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If you were one of the (undoubtedly) many who grabbed the Halo 3 Official Soundtrack from the iTunes Store since it became available in the last 24 hours, take a look at disc 2, track 5.

“No More Dead Hereos”

From any other game publisher, of course, this would be attributed to a simple clerical error, either by Bungie or by Apple. However, since this is Bungie and Halo, it is obviously a cleverly-hidden hint for faithful Bungie fans that the Master Chief will soon have his own line of heroic sandwich cookies.

Mark “Have Blue” Levin of Freeverse has written up a Gamasutra postmortem of their port of Marathon 2: Durandal to the Xbox 360.

What’s revealed is that the Xbox version isn’t so much a port as it was almost a complete from-the-ground-up rewrite:

Going beyond a port. Without an emulator, huge chunks of the game had to be discarded. The original rendering code of the game was very well suited to its original platform, but was entirely unusable on the Xbox 360. MacOS’s proprietary graphics API, QuickDraw, was used extensively throughout; some of its features, such as drawing 2D lines, were absent from the 360 entirely. Screen-space arithmetic was done using fixed-point integer math, a crucial optimization a decade ago but a source of needless complexity today.

Texture mapping was done using blocks of PowerPC and 68K assembler — no one on the team was able to directly read them. The entire renderer had to be rewritten in DirectX. As a result, the 360 version of Marathon 2 outputs a native 720p image at 60 frames per second, rather than the 480p30 of the original. And unlike most other classic ports, it uses texture filtering, true 32-bit rendering, and every pixel of a widescreen display.

The “HD” mode of the graphics, which in other games commonly refers to a post-processing filter, is a completely new set of images. All of the nearly three thousand sprites in the game were redrawn in true 32-bit color, allowing us to put our own spin on the look of the game.

Wow. That’s an awful lot of love heaped on a decade-old game; but Marathon deserves it. Check out the entire postmortem for the story of what went right, and what went wrong, bringing Marathon to the Xbox 360.

First, we have to thank the GamerCast Network and Eidos for making this possible and inviting us to be a part of the community event and coverage of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. They provided us with some nice goodies to hand out and we wanted to make sure that everyone here could have fun winning them.

So, without further ado, congratulations to our winners, plasma qrenades and Killazilla!

1st place:plasma qrenades Prize: 2 Kane and Lynch: Dead Man T-shirts 1 Kane & Lynch money clip

2nd place: Killazilla Prize: 1 Kane & Lynch T-shirt 1 Kane & Lynch ski mask

To our winners, be sure to contact Dialpex as soon as possible to get your prizes! Thanks again to everyone that sent in your photos and participated, and look forward to more contests and giveaways in the future!