My Halo News.com

The latest news about the Halo series of games from Microsoft

  • Halo 3 Giveaway at Gamehelper

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    halo@bungie.org
    in
    Joe Markert let us know that Gamehelper is giving away a Halo Zune… and some copies of Halo. Swing by their contest page for full details (registration required to enter). (Louis Wu 16:03:10 UTC)

  • Fight Like a Girl Tournament

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    Dialpex

    Hello everyone! It is that time of the year again where the Cavegirls host their Fight Like A Girl Halo 3 tournament. All entry fees are donated to help find a cure for breast cancer which affect so many women (and men!) in our lives.

    This year, they have expanded it to include not only a FFA tournament, but also a 2v2 tournament. The tournament is on Saturday, October 20th and you are invited to participate! They would love your support with this so please visit their forums to read more about it:

    http://www.cavegirlforums.com

    Let’s show them our community strength and participating on this by making a difference in someone else’s life.

  • R.net – keeping me on my toes

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    halo@bungie.org
    in
    Wow… if I don’t visit Rampancy.net for a couple of days, I miss a lot. (This is true for you, too – remember that.) Lessee what we got…

    I guess that’ll teach me to stop by every day! (Louis Wu 15:39:06 UTC)

  • Thursday’s Review Roundup

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    halo@bungie.org
    in
    Small collection of Halo 3 reviews today:

    Is the flood slowing?(Louis Wu 15:16:13 UTC)

  • Frankie on Game Theory

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    halo@bungie.org
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    Frank O’Connor was a guest on this week’s Game Theory Podcast – the topic (surprise, surprise) was Halo 3. Thanks, Zeouterlimits.(Louis Wu 15:14:48 UTC)

  • It’s all about the numbers.

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    halo@bungie.org
    in
    Maybe I’m just a statistics junkie, but I found this fascinating. Sandvine Network Demographics saw a 100% to 200% increase (that’s a doubling or tripling, for those of you who failed 5th grade math) in peak bandwidth of Xbox Live traffic in the week following Halo 3’s release. However (and here’s the fun part), the number of gamers PRODUCING this traffic remained unchanged from before Halo 3’s release. This is in marked contrast to the situation after Gears of War was released; then, an 80% increase in new users was seen. So… most people buying Halo 3 already HAVE a 360? (Remember, there are 12 million of these puppies in the wild. Even if monthly sales double, as they’re expected to, that will only add another half a million to the total this month, and a fraction of that in the space of a week… so it’s possible that the additional boxes simply aren’t showing up in the noise.) And while we’re on the subject of statistics, a Microsoft press release announces that Halo 3 has earned $300 million dollars worldwide in its first week’s sales. Wonga.(Louis Wu 14:53:07 UTC)

  • Halo 3: It’s Big in Japan

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    halo@bungie.org
    in
    It’s pretty big news when a first person shooter tops the Japanese sales charts. According to Jonnyram at NeoGAF, though, that’s exactly what Halo 3 did last week. (Avateur picked it up at Kotaku, if you want to discuss flying pigs or something on our forum.)(Louis Wu 14:19:25 UTC)

  • Another one.

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    halo@bungie.org
    in
    Remember this post? There wasn’t any speculation on our forum, but over at Rampancy.net, there were two guesses: ‘Loser’ and ‘Believe’. We got the next letter last night… and clearly, both of those guesses are wrong. And it seems like the MC and his opponent are pretty beaten-up… (Louis Wu 13:54:37 UTC)

  • You never forget your first.

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    halo@bungie.org
    in
    Heh – almost missed this. N’Gai Croal, over at Newsweek, has posted a bunch of Halo 3 ‘first kill’ pics from notables in the gaming industry, along with their comments. He calls it ‘Postcards from the Edge’. Thanks, Anton P. Nym.(Louis Wu 13:37:58 UTC)

  • More access to an egg

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    halo@bungie.org
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    Frogblast has supplied a video walkthrough to get you (by yourself) to an easter egg on The Storm; yes, you could get there easily from any saved film of the level, but Frogblast has ALWAYS been about the ‘elegant’, rather than the easy. (This egg was revealed in [T]rickety Trick 6, released a week ago – if you have two players, you can try their method as well; it starts at around 3 minutes in.) If you’d rather find eggs on your own, don’t follow EITHER of these links.(Louis Wu 13:09:22 UTC)

  • Dang. They’re playing in Bermuda.

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    halo@bungie.org
    in
    Ezandora posted a full week’s timelapse of the world activity map you can see on Bungie’s Online page. (We already noted a couple of versions that included the first day or so – this is even better.) If you’d rather watch it in QuickTime, you can. (I tried to make a WMP9 version, but I couldn’t get it down to a reasonable size and still have the text readable – sorry.) (Louis Wu 12:57:04 UTC)

  • Surreality Rules.

