Today marks the date five years ago that Foulbreed and I decided to call our fledgling Halo chapter on Bungie.net “The Hushed Casket” (THX). Much has transpired between then and now. THX has ballooned to encompass over 100 people playing a multitude of games. THX’ers have participated in gaming tournaments all over the United States, and we’ve actually even won some of them. Our Huntsville, Alabama, based group has changed significantly since then, and because an exhaustive history is available here, in this article I will only recap the past year (August 2006 – August 2007).

By August 2006 we were firmly entrenched with the Xbox 360 and awaiting a killer app to bring us together in multiplayer. We still occasionally partook in Halo 2 via Xbox Live, but before the 2006 holiday season THX’s XBL activity was centered around Texas Hold’em and other arcade games. November brought Gears of War, which was just the killer app we had been waiting for. We dove into coop campaign and multiplayer with fervor, and for several weeks in late 2006 my friends list normally had at least 7-8 THX’ers on during prime time with all of them playing Gears of War. Often I would have 12-15 total friends playing GoW. Later, a team from THX entered the first MLG GoW online tournament and fared respectably, but was unable to place. We then transitioned to independent online brackets like Team Warfare League. We did extremely well there, but lack of mature competition quickly brought that to an end. Lesson learned: we should have used Game Battles.

Our first monster LAN of 2007, JANLAN, brought gamers and friends from as far away as New Jersey and California to participate in another gargantuan Halo 1 LAN. THX’s biggest LAN to date, it encompassed 33 gamers and enough A/V equipment to make Huntsville Utilities pee their figurative pants. We also experimented with GoW via LAN on 32” LCD HDTVs and a couple THX’ers inadvertently got their picture on Joystiq.

GoW online play continued into early 2007 but tapered off shortly thereafter. Massive XBL group gaming became seldom. Website activity was centered around Halo 3 and the numerous highly anticipated titles of 2007. In May the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta landed with a thud, prompting every THX’er with a 360 to beg, borrow, or steal a way to download it. Most of us simply paid the $60 to buy it at retail (Crackdown). News poured in as revelations about H3’s multiplayer features became apparent. We all had an awesome time with H3 Beta, and were sad to see it go.

In early summer THX was briefly shown on G4TV after being one of the first gaming websites to break the story on the Iris ARG being used to promote Halo 3. Rapture landed an interview with the poor guy who’s cell phone number got caught in the middle.

JuLAN 2007 at Rayne’s house proved to be yet another massive and well-organized Halo 1 LAN that THX is known for and prides itself on. Twenty gamers converged on eight Xboxen and TVs for two networks of killer Halo 1 action. Torrent posted the pictures from the event here.

A few THX’ers became involved in Shadowrun and went on to participate in MLG’s first Shadowrun tournament, placing 5th at MLG Chicago as a part of the cooked Gamers.

Late summer 2007 has brought a resurgence of GoW online play, mostly because we’re bored, and planning for THX’s first Halo 3 LAN in October. Anticipation of Halo 3 is building exponentially as September 25th approaches, and hushedcasket.com is a haven for Halo 3 news of all sorts. A launch party is planned outside the University Drive Gamestop for the night of September 24th where we will finally get our grubby hands on Halo 3 Legendary Editions, and shortly thereafter Oculus will take a picture of his cat wearing the MJOLNIR helmet. Keep a close eye on hushedcasket.com and register for The THX 5th Anniversary Halo 3 LAN in October as we draw closer to finishing the fight.

Kotaku has a video it calls a “guided walk” through the gameplay of Halo Wars. No word yet on whether this is the same content as the rumored XBLM video “demo” due out.

UPDATE: Ensemble Studios has put up a ten minute video on their own site; this is what they showed at E3 this year.

Games for Windows – Live users (a.k.a. HALO 2 Vista and Shadowrun Vista gamers) were greeted with a tiny update to their service today. Who knows what the update did? I mean, the Games for Windows – Live website isn’t exactly a hot spot for information about the service. Heck the website is still out of date for games that were released months ago.

Looks like we’ve got a new graphic.

And GfWLive crashes my network after the update.

Nice. Looks like we’ve got a diagnosis screen. Finally.

The HOME screen gets an update.

And we’ve got some new gamerpics. What’s up with the chess gamerpics?

Other than what you see in these screenshots, I have no idea what the latest patch did. Playing online in Shadowrun saw no noticeable difference. There not update from the GfW website or from Major Nelson.

Oh, Games for Windows – Live. I’ve STILL got a lot of issues with the service. Look for an update to my “Top ten things wrong with Games for Windows – Live” list in September.

currently playing: Shadowrun
currently supporting: Ron Paul

First off I want to say a big thank you to Laird who represented us at the last minute at PAX this past week. He got some great interviews and video which we’ll be posting soon.

So this past few weeks we’ve been inundated with Halo 3 footage of stuff we haven’t seen before. Now’s the time to talk about your reactions to all this cool stuff! Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• Forge Tutorial
• Narrows footage from PAX – including the gravity hammer, the plasma cannon, flamethrower, mauler, firebombs, and flare. It also demonstrates that you can switch between equipment!
• Guardian footage – part 1 | part 2
• Sandtrap footage – including a great demo of the hornet, the gravity hammer, the map layout. WARNING: contains campaign footage at the end.
• Halo short film part 2
• Halo Wars demonstration video

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to watch one or more of these videos and let us know what you think! Do you think the hornet will be balanced in multiplayer? What do you think of the new maps? How about the gravity hammer, the flare, firebomb, flamethrower, and new alien turrets? I know it’s a lot to digest, but send in your thoughts on one or more of these things and if it’s good, we’ll put it on the show! Be sure to include your gamertag so we can give you credit. Deadline is Thursday night at 6pm EST.

One last thing: big thanks to the Podtacular IRC crew for helping me gather these links.

Edit: It’s not available on the XBL Marketplace. It’s at XBOX.com.

currently playing: Shadowrun
currently supporting: Ron Paul

Tried going to http://charlieoscardelta.com lately? You may have gone there to register for the Call of Duty 4 multiplayer beta. While a few of you were lucky enough to get in, the rest of us have been stuck with error page after error page.

Today a first-come first-server registration for the CoD4 beta was supposed to take place. The CoD.com web server crashed.

The outcome. Infinity Ward is doing away with the first-come first-server beta registration. Instead, they are going to keep it open for 24-hours. It seems like anybody that wants to can get into the beta. No more limited amount of beta keys.

So, keep checking http://charlieoscardelta.com for the beta registration page and you’ll be good to go.

currently playing: Shadowrun
currently supporting: Ron Paul