Category: Rampancy

It’s not quite what you think. Wired News interviews Epic’s Mark Rein about the Unreal Engine 3 technology. While usually it’s CliffyB letting his mouth run away with him a little bit, here it’s Rein, who is positively bubbling over the fact that Gears of War cost only ten million dollars to make. So, while…

Over at IGN, Erik Brudvik pines for truly “mind-blowing” content from Halo 3 and opines that no news is not good news: The hype for Halo 3 is already at absurd levels. The ball is in Microsoft and Bungie’s court and it’s their marketing battle to lose now. A misstep with the beta could be…

Kotaku is reporting that a playable demo of the second installment in Sony’s Halo-killer-wannabe Killzone franchise will be available before Bungie hits Xbox Live with its extensive Halo 3 Multiplayer Public Beta. Kotaku heard it from über Halo fan Luke Smith at 1UP, and I heard it from P_40E in #hbo.

Zombie Studio’s Mark Long chooses his “games for a desert island” in a piece at Gamasutra today. Not surprisingly, for its cooperative play mode, Halo gets the nod: Halo 1, that is: Is there anything better in the world than playing Halo co-op? No there is not; you don’t even need to think about that…

Here is the usual transcription package: a PrintMusic file, a PDF, and a MIDI sound file, for the 2:28 long third movement of Delta Halo Suite from the second volume of the Halo 2 soundtrack, entitled Leonidas. As usual, login or register to download.

With the three days to get in your three hours of Halo 2 on Xbox Live play on an Xbox 360 in already passed, and web registration– apparently– about to open, Halo 2 players are poised over their keyboards to attempt to become one of the 13,333 lucky entrants into Phase Two of the selection…

What’s the most accurate thing you can think of? Probably this laser. The answer is a weapon so versatile it can snipe infantry or fry vehicles. It even makes coffee at a thousand yards. It is the Spartan Laser, the heavily-censored subject of KP’s latest treatise on the weapons and vehicles in Halo 3.

The Power Of Ten is a simple idea: make a Myth map using only ten monster tags. Check their site for official rules. Thanks to PlayMyth for the announcement.

Let’s face it: if the Halo 3 Public Beta is our new Great Journey, then the Prophet of Truth is a liar, because some of us are going to be left behind. Not everybody who wants to can get in. If everybody could get in, there’d be no difference between the beta test and actually…

Bungie.net has a new moderator, Evilcam, and as a reward, he gets an interview with KP. Let’s hope that satisfaction in a job well done is reward enough.

Bungie has the Waaambulance, where people who have been banned from Halo 2 matchmaking write in nearly incomprehensible questions and complaints, and Bungie makes fun of them. I don’t have the power to ban players from Halo 2 matchmmaking, not that I would if I could. What I do have is some search logs that…

Ducain over at High Impact Halo put up a wish list for Halo 3. I thought I’d take some of his points and respond to them: ones I liked, and ones I didn’t. Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO for the notice. Click “read more” below on the front page for the entire text. read…

Games In Action gets to the bottom of the conspiracy that put KP in position to get Frankie’s coffee keep the Halo fan community abreast of Halo 3’s development. It’s a sordid tale of job applications and interviews that exposes the seamy underbelly of game development. Of course, working at Bungie isn’t all sushi farts…

The guy who shepherded the Halo novels through the labyrinthine halls of Microsoft, Eric Trautmann, has made an interesting blog post on storytelling in games. It started out as a review of the new Xbox 360 shooter Lost Planet, but took a u-turn somewhere and ended up with the conclusion that games, so far, are…

KP’s latest in weapons profiling focuses on the Covenant’s Type-2 Antipersonnel Fragmentation Grenade, or Spike Grenade. Even with all the info up close and personnel, we still have to settle for a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot for an image. Hey, how about some pictures, like we got for the Mongi?

Okay, this is a little obscure, but I thought it worth posting anyway. Mumbo Jumbo is a company that does so-called “casual games”. Mobile phone games, Flash games, puzzle games, game show conversions, card games. Some of it’s on Xbox Live Arcade. However, the name “Mumbo Jumbo” wasn’t always associated with such games. At one…

The Escapist is calling Bungie a great artist in their piece on how the gaming industry shamelessly pillages the film industry, especially in the area of science fiction. The concept of the article: to make a list of movies so influential on the games industry that, if they had not ever existed, the gaming industry…

When we heard whispers to expect something “soon” from Wideload, I’m sure nobody had this in mind. Translator Dmitri “Goblin” Puchkov, responsible for many of the best quality dubs of Western movies and television programs into Russian, including some hilarious spoof dubs of films like Star Wars Episode One and Shmatrica, a parody of The…

Halo3.com notes that the first way of getting into the Halo 3 public beta– the web registration form that offered any and all comers in the U.S. a chance to be chosen– has closed. Winners will be notified sometime this week. Those who don’t make it can still get in by buying a specially marked…

GameSpot has an item up that says Wideload Games, makers of Stubbs the Zombie for Mac, PC and Xbox, have applied for several new trademarks that may be connected to as-yet-unannounced game projects: Another trio of trademarks was filed for by Wideload Games, the development studio behind Stubbs the Zombie. The trademarks don’t appear to…