Author: narcogen

In addition to the official HaloWars.com site and its forum, Halo Wars fansites are starting to sprout up. We saw the first of them linked from HBO: Halo Wars Central, which is currently running an art contest. We’ve added a Halo Wars section to our database of links to other sites.

The HaloWars.com forums are both new and very busy. It has been difficult at time to get at the interesting discussions because so much time has been taken up by the same issues over and over again. Since the announcement of Halo Wars, some eleven thousand posts have been made. About half of them are…

The buzz has died down a bit, but there are still a few sites catching up with the X06 Halo Wars bombshell. The latest is the BBC’s site, which quoted Bungie’s Brian “SketchFactor” Jarrard as well as HBO’s own fansite editor, Claude “Louis Wu” Errera. As for why a Halo RTS by Ensemble, Sketch put…

Indie in the Halo Wars forum pointed out some listings from the jobs page at Ensemble Studios. What he found particularly interesting were two items for MMO environmental and concept artists; what I find interesting are the console programmer and Xbox Live developer positions. Ensemble hasn’t really said a word yet about the features of…

1Up is reporting that EGM’s issue #210, presumably the December 2006 issue if it will hit newsstands on November 14th as they claim, will feature Halo 3 in a big way. The current issue has a teaser for that feature.

The Money Times: Halo Universe To Expand Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Peter Jackson to work on future ‘Halo’ installment Edmonton Sun: Jackson speaks, gamers listen Gaming Insider: Interactive’s Attractions Grow For Moviemakers And Marketers GameDaily: The Future of Halo Not a lot of new information there, although the Money Times article does reiterate that Jackson’s Halo games…

Less ado, more do: Eurogamer: Halo Wars Is For Ze Germans Dolbex: How Far Can Bungie Stretch? Bungie: Bungie.net Update Xboxyde: HaloWars Q&A and Interview with Peter Jackson Primotech: Marty O’Donnell’s Wife Plays Bejeweled

Wideload Games, makers of Stubbs the Zombie and currently working on an unspecified number of unspecified projects for unspecified platforms in their sweet Chicago digs, is looking for a Lead Engineer: Sure, there are other options. You could move to California and get a job squeezing out WWII shooters for some big company. Bet nobody’s…

Supernostro pointed out an article at IGN suggesting that in Q1 of 2007, the CPU in the Xbox 360 will get an upgrade that will make the console more reliable: Chartered Semiconductor will update the 360 CPU to a 65nm process, the current state-of-the-art in chip manufacturing techniques. The new Xbox 360 CPUs will benefit…

More links about the ever-expanding Halo universe: WarCry: Peter Jackson Into Games, Working on New “Halo” TeamXbox: Video of Storytelling panel at X06 featuring Jackson, Frankie, and Peter Molyneux IGN: Video interview with Bungie’s Marty O’Donnell Hollywood Reporter: Peter Jackson buddies with Microsoft for video game studio HBO: The audio portion of Microsoft’s X06 presentation…

Frankie and SketchFactor, over in Barcelona for the X06 event, decided to do a different sort of Humpday Challenge this week, applying their Halo 2 skills to other games available for play. The two pitted themselves against bots in Shadowrun (the bots won) and then against each other in Gears of War (Frankie won).

To cope with all the new things we’re tracking now, we’ve made some additions to the site. There is now a Halo Wars image gallery and a mirror of the QuickTime version of the Halo Wars trailer; this is a mirror of the same file provided at HBO and re-encoded by Louis Wu. The image…

From Ensemble Studios’ own web page is this announcement for Halo Wars, which may assuage some of those already screaming that the meagre amount shown in the trailer contradicts known canon: Breaking News – Ensemble Studios is bringing real-time-strategy to the Xbox 360 and to the Halo universe. Designed exclusively for the Xbox 360, Halo…

DoomBatINC created this image for a SomethingAwful Photoshop Phriday feature fusing food and videogames. Certainly, the “long lasting rampancy bar” enriched with “Strauss protein blend” must be how an ordinary cybernetic security guard was able to face down the Pfhor and two rampant AIs over three games without ever once sitting down to a real…

Gravemind80 has produced what may well be the single most exhaustive commentary on the Halo series to date, covering not only comparisons to Halo 1 and Halo 2 including each weapon and every vehicle, but single player and multiplayer level design as well. He caps it off with a series of mostly level-headed suggestions for…

Although two panelists– Al Lowe, Leisure Suit Larry creator and Erik Wolpaw, better known as Old Man Murray and a writer on Psychonauts were no-shows, attendees at the Game Writers Conference were treated to a few laughs by Wideload Games’ Matt Soell and Tom Abernathy of Pandemic, makers of Destroy All Humans! Making gamers laugh…

Halogen, an unofficial fan project to create a real-time strategy game in the Halo universe, is shutting down due to a request from Microsoft. From their homepage: Hours ago, we finally recieved the words we’ve been dreading since the mod started to get noticed. Microsoft has decided that we are infringing on the intellectual property…

San Jose Mercury News columnist Dean Takahashi, also author of books on the Xbox and Xbox 360, has a new column up saying that a small team of developers within Bungie Studios, led by Jason Jones and Chris Butcher, aren’t working on Halo 3. They’re working on something else: They are on a small project…

Gamasutra reports that Alexis Nolent, Editorial Story Design Director for Ubisoft, delivered remarks at the Austin Games Conference on the integration of stories into games. He seems to favor the Half-Life 2 brand of “scripted events” versus the more traditional, cinematic sort of Halo-style “cutscenes”: First, he saw a trend toward fewer cinematics, and more…

Josh Rodgers and “Stosh” recently joined Bungie officially after spending time involved in other capacities. KP drew the short straw and had to interrogate them about their deviant proclivities, super secrets, scrumptious sandwiches and the use of Mat Noguchi’s rage radiation as a source of warmth. Check it out.