In honor of the M203 grenade launcher in Call of Duty 4 (often called the noob tube by frustrated gamers who can’t form an effective strategy to combat a player using it) here is a video of an actual M203 in action, in the hands of my wife.
At The Basic School every company holds an event where spouses, friends, and family come to work with you and get to look at and and sometimes use real military equipment. At this event my wife, gamertag BattleItch, gets to fire an M203 grenade launcher attached to an M16. She aims at the right lateral limit sign to the right of the screen (notice the puff of orange smoke when the training round impacts) and manages to hit it. She was either very good or very lucky, because aiming the M203 at that range with the leaf sight is very difficult. Unfortunately, that sign is one of the few things on the range you are not supposed to shoot. She forgot that part. GG.
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BattleItch Shoots the Noob Tube
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GWF Developers: details
A couple of days ago, we mentioned the Game With Fame Developers day – which is today. Participants, and a time for the Bungie dev team participation, were unknown at the time. They’re up now – you can see who from the Halo Wars dev team will be playing from 9am – 1pm today, and who from the Bungie team will be playing from 3pm – 5pm today. (All times are Pacific.) Thanks, KP. (Louis Wu 13:10:37 UTC)
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Free Halo 2 theme on XBLM
Se7enth Prophet noticed that in honor of Xbox Live’s 5th birthday, there’s a free Halo 2 theme available on Xbox Live Marketplace. Go to Themes -> Xbox Live is 5ive to find it. (Louis Wu 13:06:54 UTC)
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When ad dollars stretch too far
Yesterday morning, x Zero x mentioned that Tuesday night’s episode of Caveman, a comedy on ABC, contained a Halo reference. I didn’t get around to mentioning it in the news… but last night darthbob noticed that there was a clip of it on Kotaku. I’m gonna have to agree with them – it looks more like paid-for product placement than an honest pop culture reference. Oh, well.(Louis Wu 12:45:55 UTC)
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Halo: Featured on Wikipedia
TKD 117 was the first to let us know that Halo: Combat Evolved is the Featured Article of the Day on the English version of Wikipedia today – Happy 6th Birthday! (While it’s true that the game itself was released a few days before the 15th, nobody could PLAY it until the Xbox hit the shelves.) (There’s no specific word on this – but I’d GUESS that this means that the download will not be 60Hz-compatible for PAL regions, since the original game wasn’t.)(Louis Wu 12:26:56 UTC)
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Go Forge Yourself
Cozmo23 let us know that Clan O7AH is hosting the First Annual Go Forge Yourself Contest; you’ve got until December 17 to create something cool. There will be prizes for the Most Creative Map, Best Looking Map, and Best Overall Map. Check the site for full details and rules. (Louis Wu 21:43:13 UTC)
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As Stupid As Possible.
Bungie slipped in a few cheap shots in the dialogue of Halo 3 – Stuntmutt helps you find one in today’s One One Se7en.(Louis Wu 17:20:09 UTC)
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Halo 3 Cheat Codes
Heh – this is hilarious. The only downside is now I’m going to lose a ton of time going through the rest of the site…(Louis Wu 17:16:32 UTC)
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Bungie to be well-represented at GDC
The newspost about the Game Designers Expo reminded me that the Game Developers Conference is coming soon, as well – February 18 in San Francisco – so it’s time to see who from Bungie will be talking this year. It’s a pretty big list:- Chris Butcher will be discussing Matchmaking in Halo 3
- Hao Chen will be talking about Lighting And Material Of Halo 3
- CJ Cowan will look at the Halo 3 Cinematic Process
- Yaohua Hu will discuss Lightmap Compression In Halo 3
- Marty O’Donnell will do an Audio Post-Mortem of the game
- Luis Villegas and Sean Shypula will talk about distributed processing to speed up development tasks, will lessons from Halo 3
Sounds like it’ll be a great show for folks who want to learn the Bungie magic!(Louis Wu 17:04:37 UTC)
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New goodies at the Bungie Store
In an interesting move to a wider variety of wearables, the Bungie Store has added a Master Chief Thermal Twofer, a Short Sleeved Work Shirt, and a Reversible Beanie. Thanks, ViralSyris.(Louis Wu 17:02:53 UTC)
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Bungie audio team giving keynote at GD Expo
Very nice – Jay Weinland and CJ Cowan will be giving the Keynote speech at this year’s Game Design Expo in Vancouver, BC (January 2008). They’ll be talking about “the tools and processes that helped create the sound and visuals for Halo 3”. Thanks, RotaJota.(Louis Wu 16:51:01 UTC)
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Battles at the first tower
Rockslider has put up a new page at Bad Cyborg; there are directions for putting together large battles on The Covenant. Go read!(Louis Wu 15:57:09 UTC)
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Halo 3 FFA online tourney
RedSpades wrote to say that he’s hosting a Halo 3 FFA Tournament on his site, WinMicrosoftPoints.com – admission is free, prizes include the book Halo Effect, an iTunes gift card, and a 1-month XBL Gold card. Details can be found in this forum post.(Louis Wu 15:55:08 UTC)
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Sniping for Christ
Christ and Pop Culture has a podcast devoted to the subject of whether it makes sense to use Halo as a recruitment tool for Christian outreach groups. Yes, this subject is in danger of being oversaturated (we actually suggested that a month ago) – but this podcast talks to someone who games for fun, and is a seminary student. He makes some interesting points.(Louis Wu 15:51:19 UTC)
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More Than Genetics
TTL Demag0gue has posted Wednesday’s Reclaimer comic – in Chapter One, Part Eight, Ferial continues to explore the idea of will, and what you can do with it.(Louis Wu 12:34:35 UTC)
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Great Uses of Forge, from MLG
MLG takes a look at some of the things Forge makes possible in an article on MLGPro.com – interesting read. Thanks, Grady Durden.(Louis Wu 12:30:27 UTC)
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Large Online FFA at Violated Gaming
Chad Souter let us know that ViolatedGaming.com is holding a 256-player single-elimination FFA tournament on November 19, at 6 pm CST. Entry is free, and the entire tourney will be completed in a 2-3 hour stretch. They’ve got 51 players so far – go sign up!(Louis Wu 12:25:16 UTC)
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OMRA
trigger119 stopped by yesterday to announce the OMRA – the Online Machinima Rating Association. They’re planning on it mostly being used for videos released through GamingTV, but they’re also making the ratings graphics available for download, so that machinima makers who elect NOT to host their vids at GTV can still incorporate the ratings. (Because this means that some movies that use this rating system will be self-rated, you should take the ratings with a grain of salt… but the idea is an intriguing one nonetheless.)(Louis Wu 12:20:28 UTC)
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Oh no, where do we go?
Oh no, where do we go? Hawty McBloggy found an entertaining (if NSFW) Halo rap on YouTube – go watch. (She warns that it’s slow for the first 4:50 – she’s got that colon in the wrong place. It’s only 45 seconds.) There’s more information about Warped Corp, the group that put this together, on the actual YouTube page.(Louis Wu 12:16:25 UTC)