Author: Rampancy – Se7en Years Of Halo

Jordan117 has put up a nice bit of analysis in the HBO forum alleging that various artistic and design choices in Halo 2, specifically those made in the Outskirts and Metropolis levels, indicate that Bungie is postulating increasing global warming in Earth’s future. While probably not essential to the plot, if it’s true it does…

Quint at Ain’t It Cool News has put up part three of five in his interview with Halo movie producer Peter “Freakin” Jackson. Unlike just about everybody at Bungie, Jackson actually likes to talk and talk about Halo, so there’s loads of content in here. It is probably too far out from the film’s expected…

KP’s latest piece at Bungie.net is for all the fans who wish they could work at Bungie like he does. It’s probably fair to say that Bungie has hired more than its share of its own fans over the years, so while it’s certainly a long shot, it isn’t impossible, if you’ve got education, determination,…

Eastbeast314 posted up links from Let’s Kill Dave to the PPT presentations at this year’s GDC, as offered by Microsoft. The Graphics Track (caution, direct link to large file!) includes a portion called “HDR The Bungie Way” about HDR lighting. The files are huge– about 500Mb, though, so be careful.

The latest Community Spotlight at Bungie.net by KP is on Recon54, who is currently on an extended mission ordered by th’ greybeards o’ auld school Bungie fandom t’ observe noobs in their natural habitat, interactin’ with Microsoft’s “magical hummin’ box”. In addition, he drives th’ Spambulance and has a healthy fear o’ Shishka, which certainly…

Gravemind wrote up an extensively compendious piece on the Halo franchise, posted it on GeoCities, then linked it in the HBO Forum, with predictable results. When HBO front-paged it the next day, the site quickly exceeded its bandwidth quota. HBO had a mirror up by that time, with simplified HTML for quicker loading. I decided…

A new Marathon film (in Marathon recording and .mp4 formats) called Spectral Falls and a new map pack called Fabrecation are available at Marathon: Aleph One. Check them out!

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…

Gravemind 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. Nolent 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.

Excellent online gaming magazine The Escapist has an article called The Wideload Way on Wideload Games this week. Those who have read previous articles focusing on Wideload’s outsourcing-heavy business model will find little new here. There’s a confirmation that Stubbs sold well enough to fund Wideload’s next project, but there’s still no information on what…

Captain Spark fired up his Halo dialogue website at the end of last month, upgrading to a new CMS– PHP-Fusion. Be sure to check it out, even though he admits the current design is a placeholder (now where have we heard that before?). He’s also working on an IWHBYD skull tutorial which I’m sure many…

Brannon Boren, of Boren’s Syndrome fame, laments on his blog that the Wikipedia entry on Bungie Studios casts doubt on the existence of the Halo Bible. Such a shame.

As of now, Rampancy.net is running on the latest and greatest stable version of the Drupal content management system, Drupal 4.7. This version has been out for some time, but just now supports all the contributed modules the site needs to run. Some features (like the gamertag database) are offline for the moment but should…

Normally the very entertaining Halo Story Page is rather like the equivalent of the Bungie fan community putting on funny costumes, lounging in easy chairs and sipping snifters of brandy while contemplating the treachery of Cortana, the inscrutableness of Gravemind and the machismo of Keyes family officers of both genders. Wait, it’s not the equivalent…

Normally the very entertaining Halo Story Page is rather like the equivalent of the Bungie fan community putting on funny costumes, lounging in easy chairs and sipping snifters of brandy while contemplating the treachery of Cortana, the inscrutableness of Gravemind and the machismo of Keyes family officers of both genders. Wait, it’s not the equivalent…