The Hunt the Signal contest has come to a close, lasting less than two weeks until a winner was declared.  Similar to previous pre-launch ARGs, this contest heavily involved the use of cryptography to solve a myriad of puzzles to progress as a team of four.  Starting off with a mysterious signal embedded at the end of the sixth Hunt the Truth episode, the contest launched with a link to StolenGauntlet.com.  From there people waited for the countdown to reach the end and start the contest.  Many teams tried to solve the puzzles, but the victors came from a group behind the Twitter account ONISEC3.  How they got there is this episode’s topic.  To follow along, there’s a Waypoint forum thread here, and we also recommend checking out Halo Canon’s videos here and here.

Also in this episode, we had the privilege of talking with Media Bias, one of the members from the Halo Archive.  The archive is one of the more recently sprouted communities that has amassed a large following with regards to the Halo lore and universe.  They have a growing repository of information and articles that any lore fan would be best to check out.

Ben is just about ready to blow open ONI’s dark secrets waiting for a few more pieces to fall into place.  Wrapping up a recording session with Anthony Petrovsky’s testimony of the Spartan program, he finally gets the last bit of data he needs from Mashak to make his case.  He even goes one step further cleaning up a police report behind one of the cases where a Spartan abductee ran into his clone, which Ben decided not to use.  FERO, with her impeccable timing cuts off Mashak and get’s Ben ready to blow the story up to the UEG senators, throwing out his journalistic integrity in one fell swoop.  He manages to make it through the whole process and deliver his final testimony as FERO’s hack was curbed, but not before Sully told Ben he was done for good.  With Ben now a fugitive of ONI, out of money and lost contact with the outer colonies, we’re left to wonder what will happen to him and everyone involved with his discoveries. We also explore another possibility behind the identity of FERO thanks to an article over on Halo Archive that suggests, somewhat convincingly, that she could be Ilsa Zane, a Spartan IV washout turned Innie.

Halo 3: ODST and Remnant are now available for Halo: The Master Chief Collection.  Before the release, had the chance to talk with Dan Ayoub, Executive Producer at 343 Industries, and JP Eaton, Lead Environment Artist at Certain Affinity about these additions to the collection.  As we talked with Dan, we discussed the challenges facing the team bringing Halo 3: ODST to the collection with the different campaign flow the game offered, the decision to not include Firefight, achievements we’ll see, and what changes were made to the game to make it fit with the collection.  Flipping over to Remnant, we talked with JP about the differences between Relic and Remnant, the reasoning behind choosing Relic to remake, and what new features we could expect with the map.