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Friday’s Fan Fiction
Fan Fiction offerings this week are slim – only 4 pieces. Shouldn’t take you long to read!(Louis Wu 13:49:25 UTC)
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Speck is here!
I received this email from Brick’s brother this morning:
Spencer Jacob was born last night at 10:54. 7 lbs, 4 oz and 19 inches long.Everyone’s doing well and resting and recovering right now.
Congratulations Brick.
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Shadowrun beta stats revealed
Pretty cool. FASA has released a ton of stats they collected during the beta. (They actually collected from pretty complex stats like “distance bullets traveled” and other complex stats).
Kill to Death ratio stats
Gamer Tag Kills Deaths K:D 1 EnragedGnome 4871 1257 3.88 2 Crymson Omega 2176 575 3.78 3 DarckDrizzt 618 216 2.86 4 EA 2980 1098 2.71 5 Fall360 195 72 2.71 6 KarmicMonk 8099 3038 2.67 7 tsfreaks 2675 1050 2.55 8 xUnknown Datax 1901 768 2.48 9 Xion89 3509 1420 2.47 10 goku2057 3942 1688 2.34 60 synide 1070 628 1.70 98 THX Oculus 718 482 1.49
You’ll notice that Gnome and I are at the top of the Top 100 Kill/Death ratio stat. I think it’s neat to know that Gnome, Xion, and Goku all live about 3 hours from Huntsville. I don’t know about the rest of the guys in the top 10. Oculus also made the Top 100 K/D ratio list with a respectable 1.49:1 K/D ratio. jayWHY?
Time spent playing Shadowrun
Gamer Tag Days Hours Minutes Seconds 1 Are U Dead Yet 8 4 31 20 24 goku2057 3 5 5 17 25 EnragedGnome 3 4 6 20 47 EA 2 6 44 34
I actually thought I would have played more than that. 50-something hours isn’t THAT much Shadowrun for a 3 to 4 month beta.
Longest rang kill
Gamer Tag Weapon Distance (Meters) 1 Dragondemi Pistol 146.52 2 Ollie Cromwell SMG 139.42 3 B4M Bloody Life Sniper 123.77 4 Quidam18 Sniper 115.25 5 xBETA 420x Sniper 110.42 6 PowerRory Sniper 108.80 7 Xx d04 xX Sniper 108.45 8 THE MLG PUCKETT Sniper 105.43 9 EA Sniper 104.84 10 mfed3 Rifle 102.43
So, I had a long Sniper shot. No big deal. But look at the longest range kill in the game. It was done with a Pistol. Nice D.
Note that this is probably the last of the stats reporting. FASA has decided that reporting stats encourages cheating. You’ll never know your TrueSkill ranking. They won’t be publishing leaderboards.
I think that’s a great decision. A game shouldn’t be about leaderboards. It caused a lot of cheating in HALO 2. Being a 40 or 50 in HALO 2 didn’t mean anything because so many people cheated to get there.
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Portable lifts and turrets in H3
Should make for some interesting physics experiments.
How do you think they will impact gameplay though?
via x360fb.
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District and Uplift tours at Game Videos
Nelson, Game Videos, wrote to let us know that they’ve put up ‘tours’ of the two new Halo 2 Vista maps, District and Uplift. They’re pretty bizarre vids; it looks like they’re just the first time someone jumped onto these maps. There’s no real attempt to point out the goodies and intricacies, it’s just someone running (or driving) around… but you DO get a good look at what’s there. (You also get a chance to watch someone try multiple times to drive a ghost through a doorway far too narrow for it…)(Louis Wu 01:40:40 UTC)
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The Origins of Shadowrun
Whoa. rapture pointed out an entry in EnragedGnome’s Shadowrun blog that references some comments by Derek Carroll, Game Designer for FASA (the guys behind Shadowrun) – looks like that game started life as a Halo mod. (Okay, not really – but when they were prototyping the game, they used a ‘borrowed’ engine for the proof-of-concept stuff… and guess which engine that was.) Fun stuff!(Louis Wu 23:50:06 UTC)
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RT: Catch Phrases
Hey Everyone, I just wanted to drop a line to post today’s awesome comic, as well as mention that we’re working on a very special video for next week (fingers crossed), and possibly a director’s commentary for Episode 96 as well. xoxoxo
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Shadowrun does have close H1 ties.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where Shadowrun started out. EnragedGnome reported that FASA posted a blog about prototyping Shadowrun. Looks like H1 played a big role in the development of Shadowrun. Check out those images. Pretty cool stuff.