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    halo@bungie.org
    in
    Elnea’s posted another pair of Halo Action Figure Theater episodes – you can read about them (and get a one-paragraph plot synopsis of the series) in this forum post. She says she doesn’t feel comfortable posting this stuff here any more – let her know if you enjoy it! (Louis Wu 12:52:07 UTC)

  • Map impressions – from pros

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    halo@bungie.org
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    Over at MLGPro.com, a couple of regulars have picked their favorite Halo 3 launch maps (and provided rationale); one likes Epitaph, the other likes The Pit. Go see why! Thanks, 3Suns. (Louis Wu 12:50:48 UTC)

  • If at first you don’t succeed…

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    halo@bungie.org
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    3Suns posted a link to an AWESOME stick by BlackShadowMist over at MLGPro.com – nobody’s saying it was planned, but because of Saved Films, you get the chance to WATCH it, which is pretty cool. For folks who don’t like streaming Flash, I dropped off a couple of downloadable versions – WMP9 (1.6 mb) and QuickTime (1.3 mb).(Louis Wu 12:48:22 UTC)

  • Falling Star.

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    halo@bungie.org
    in
    Gah. I HATE forgetting stuff. I didn’t post yesterday’s One One Se7en on time – so it’s up now. If it makes no sense, you haven’t played the first couple of minutes of the campaign… or you can just blame Stuntmutt. (I do.)(Louis Wu 12:24:03 UTC)

  • Halo 3 Sells Xbox 360s

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    narcogen

    Most people long since acceded that Halo 3 would sell well, and it has. The big question for the platform, though, was whether it could move consoles; whether it could take back some of the ground gained by the Nintendo Wii since it launched last year, as well as ensure they’d stay ahead of Sony’s lackluster PlayStation 3.

    Early indications are that the answer to that might be “yes”.

    Spong is reporting that Chart-Track, a market statistics aggregator, says that during Halo 3’s launch week Xbox 360 sales doubled compared to the previous week. Even more unexpected, Halo 3 topped the Japanese software charts, which perhaps goes to show that there’s nothing out there for the Wii that people don’t already have, and just plain nothing out for the PS3 yet.

  • What’s New at Podtacular: Community Projects

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    foomojive

    One of my favorite things about Podtacular is how it’s not just my community, it’s your community. It’s so cool how the community takes ownership of itself and puts together some great stuff, making friends along the way. Here are some perfect examples:

    • Pod TV is putting out new episodes – You’ve seen the first grand slam Halo 3 show, and there’s plenty more in the hopper for Cryptoflix and the Pod TV team. They recently got a nice influx of talented help so they’ve got quite a team going.
    • Halo News is on it’s way back! – Chevelle65 and the Halo News crew are working hard to bring back one of the most genuinely funny machinima series ever. The ones that assembled the Halo Voltron are coming back soon with a bang!
    • Monthly Porridge is in the works… – You thought Quality Jeverage had retired his regular Podtacular comic? Think again! No seriously, think again.
    • Podtacular Radio is returning! – DJ Painkilla05 is frantically spinning his wheels of steel to bring us more music to frag by.
    • Podtacular Review Frenzy – Killazilla and the review crew are ready to provide you with a full and complete review and all of the insights for all the brand new and upcoming games to hit shelves this year.

    Yes, new life has been breathed into the old favorites. But it doesn’t have to end there. You can start your own project and work together with the Podtacular community! If you have an idea, share it in a thread on the forums and see if people like it and will help. Then get crackalackin’! I look forward to seeing what you come up with. You could also contact the leaders of Pod TV or Halo News and see if they’re looking for any help, I’m sure they’d appreciate the offer. Let the community projects return and begin!

  • Trickity Trick 6

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    narcogen

    DevinOlsen, goatrope, jayWHY, and EA demonstrate that with the right settings it’s possible to get through any soft elastic barrier on Halo 3 in the latest in the Trickity Trick series.

  • Halo 3 Needs No Punctuation. Period.

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    narcogen

    The Zero Punctuation videoblog at The Escapist proves that it’s much easier to be funny when criticizing something than praising it, and their review of Halo 3 is indeed funny. I just can’t figure out if it’s funny for the sake of it, or whether the reviewer honestly dislikes the game as much as the review says and being funny is just a byproduct of that.

    However, all I can think of watching the recycled criticisms (the game is short, the story is incomprehensible) is that I don’t see the basis for them. At all. Estimates of game length are all over the board, from 8 to 20 hours. And yet all of these are called “short”. Compared to what? Oblivion? Are all games supposed to deliver the same number of hours of play for a single price point? Is it fair to hold Halo 3 to that standard while saying “I don’t give a flying blam about multiplayer”?

    Would this stuff be deemed funny if someone lampooned the plot of The Return of the King from the perspective of someone who had neither read nor seen The Fellowship of the Ring or the Two Towers and therefore didn’t know anything about these wacky short people called Grunts Hobbits and this all-powerful Halo Ring everybody is on about?

     Click here for the complete text.

  • Andrew McCaffrey Breaks Into Bungie

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    narcogen

    Back in August, before Halo 3 went gold, OXM senior editor Andrew McCaffrey got to visit Bungie and play Halo:

    We were fortunate enough to actually make it past the locked doors and get to step inside the heart of Bungie’s newsroom-style studio on Day 2, being taken up into the “loft” area where Frank and the Bungie.net team sits, so we could be given a walkthrough of the redesigned website features and how they interact with Halo(R) 3. It was a quiet and focused environment, despite the fact that many on the team were on vacation, and the game was 99.9% done.

    For the complete story see Xbox.com.