Author: Rampancy – Se7en Years Of Halo

Almost five years to the day after the first HBO LAN Party, Louis Wu held “Deadly Night”. Accounts from attendees Jillybean and retsamolah and Ma1agate are in the HBO forum, along with a a video of the retsamolah vs Schooly-D grudge match. Mintz put his own writeup at the Hushed Casket, including an especially helpful…

Since some HBO forumgoers were kind enough to hold open the thread for me, I’m now morally obligated to deliver the goods on the Brute documentary. Given that it is longer and more up-front with its new content than the TV ad, I think a frame by frame analysis, in most places, is unwarranted, so…

HaloDev has put up the first of in a series of “Feature Focus” articles. This one, by Talin, is accompanied by a very complex render done by Talin and Veegie and covers the technique of normal mapping to add the appearance of detail to textured polygons. Veegie also produced another, more sedate image of an…

Xbox Live is telling you to walk away from the television set and spend time with your friends and family in the real world this holiday season. At least, that’s the message one might infer from the fact that for several hours now, subscribers can connect to the services to browse the Marketplace or use…

Trakan, a moderator at the Cheap Ass Gamer forum, has posted scans of an ad for the upcoming Xbox 360 game, Crackdown, in Gamepro magazine. According to the scan, “specially marked boxes” of Crackdown will include an invitation to the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. This seems to be the first sighting in North America of…

Although the track “Siege of Madrigal” is actually from Bungie’s earlier RTS game, Myth, it also appears in a hidden spot in the Halo level “Assault on the Control Room”. If you fly a Banshee to one of the ledges high above the pyramid structure at the end of that level, and stand on the…

This one is machine and nerve, and will make a good tree-trimming; This one is but flesh and faith… and will get coal inside his stocking. Have a Merry Christmas… we’d rather not piss this thing off.

Spartan182 discusses in his blog the possibility of plasma energy swords being dual-wieldable in Halo 3, based on suggestions in the Brute video documentary. One might think this would make such characters a bit too powerful, although I’m not really sure how carrying two instant-kill weapons really makes a difference unless you can lunge in…

Max “Yeroen” Hoberman, Bungie alum and founder of Texas-based Certain Affinity, now working on new Halo 2 multiplayer maps for release next year, gave an interview to Firing Squad. However, that’s not all they’re working on, apparently: FiringSquad: You are also working on a new game. What can you tell us about this game at…

So the Brute documentary is out. I’m going to stop using Bungie’s VIDOC or Video Documentary term, because I really couldn’t think of any other kind of documentary except perhaps for film, and since George Lucas says film is dead and HD Video is the way to go, I suppose it’s redundant. Certain pockets of…

I was taking another look at some of the sheet music earlier and I noticed that there was no Halo 2 theme. So I decided to transcribe it. The format is again only for Finale Notepad but will be available in PDF shortly. I also added “The Maw” transcription done by Poop Scoop to the…

MereCatfish provided us with this early capture from Bungie’s 7-minute-long Brute documentary. This one shows (along with an Elite and various lines of fire and information about local terrain) alterations made to the heads-up display, with the shield strength bar separated from the motion detector and placed dead center, straight up. What appear to be…

After working on it for almost 4 months, I have decided that this is good enough. It is only for Finele Notepad; so if you dont have that program, you can’t view it. If you can view it, then enjoy! I am currently working on the rest of the trailer and hopefully will have it…

Captain Jacob Keyes started to have bad luck from the first moments of Halo 1. His ship, preparing for a secret mission, was ambushed when the Covenant attacked Reach. They fled blindly, only to arrive at Halo 04 and find the Covenant waiting for them. After a valiant effort, the ship crashes on Halo and…

A couple of newsworthy items noted at WideloadGames.org that skipped my notice until just now: Alex “The Man” Seropian and Matt Soell, as well as others from Wideload, attended a meeting of the new Madison, Wisconship chapter of the International Game Developers Association last month. No missing brains have yet been reported. Furthermore, the ring…

Ahh, the Halo rumor mill. When the tabloids fail to satisfy or even titillate, Halo rumors always ride to the rescue. A Microsoft blogger in Belgium apparently reposted verbatim an electronic mail message sent from a “bigwig” at Microsoft about a video due to hit Xbox Marketplace on December 20th. The email alleged the 7…

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. There’s also a transcript of the events in the advertisement pointing out various items, but without any commentary…