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rapzilla blog | Shadowrun | HALO 2 Vista | cooked Gamers
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Longswords on Escort Duty
Mid7night posted a link to some cool pics of his X-Plane conversion of the Marathon-class cruiser – being escorted by a pair of Longswords. Nice!(Louis Wu 23:36:29 UTC)
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For Mature Audiences Only
Darksage let us know that over at his new site, Nation of Gamers, you’ll find a contest with Halo-related prizes. Tell ’em why you’re a mature gamer, win cool stuff including a redvsblue sponsorship (the Halo part) and a 360 Elite. You’ve got a month! (Louis Wu 23:18:40 UTC)
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Podtacular Interviews: Logan Payne
BlankCANVAS and JBurton90 bring us an interview with another member of the Podtacular community this week. Hear all about how he got into Halo, his upcoming machinima, and what makes him such an anime nut. More talk in the forums
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Podtacular Interviews: Logan Payne
BlankCANVAS and JBurton90 bring us an interview with another member of the Podtacular community this week. Hear all about how he got into Halo, his upcoming machinima, and what makes him such an anime nut. More talk in the forums.
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Catan kicks ass!
Catan is the only board game I own and it’s really fun. If you’ve played the board game, the Xbox Live Arcade equivalent is even better IMHO. The idea is you’re a settler on an island and you’re trying to become the dominant clan on the island first. You need to trade resources with your opponents to make it happen, so there’s an interesting degree of competitive cooperation in the game. There’s also a good amount of twists that can really turn the tides. Stay tuned to the podtacular podcast for the usual quick review of this game. In the mean time, I highly recommend buying it and look forward to playing Catan with some of you soon!
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Catan kicks ass!
Catan is the only board game I own and it’s really fun. If you’ve played the board game, the Xbox Live Arcade equivalent is even better IMHO. The idea is you’re a settler on an island and you’re trying to become the dominant clan on the island first. You need to trade resources with your opponents to make it happen, so there’s an interesting degree of competitive cooperation in the game. There’s also a good amount of twists that can really turn the tides. Stay tuned to the podtacular podcast for the usual quick review of this game. In the mean time, I highly recommend buying it and look forward to playing Catan with some of you soon!
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Halo3.com content un-Flash-ized
If you’re not a fan of Flash-based content (it’s harder to search, it can be annoying to navigate if you’re going over the same route multiple times), Narcogen, over at Rampancy.net, has transcribed the content from halo3.com into a standard html format. Go give it a read!(Louis Wu 12:10:04 UTC)
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Downloadable Maps now Downloadable (for all)
A couple of weeks ago, Bungie released the Blastacular Map Pack – Tombstone and Desolation – for the Xbox and Xbox 360. A lot of people had trouble downloading it. According to this news post on B.net, those problems should be over; go ahead and give it another try if you were one of the folks who couldn’t get it to work before. (Sounds like the Matchmaking update will be coming pretty soon, too…)(Louis Wu 11:48:53 UTC)
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CA.net opens
Our good friends over at High Impact Halo have branched out with a new endeavor – the very first fansite devoted to Certain Affinity is now open for business. Pretty stuff – and according to CA themselves, you should be finding some exclusive content there soonish. Check it out!(Louis Wu 11:44:41 UTC)
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Minds First, Hearts Will Follow
Heh – Joystiq’s Jared Rea stopped by to point out a subtle campaign by Marvel to keep Halo in the minds of their readers until this summer’s release of the Halo comic… clever.(Louis Wu 11:41:38 UTC)
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No More Strokefests For Gamecock, Says Seropian
Alexander “The Man” Seropian, cofounder of Bungie and later Wideload Games, currently working on Hail to the Chimp to be published by Gamecock next year, gave an interview to Armchair Empire this week. Sounds like the interviewer was expecting to hear a lament about how E3 was crucial for new, small developers like Wideload, but instead, Seropian heaves a sigh of relief:
As a developer, E3 brought its share of excitement. There’s a lot of attention put on the industry and if you’ve got something that’s debuting or being shown, it’s very exciting. But more often than not, it ends up being a huge drain on resources to focus and to prepare for an event that really, from a developer’s perspective, did not seem to serve any purpose whatsoever. It was really a big strokefest for the publishers to see who could make the most noise.
What Seropian does say means a lot for small independent developers is original intellectual property. For the details, read the entire interview; plenty of interesting things there, although the only thing about HttC is a promise for more information soonish.
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They Won’t Draw Themselves
Frankie at Bungie says if you make a cool enough emblem design, it’ll be included in Halo 3. Check the post at Bungie.net about the Bnet reader design contest for details.
The latest news about the Halo series of games from Microsoft
