Author: narcogen

Since I’ve been spending way too much time playing Halo 3, a lot of news has slipped by the last couple days: Kotaku notes a new Xbox 360 bundle that includes Halo 3, destined for Europe. TTL says Halo 3 is blam!ing awesome. Wired interviews Frankie about Bungie’s independence and its future. This is actually…

GamesFirst thought the gunplay was excellent and the story “nonsense” but gave Halo 3 a score of 4 stars out of 5 anyway.

CVG has posted up The Bungie Story, an excerpt from Halo 3 – The Ultimate Companion book, free with Xbox World 360 issue #58 on sale this month. It’s more of a Bungie Summary than a Bungie History, running quickly from Minotaur to Monitor, but it’s a nice primer for those who have been brought…

The second item in Meyeselph’s Halo 3 weapon guide is that all-around performer and MLG favorite, the Battle Rifle. Almost makes people forget the Halo 1 pistol. Almost.

Frankie does a good impression of Officer Barbrady while talking to Game Informer about the Microsoft-Bungie split: GI: Are you at all surprised by the response to this? O’Connor: Not really. It’s Microsoft, and that’s the big story, right? The Wall Street Journal doesn’t care about Bungie Studios, but it cares about Microsoft business, and…

Something Awful reviews Halo 3, and for once, it’s a real review (sort of) and not just an excuse to crack some poop jokes. Except, there are a few poop jokes. Generally the review falls into the “single player is crap but multiplayer is good” except they also hated multiplayer. What do you expect? It’s…

1Up interviews Bungie’s Brian “SketchFactor” Jarrard about the Bungie-Microsoft split. So far everyone who has spoken to the press is still on the same page; that this was a mutually beneficial deal, quickly and amicably agreed upon. Despite 1Up trying to press and find some conflict, no one will admit to any, even theoretical: 1UP:…

More updates on Bungie’s amazing flight into freedom: FiringSquad interviewed Frankie, but all they give you is a summary. It does say that Harold Ryan is now President of Bungie. He mentions a skunk works for new projects. Wonder if that’s where Jason Jones is spending his time, given that his only credit in Halo…

Those of us steeped in Halo 3 and Bungie Breakaway news might be forgiven momentarily for forgetting that online communities for Bungie’s Mac and PC RTS games, Myth, are still hanging in there a decade after the game was released. Unfortunately one of them, PlayMyth, has now shut down. Server administrator Blades, apparently posting as…

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an updated story on the to-all-visible-appearances amicable Microsoft-Bungie split, including comments from Bungie studio head Harold Ryan and Microsoft’s Shane Kim. It’s well worth poring over. Both Kim and Ryan are extremely evasive regarding any of the financial details, but they do say that the Halo intellectual property belongs to Microsoft,…

Here are more links to articles on Bungie’s bombshell announcement: Nobody asked Bungie about the rumored separation in the thread for this week’s update, but Frankie dished on it anyway. Effective October 1, Bungie is an independent company with a long-term publishing agreement with Microsoft Game Studios for Halo games. GameDailyBiz interviewed Frankie about Bungie’s…

SketchFactor has posted a press release on Bungie.net that declares that Bungie Studios will become a privately held company. Bungie LLC will have Microsoft as a partner and a minority shareholder and will continue to make games for the Xbox. “Working with Microsoft was great for us, it allowed us to grow as a team…

Daniel Radosh at the New York Times laments the dependence of games on cinematics for storytelling, and alleges they are stunting the medium’s development of its own storytelling vocabulary. While I agree in principle with his point, essentially this is just another “pig pile on Halo” story; since it’s the biggest release in the vicinity,…

Halo 3 topped the Australian sales charts last week and sits in the #2 space among Xbox 360 games overall, just behind Gears, which it’ll probably pass soon. Interesting that Australia, which is a fairly good market for the Xbox 360, sold only about 12k more copies than Japan, which is not (although it is…

If I was apprehensive about anything in Halo 3, it was the Flood. Halo 1 has reached a certain legendary status amongst fans, but even it has a sore spot for many: the Library, where you navigate endless repeating dark corridors with endless hordes only four enemies to fight: Human Flood combat forms, Elite Flood…

Shishka saved Bungie from humiliating defeat in the first post-launch Halo 3 Humpday, as the boys from Kirkland waded into Social Slayer and got socially slayed. Check Bungie.net for the full writeup as well as links to the Saved Films; this is the first time we’ll be able not just to read about the humpday,…

Brian Szabelski at Blogcritics.org gives a thumbs up to Halo 3: Halo 3 is just about everything we’ve been led to think it would be. It falls short in some areas of campaign, where things seem like the generic FPS cliché of “here’s a room full of bad guys, kill ’em!”, but it absolutely shines…

Creativity Online interviews film director Neill Blomkamp about the promotional shorts he did for Halo 3, and in the process, finds out that the Halo movie project is a lot more dead than most fans think, and that the shorts were entirely separate, and not part of an attempt to lure Hollywood back into the…

The Bungie Store has got the blue filter you can use with Halo 3’s video calibrator in stock now. For a limited time, it’s free with any other order!

Halo 3 zoomed from its first day US sales of $170 million to a first week total of $300 million, according to GamesIndustry.biz. It was also heavily played on Xbox Live, garnering the top spot: Microsoft stats reveal that more than 2.7 million people have played Halo 3 over Xbox Live in the past week,…