AHWU #3! It’s here! You can all calm down now.
We go over all the releases this week as well as some other fun news. Also, keep an eye out for Achievement Hunter / Rooster Teeth’s own Count 3d!
I’m off to find more free alcohol at SXSW. Chow!
The latest news about the Halo series of games from Microsoft
So we just got the ability to make ringtones for the iPhone. Clearly, the only logical next step was releasing Sarge’s House Beat from the sponsor version of Reconstruction Episode 2 / Reconstruction DVD deleted scene. While complaining about Sister, Sarge lays down a beat that draws everyone else in. If you haven’t seen it, you can probably find a clip of it. 
Ubisoft have recently confirmed that the Splinter Cell: Conviction demo will be available on the Xbox Live Marketplace come March the 18th. The demo will feature the bathroom interrogation scene that has been shown a number of times in videos and various gaming conventions, and will then leap forward to a later level in the game where the Mark and Execute abilities will be displayed.
Excited? Yeah, I thought so.
We have been bumped up to the largest theater at the South Lamar Alamo Draft House in Austin. This of course means we have some more tickets available but once these are sold out, that’s it. Tickets are available here. Jaime “Case” Griesemer, longtime Bungie designer, gave a talk at GDC about game balance in Halo, with some specific mention of the sniper rifle:
Spectacle, too, is important to keeping players in flow, with the sniper rifle creating a contrail and sound effects being subject to a delay over long distances. Such exaggerated causality makes the gun look good on YouTube, because viewers can easily see what’s happened, and players don’t break out of the game’s flow in order to figure how what’s just happened. And most sniper rifles aren’t fun, he claimed, because they don’t generate flow.