Author: narcogen

Max “Yeroen” Hoberman, one of the longest-serving Bungie employees, is founding a new games development company, Certain Affinity. The CA team of developers in Austin, Texas, including other Bungie alumni such as David Bowman and Chad “Shishka” Armstrong are already hard at work on new maps for Halo 2. Bungie.net has the lowdown in an…

Ducain put up an interview at High Impact Halo where Shdw Shinobi and Mr. Sprout put questions to HBO’s webmaster, Louis Wu. No, not the one with gorilla breath and the big hat, the other one. He gives some pointers on what it takes to run a big fansite like bungie.org. For the people who…

In addition to the text-only transcript of the dialogue and events in the CGTV ad from yesterday, and a preliminary commentary piece (which has already gone through several revisions) offering interpretations of the content in the ad, I’ve posted a frame-by-frame analysis with screen captures, taken from the QuickTime HD version posted by Louis Wu…

Although it is only sixty seconds in length, there’s actually quite a bit of content to pore over in the CG animated Halo 3 TV commercial. It starts slow, moves quickly, and ends suddenly, so pay attention. Click “read more” from the front page for the entire text. read more

The fan community switched into high gear this evening as the Halo 3 CG TV Commercial aired, and digitized versions began popping up immediately. One of the first is a very small, relatively low quality WMV version kindly provided by HYB. Next, Xbox.com had its own streamed version, but as it doesn’t play on Macs…

Okay, so right now, if you’re a US resident with an XBL account linked to a Passport account and you use Internet Explorer 6 on Windows (or can create a configuration that mimics the above) you can access www.halo3.com and begin the signup process for the beta. Along the way, you’ll be told that you…

Halo fans will be reaching for their remote controls this evening as they get ready to watch the first television advertisement for Halo 3 tonight during Monday Night Football in the U.S. The commercial was created by Digital Domain using some of Bungie’s models for Halo 3, but unlike most promotional materials for the Halo…

A new version of the open source Aleph One engine for playing the Marathon games has been released. 0.17 offers a number of netplay-related improvements, and as such is netplay-incompatible with previous versions.

I can’t see any official confirmation of this from Bungie yet, but it appears as if Microsoft sent out a press release that says there’ll be signups for the public beta of Halo 3 multiplayer on Xbox Live, and that the signup form will be at www.halo3.com. At least, so says Kotaku, Techspot, Playfuls.com, PlanetXbox360,…

Spartan Jag got matched up with a bunch of quitters in Team Slayer on Xbox Live, but came away with a heartwarming tale of good sportsmanship and good manners involving a group not unknown to HBO’s readers– the Tied The Leader Gunslingers. A good read, check it out. Also be sure to check out TTL,…

1Up.com obviously didn’t get enough Bungie in their “three weeks of Halo 3” coverage, because now the company is getting a mention again– this time for Marathon. Unfortunately, it’s not a flattering mention. Marathon 2 is featured in their Best Worst Ads 3 feature, on page six, which shows their ad from 1996 that compares…

The Escapist has a nice piece on how Microsoft has gone from being a puppy to a big dog in the computer and console game space, and how often that has been achieved through acquisitions. To do so, they spoke with Bruce Shelley of Ensemble Studios, best-known for their Age of Empires series of RTS…

Buried near the bottom of an interview by Dean Takahashi over at the Mercury News interview with Microsoft’s president of Entertainment and Devices Robbie Bach, comes the news that Microsoft will look for other studios to make the Halo film with, or give up the project. Does it make sense for Microsoft to be in…

Then head right over to Something Awful for their sneak preview of Halo 3 where the Master Chief can kill you with his mind.

That’s how long a look 1Up actually got at Halo 3’s campaign mode. They described the area they were in as an outdoor war zone on Earth. They mentioned Covenant air craft that disregarded them, and a new Ghost apparently specialized for use by Brutes. Oh, and the Gauss Hog returns. Other than that… not…

A selection of the screenshots of Halo 3 multiplayer that have been featured in gaming magazines and embargo-breaking European websites for the past week or so are now up at Bungie.net in pretty high resolutions. Inside the main Halo 3 image gallery, Rampancy now has a Halo 3 Multiplayer screenshot gallery for them. Enjoy!

Eurogamer is doing a retrospective on the top twelve exclusive franchises for the first Xbox console. Halo 1 and 2 unsurprisingly clock in at #1.

Ars Technica notes that recent decreases in the costs of parts and manufacturing may mean Microsoft no longer has to subsidize the sales of their Xbox 360 console with profits from software: they may be making as much as $75 on each console sold, according to iSuppli. Meanwhile, it is estimated that Sony will lose…

Four Aleph One netmaps and a Lua CTF script for Marathon fans today over at Aleph One, courtesy of eX and W’rkcacnter.

One of the oft-discussed topics among those following the upcoming Halo Wars RTS game by Ensemble for the Xbox 360 console is whether or not a workable interface for a strategy game can be created for a console. Many commenters have offered that RTS games just belong on PCs to be played with mice and…