Author: narcogen

Surprise, surprise– the new Halo 2 maps by Certain Affinity apparently won’t be only for the Xbox 360, but will also run on the original console. Hang ’em High and Derelict are coming to the new engine as Tombstone and Desolation. Apparently this means that Xbox Marketplace can’t be used, since it doesn’t support original…

Louis Wu says this article is supposed to have three parts, so I guess this is the end. Weapons? Covered. Characters? Covered. NPC behaviors? Covered. Cover? Covered. What’s left? Oh, right. Story. Plot Holes You Could Drive A Warthog Through Normally, when one is talking about plot holes, one is referring to elements of a…

The first time around, I talked a bit about Gears’ level structure, its cinematics, and main characters. Now a bit more about some of its unique strengths and weaknesses, compared to Halo, including NPCs and weapons. Click “read more” from the front page for the entire text. read more

Released a full two years later and the first title in a wave of second-generation games for Microsoft’s next-generation console, Halo 2 and Gears of War clearly have nothing in common, and nothing would be gained by trying to compare them. So why am I doing it? Because that’s the nature of my illness. After…

Bungie’s new new hotness– that is, the new design and featureset for the Bungie.net website– is online. Check out the details. Coolest feature so far? RSS feed.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this entry last week, it was announced that the new Halo 2 multiplayer maps will make some XBL playlists 360-only, since the maps are only being released for the 360. In defense, we’ve been told that most Halo 2 players are using 360s. However, Microsoft does not release breakdowns between the…

Ahh, the luxury of being an independent developer and publisher. The luxury to redesign every level in your game at the last minute, while you tell fans you’re just “printing boxes” because you wanted to make the game… well, fun, instead of just done. Those days are over for Bungie Studios, and have been since…

Game Informer gave Bungie ten questions and Bungie’s own Brian “SketchFactor” Jarrard gave ten answers. A quick summary: “delta”, “stay tuned”, and “what demo?”. For the questions, see the interview.

Frankie O’Connor at Bungie gave an interview near the beginning of this year, and one of the questions I found particularly interesting, especially because I’ve only recently had a chance to play Gears of War myself: XCN: Are you influenced by other games like Gears of War, would you consider implementing some things like the…

Think there’s already too much Halo merchandise out there? Too bad. Corgi International today announced a partnership with Microsoft to add Halo products to their “Master Replicas” series of collectibles. No word on if they’ll call them Master Chief Master Replicas. From Corgi’s site: While details of the line are still being worked out, look…

The February Halo Wars update by Thunder has a lot of fuzzy, censored pictures, but we’re told flat-out that the game is in a playable state, and has been played by Microsoft bigwigs like Shane Kim. Still, he reports there is “a long way to go” and there is still no officially announced release date.

Two strange Halo-related music items of note today: The Scissor Sisters apparently did a video with music somehow “inspired” by the Halo Wars trailer. CVG reports a rumor that the “Halo Mjolnir Theme Song”, the guitar-based Halo 2 theme, will be available as a Guitar Hero 2 add-on.

Don’t believe the rumor going around that those who got into the Halo 3 public multiplayer beta by purchasing Crackdown are going to get a different version of the game, or get it at a different time, than those who gained entry some other way: it’s false. Bungie’s own Frankie busted that rumor to HBO’s…

Last week I wrote about the website Halo2Sucks.com, a site devoted to discussing why Halo 2, despite being tremendously popular, was not actually a good game in the minds of some people; more specifically, why it was not as good a game as the original Halo. The key points of this argument were laid out…

The controls expected to be in effect when the Halo 3 beta launches later this spring; described in detail in the Bungie Weekly Update in mid-February.

In a weekly update that was almost uncharacteristically chock-full of real information, including an update on Halo 3’s current control scheme, button-by-button, one last morsel was hidden in plain sight, in the desktop wallpaper “teaser image” that features the Halo 3 logo above the glowing Forerunner artifact from the announcement trailer. Even the Mister Chief…

MTV is into all the things the hip kids do these days, including play videogames. MTV did a video interview with Microsoft’s Phil Spencer about Halo, and MTV News has a piece up on Gamecock, the outfit that will be publishing Wideload’s next game. Wideload’s Alex Seropian related a story about trying to find a…

Sometimes, you’ve got to take the good with the bad. So first, watch KP take on random jerks you don’t know who are doing what you can’t right now: playing Halo 3. Nobody else showed up for the Humpday this week, so you don’t get specific jerks, just random ones. After you’ve downed that nasty…

For most of the past few years the bulk of my attention has been on Halo’s campaign play: story, characters, and settings. Partly it’s my choice, since it is where my interest in Halo lies, but partly due to circumstances. For most of the past seven years, the Internet connections I had access to were…

Keeping a company light on its toes by keeping the core creative staff small and outsourcing the fiddly bits is how Wideload Games is approaching the problem of rising game development costs. Gamecock is taking the same approach to publishing, according to interviews with Wideload’s Alex Seropian at GameSpot and with Gamecock’s CEO Mike Wilson…