direct party to, but there are other story…

So during the Week Without Internet here are a few things that went on: Joe Staten’s new Halo book, Contact Harvest, came out. It covers the first Human-Covenant engagements from the perspective of Avery Johnson. Bungie.net has the prologue online. GameTap has a two part interview with Staten about the novel. G4TV also has an…

Narcogen and Trindacut examine the second level of Halo 3, A Crow’s Nest, for Anger, Sadness & Envy, the official podcast of Bungie fansite Rampancy.net. Features include an interview with the Prophet of Truth, changes to voice actors, and Halo 3’s equivalent of the Jackal sniper: the invincible Brute chieftain. This is the M4A version…

Kato at Katonian.net has an article up on how to make stereoscopic screenshots from Halo 3. The story mentions only the Windows program StereoPhoto Maker but I also located the Macintosh freeware AnaBuilder, which you might have some luck with if you’re a Mac user.

Rockslider famously rejected Halo 2, preferring instead to spend six years tricking the Halo 1 engine into delivering him continually more epic “megabattles”. So, naturally, people wanted to know what he thought of Halo 3– did it return to the roots of the original game enough to keep his interest? Now he’s provided the answer…

Since before I’d even managed to finish the fight on Heroic, let alone Legendary, people have been asking… “so, what do you think of Halo 3?” Given the thousands of words I’ve hurled at Halo 2 over the years that seems like a rather broad question. When pressed, most people admit what they really want…

The first episode of Anger, Sadness & Envy, the official podcast of Bungie fansite Rampancy.net, covers the first two levels of Halo 3: Arrival and Sierra 117. We’re working on getting this submitted into the iTunes podcast directory, but until then, you can manually subscribe in iTunes by pulling down the Advanced menu, choosing the…

Sorahn wrote a script to power Haloscreenshots.net; you enter your gamertag and it pulls down all your screenshots from Bungie.net. For the next step, it assembles those images into a mosaic composed from the submitted images. The first mosaic is up now, check it out!