My Halo News.com

The latest news about the Halo series of games from Microsoft

  • Friday Review Roundup

    Another four, today:

    Metacritic’s critic review average is still at 94 (though fans have rated it only 7.8/10) – that’s a wider range than other top 360 titles (Bioshock is at 96/8.9, and Gears of War is at 94/8.4, for comparison). Are the critics blinded by the hype… or are there anti-Halo fans skewing the user numbers? Only time will tell! (Louis Wu 12:27:17 UTC)


  • Friday’s Fan Fiction

    Eleven new pieces up for you this week in the Fan Fiction section… get to reading!(Louis Wu 12:08:46 UTC)

  • 300 Mill? Pfft.

    Jon Ogg, at 24/7 Wall St., says $300 million is nothing – Halo 3 will hit $500 million soon. (I suppose if ‘soon’ means ‘sometime in the next two or three years’, I’d agree with him. If he means ‘before the end of 2007’… I’m not sure I’d take that bet. He probably means something in between, though.) (Louis Wu 12:00:00 UTC)

  • ActionClix, on the ground

    Sean “Shidarin/ig98” Wallitsch (longtime bungie.org readers might recognize the name; ig98 was one of the first maintainers of myth.bungie.org, back in 1999) picked up some Halo ActionClix goodies, and was kind enough to blog about his experience. Check it out!(Louis Wu 11:53:42 UTC)

  • Podtacular 4 Players Co-Op Tourney

    What’s up everyone!

    It’s now time to get your BR’s and Carbines out and get your team of 4 ready because on October 13th at 6:00PM EST Podtacular will proudly bring to you the first Online 4 Players Co-Op Halo 3 Tourney around.

    In this touryney teams will compete against one another for the maximum score on 3 maps played on the Mythic dificult (Legendary with Mythic Skull activated). We will use the META scoring system to gather the points and see who can score more points on the 3 maps within the time limit given to all teams.

    So what are you waiting for?! If you’re not registered at podtacular yet go ahead, register and check out our forums for all the info you need regarding this great tourney.

    Click HERE for rules and FAQs.

    See you on the flipside!


  • Bungie Prevails In First Official Halo 3 Humpday

    Shishka saved Bungie from humiliating defeat in the first post-launch Halo 3 Humpday, as the boys from Kirkland waded into Social Slayer and got socially slayed.

    Check Bungie.net for the full writeup as well as links to the Saved Films; this is the first time we’ll be able not just to read about the humpday, or pore over the statistics, but actually see the matches themselves. No more lying embellishment!


  • Halo 3 Completes Your Collection

    Brian Szabelski at Blogcritics.org gives a thumbs up to Halo 3:

    Halo 3 is just about everything we’ve been led to think it would be. It falls short in some areas of campaign, where things seem like the generic FPS cliché of “here’s a room full of bad guys, kill ’em!”, but it absolutely shines in multiplayer modes. And guess what? The game’s difficulties aren’t just cosmetic changes like in some other titles – it’s insane on Legendary, but you’re rewarded more for it. No 360 owner’s collection is complete without this title.

    Check out the complete review for his list of pros and cons.


  • Halo Movie Is Deader Than Dead

    Creativity Online interviews film director Neill Blomkamp about the promotional shorts he did for Halo 3, and in the process, finds out that the Halo movie project is a lot more dead than most fans think, and that the shorts were entirely separate, and not part of an attempt to lure Hollywood back into the project:

    There’s such a massive misconception about what those are. In essence, those pieces have zero to do with the film. Like less than zero. I worked on the film for a few months and we developed a lot of things during that time, and none of that has anything to do with the shorts. Long, long long after the film died, Bungie and Microsoft asked me if I wanted to be involved in the Halo 3 promotional stuff, just because I knew all of the guys at Bungie, and I was like Yeah, sure, that sounds like fun. I went about starting to make those three pieces back with a lot of the guys from Weta who had made the original film. All of the design and everything that we’d made for the film is just locked up in some locker somewhere, so all of the stuff for the shorts is specifically for the short films, from scratch.

