The Anennberg School for Communication at USC’s Online Journalism Review interviews Claude “Louis Wu” Errera at HBO about what it’s like to run an online community for a game like Halo, and why mainstream media outlets have been slow to pick up on trends in that area in the article Lord of the Ringworld.

OJR: Newspapers still sort of treat Halo and other massively successful game franchises as underground or outsider. A lot of the reporting is like “Gee, games make a lot of money, who knew?” Why are journalists so far behind the curve? What would you like to see in mainstream media reporting about games that’s not there now?

I think journalists might be behind the curve simply because gaming became a successful adult entertainment outlet relatively recently. Not that long ago, video games were the domain of kids – I think there are just a lot of writers that haven’t noticed the change. It’s becoming clearer with every runaway success, though.

Thanks for the heads-up to GhaleonEB at HBO.

It’s amazing how thousands of gamers work together to find a little easter egg hidden in a huge digital world. Halo trickers and map explorers have been looking for days for the last white skull in Halo 3’s campaign known as the “I Would Have Been Your Daddy Skull”. This skull will unlock the coveted Hayabusa head armor for your multiplayer character.

A saved film of getting this skull has been publishd. You can automatically download it to your XBOX 360 my going to this Bungie.net forum post and click on “Download to Halo 3”.

Triggering the skull is done in the “Covenant” map with the seven Halo rings. You must jump through the rings in a certain order. Gamers knew something was odd because jumping through the rings produced different notes of sound.

Assuming the first ring in the room is #1 and the last ring in the room is #7, the rings must be jumped through in this order:

4 6 5 4 5 3 4

Don’t forget our Guide to unlocking the armor in Halo 3 and our guide to finding the skulls in Halo 3.

It’s amazing how thousands of gamers work together to find a little easter egg hidden in a huge digital world. Halo trickers and map explorers have been looking for days for the last white skull in Halo 3’s campaign known as the “I Would Have Been Your Daddy Skull”. This skull will unlock the coveted Hayabusa head armor for your multiplayer character.

A saved film of getting this skull has been publishd. You can automatically download it to your XBOX 360 my going to this Bungie.net forum post and click on “Download to Halo 3”.

Triggering the skull is done in the “Covenant” map with the seven Halo rings. You must jump through the rings in a certain order. Gamers knew something was odd because jumping through the rings produced different notes of sound.

Assuming the first ring in the room is #1 and the last ring in the room is #7, the rings must be jumped through in this order:

4 5 6 5 7 6 5 4 1 2 3 2 7 2 1 3 4 6 7 5 4 6 5 4 5 3 4

Don’t forget our Guide to unlocking the armor in Halo 3 and our guide to finding the skulls in Halo 3.

GameSpy stops playing Halo 3 just long enough to wax lyrical about the game. There are viewpoints from several staffers, but here’s one that stands out. Associate Console Editor Sterling McGarvey was bitten by the bug that disables the Resume feature when moving a hard drive from one console to another:

It’s not all rotten in the state of Denmark, however. After jacking a Wraith to Gabe’s amazement, I proceeded to mow through legions of Brute forces with alarming ease. That was because I’m playing on Normal. What can I say? I can’t organize enough guys on my schedule to burn through four-player Legendary. Yet. I’m sure that I’ll be far too green to play well online in time for Wednesday’s upcoming ‘Spy-Hunter, but what else is new?

Playing on Normal because you’ve no help or time with Legendar? There’s a solution to that problem. It’s called Heroic.

The Hushed Casket told you how to get the armor permutations; if you now need to find all the terminals (without looking yourselves, you lazy bastards) check out the 7th Columnist’s terminal guide.

GameSpot has a nice feature out that lets you compare in place screenshots from all three Halo games so you can see the changes in the graphics; very slick. Check it out.

The latest Bungie update covers a number of topics, including achievements and skulls, but the real revelation is that unlike most Xbox 360 games, Halo 3’s native resolution is 640p, as rumored:

Naturally it’s more complicated than that. In fact, you could argue we gave you 1280 pixels of vertical resolution, since Halo 3 uses not one, but two frame buffers – both of which render at 1152×640 pixels. The reason we chose this slightly unorthodox resolution and this very complex use of two buffers is simple enough to see – lighting. We wanted to preserve as much dynamic range as possible – so we use one for the high dynamic range and one for the low dynamic range values. Both are combined to create the finished on screen image.

This ability to display a full range of HDR, combined with our advanced lighting, material and postprocessing engine, gives our scenes, large and small, a compelling, convincing and ultimately “real” feeling, and at a steady and smooth frame rate, which in the end was far more important to us than the ability to display a few extra pixels. Making this decision simpler still is the fact that the 360 scales the “almost-720p” image effortlessly all the way up to 1080p if you so desire.

I won’t deny the sense of it, and I suppose if Bungie felt it was best, then that’s that. However, if anybody thinks that’s the end of complaints on this issue, they’re insane. The fact that Halo 3 is not native 720p means one simple thing: it is not meeting the point that Microsoft said was the “sweet spot” for next-generation gaming. It’s not fulfilling the one technical requirement that Microsoft said was the sine qua non of gaming this generation; the thing they pooh-poohed the Nintendo Wii for not having. More questions certainly will be coming: already most reviewers are saying Halo 3’s graphics are not as good as Gears of War’s or Bioshock’s; but the tradeoff between excruciating detail and wide open areas almost explains that. However, it’s harder to swallow the idea that Halo 3 needs to drop down a few pixels because it looks better than those other games, when Bioshock runs natively in 720p.

Personally, it doesn’t affect me much at all. I don’t have an HDTV; my projector’s native resolution is the not-so-common 576p EDTV standard, so whatever the Xbox puts out is being downscaled to that. In fact, it just makes me wish they’d put another display setting in for the 360, and have it put out whatever game code generates without any scaling. No matter what the update says, you are nearly always better off looking at something unscaled; upscaling invents information that doesn’t exist. So for me, Halo 3 will be 640p, upscaled to 720p, then downscaled to 576p. Cutting out one of those steps would be beneficial. Dropping down a setting won’t help, since there’s nothing between 720p and 480p to set it to.

Hey Bungie– if you’ve got the werewithal to tell Microsoft to go get stuffed on their “HD is the way to go” slogan, why not get them to put in a 640p output option in the dash, so we can see the game without upscaling?

Penny Arcade doesn’t hate Halo anymore (well, at first they loved it, then they hated it, then they sort of… well, at any case, now Tycho says:

I’m not sure people understand that the time to bag on Halo was years ago, when everyone liked it, as opposed to now, when they’ve finally delivered a cool draught of its deep promise. I have to say that I’m done hating things just because idiots like them, a state you might call post post post hip. Unless you bought a more expensive version of the game whose abrasive collector’s case scratched your disc, in which case your rage is just and proper.

To find out what they think now (sort of) see their latest comic.