    Thanks for the heads-up on this story to Louis Wu at HBO.


  • Blue Filters In Stock

    The Bungie Store has got the blue filter you can use with Halo 3’s video calibrator in stock now. For a limited time, it’s free with any other order!


  • Halo 3 Cracks $300 Million

    Halo 3 zoomed from its first day US sales of $170 million to a first week total of $300 million, according to GamesIndustry.biz. It was also heavily played on Xbox Live, garnering the top spot:

    Microsoft stats reveal that more than 2.7 million people have played Halo 3 over Xbox Live in the past week, with the first day of release seeing a total of 3.6 million hours of online play, increasing to 40 million hours by the end of the first week.

    Yowza. There are no unit sales figures yet, but if the average price of Halo 3 was, say, $90, to account for a distribution of Standard, Limited, and Legendary editions, that’s 3.3 million copies. If there are fewer Legendary editions than Standard and Limited, then that number goes even higher.


  • Humpday Challenge: Halo 3 Debut

    Click the left stick. And up, and down and up, and down. It’s the Humpday Challenge.

  • Blomkamp discusses Halo

    Creativity Online interviewed Niel Blomkamp about the Halo shorts he made recently (and about the Halo movie he didn’t make). It’s a pretty interesting read; he’s pretty clear that the Halo movie, in its most recent form, is quite dead… but he’s certainly willing to reconsider it if things change. The discussion about the shorts is great – he really enjoyed doing them, and working with Bungie… who knows? Maybe there’s something else in the future there. Thanks, Anton P. Nym.(Louis Wu 21:34:25 UTC)

  • A different view

    The Slate review of Halo 3 basically says Campaign is a total waste of time, that Multiplayer is where it’s at. “Think of it as Madden for the science-fiction crowd. It ain’t art, but it sure is fun.” Um… I’m not sure we’re playing the same game. Thanks, Salen Stormwing.(Louis Wu 21:19:43 UTC)

  • RT: Dad of the Year

    You’d have to be living under a rock to not know about every little iota of Britney Spears’ life lately, from what she eats, to what her underwear looks like, to which hair extensions she’s wearing this week, to her custody battle over her kids. We’re not…

  • A homemade MC outfit in Sweden

    Speaking of Master Chief costumes – Gustav Ljungdahl, a Swedish Halo fan, sent us some pictures of his homemade Master Chief outfit – total cost was $40. MC photographed by a semi-naked man | MC fighting Samus Aran | MC in bed with a cute girl Not a bad job!(Louis Wu 18:27:02 UTC)

  • Art meets commerce

    Hawty McBloggy has been busy; she’s got an interview with Pavel Dolgov, who does a lot of Halo-related art (check our news for links), plus a couple of fun eBay items – a foam sheeting Master Chief costume, and a Master Chief sculpture made from real engine parts. Whee!(Louis Wu 18:20:49 UTC)

  • A/V Calibration Filter: Now Available

    The Blue Filter, a non-essential tool you can use to finely tune your television is now available at the Bungie Store.

  • Fight Like a Girl

    Last year in October, the Cavegirls hosted an online Halo 2 tournament to raise money for the fight against breast cancer. Since the tournament was a huge success last year, we’ve decided to hold another tournament in Halo 3! Please join us!

  • Red v Blue Charity Challenge

    No, this has nothing to do with Rooster Teeth; this is an Australian fundraising effort for Mission Australia and Make a Wish Australia, with lots of cool goodies from Microsoft to make it fun. Filefront has done a nice job of describing what’s going on – or you can simply explore the official Red v Blue website.(Louis Wu 16:26:42 UTC)

  • New Schwag

    Some new stuff at the Bungie Store – there’s a dual deco MC hoody (embroidered AND screened), a pair of mixer glasses (they look perfect for beer), and free with every purchase, a Halo 3 Video Calibration Filter (useful only to those with Halo 3 Essentials Disc One, which comes with the Limited and Legendary editions). Go shopping!(Louis Wu 16:15:44 UTC)