ESKAY RULZ. That is all.(Louis Wu 12:16:12 UTC)
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Delivering Halo Through RTS
CanMag has written up a first look at Halo Wars, and what it might mean for the Halo franchise. (It echoes a lot of points made multiple times on our forum, but a forum post doesn’t get the same viewing audience, generally, as an article in a big online mag.) Go read.(Louis Wu 12:15:42 UTC)
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Beating Your Children, Bungie-Style
A REAL Halo Humpday Challenge happened this week after all – offspring of Bungie employees came in and gave Bungie employees a whuppin’. That is – until KP showed up. The first game was a rout – the kids ruled. Games 2 and 3 were a bit different… and the difference wears a red cape, blue tights, and reports to Frankie each morning. Yep… SuperKP! Go read the writeup.(Louis Wu 12:08:50 UTC)
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Cooler Xbox 360 CPU Rumored For 2007
Supernostro pointed out an article at IGN suggesting that in Q1 of 2007, the CPU in the Xbox 360 will get an upgrade that will make the console more reliable:
Chartered Semiconductor will update the 360 CPU to a 65nm process, the current state-of-the-art in chip manufacturing techniques. The new Xbox 360 CPUs will benefit from lower power consumption, and thus much lower operating heat. The change will likely have a dramatic impact upon Xbox 360 reliability, as the console, especially the first batch of units manufactured before January 2006, has something of a reputation for being prone to hardware failure and the dreaded “Red Eye of Death.”
Of course, I’m sure Microsoft would rather that hordes of potential buyers don’t skip out on buying a 360 this holiday, assuming they haven’t already, so don’t be surprised if this upgrade either gets moved up, or denied altogether.
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News Roundup For September 29
More links about the ever-expanding Halo universe:
- WarCry: Peter Jackson Into Games, Working on New “Halo”
- TeamXbox: Video of Storytelling panel at X06 featuring Jackson, Frankie, and Peter Molyneux
- IGN: Video interview with Bungie’s Marty O’Donnell
- Hollywood Reporter: Peter Jackson buddies with Microsoft for video game studio
- HBO: The audio portion of Microsoft’s X06 presentation
- Wikipedia: Halo Wars
- Podtacular: Episode 82, now with more Stuntmutt
- Rampancy: HawaiianPig‘s take on Halo Wars.
- Eurogamer: Peter Jackson Bored With Movies
- Playfuls.com: Halo Wars RTS In The Works At Ensemble
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News Roundup For September 29
More links about the ever-expanding Halo universe:
- WarCry: Peter Jackson Into Games, Working on New “Halo”
- TeamXbox: Video of Storytelling panel at X06 featuring Jackson, Frankie, and Peter Molyneux
- IGN: Video interview with Bungie’s Marty O’Donnell
- Hollywood Reporter: Peter Jackson buddies with Microsoft for video game studio
- HBO: The audio portion of Microsoft’s X06 presentation
- Wikipedia: Halo Wars
- Podtacular: Episode 82, now with more Stuntmutt
- Rampancy: HawaiianPig‘s take on Halo Wars.
- Eurogamer: Peter Jackson Bored With Movies
Playfuls.com: Halo Wars RTS In The Works At Ensemble
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A kid in the candy store
Great video interview with Marty O’Donnell over at IGN – Marty talks about sound design, and emotion tweaking. Good stuff! Thanks, darthbob.(Louis Wu 22:55:32 UTC)
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Humpday: Bungie Offspring
Bungie’s been frantically searching for opponents we can beat in order to raise our morale. This week, we finally found our match: Bungie’s children! That’s right, Bungie beats its own children.
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Halo 2 Vista Screens from X06
Bungie was pretty busy yesterday in Barcelona, not only with the two big announcements but also in showing off Halo 2 Vista. Today we’ve added the screenshots they released to the Halo 2 Vista section of the site, so go check them out!
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Storytelling Roundtable
The roundtable discussion about storytelling in games this morning at X06 between Peter Jackson, Greg Zeschuk (Bioware) and Peter Molyneux (Lionhead) – moderated by Frankie – has been put online, in its entirety, by TeamXbox, in WMP9 format (almost 200mb). I haven’t had time to watch more than a couple of minutes – but grab a copy, it sounds like a fascinating discussion! Thanks, Tempus Fugit.(Louis Wu 21:38:41 UTC)
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Out of the gate at a flat run
Hmm… this is pretty bizarre… Team Xbox has Halo Wars on the list of games arriving in time for the holidays this year; I have a little trouble believing that, since that means they pretty much need to have sent it to the duplicators by now… but hey, stranger things have happened. I say, until Ensemble confirms, count this as a typo. Update: Thanks to Black Six, who noticed an all-but-invisible line (see screenshot) which separates some of the games on this list from the actual Holiday releases – Halo Wars is NOT coming out this year.(Louis Wu 21:27:01 UTC)
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Unused Halo 2 Animation Clip
I’m not sure how good an idea this is, but… BARBARIC RAGE stumbled across the portfolio of the Treanor Brothers, a 3D Animation and Cinematics company – apparently, they created a a 10 second web trailer for the launch of the Halo 2 website back in 2004. As far as I know, it was never used – but it’s pretty cool! Take a look. Update: Tempus Fugit says I’m wrong – he remembers seeing it.(Louis Wu 20:17:17 UTC)
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Comical Mesh
Paul Maestri writes to say that Halo Heads 13, with a visit from One One Se7en, is now posted; this makes much more sense (and is actually quite funny) if you listened to Podtacular 82.(Louis Wu 20:13:35 UTC)
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Jackson discussion available as audio
Gah. I grabbed this this morning, but forgot to post it. Microsoft has made the streaming feed from yesterday’s press conference available again, for those that missed it live – but the video is so small, and (in the case of the discussion with Peter Jackson) so irrelevant, I simply cut out the audio portion of the Peter Moore/Peter Jackson section – you can grab it in MP3 format (under 2 mb for 6 minutes) here. Listen for yourself to how he describes the upcoming products from Wingnut Interactive.(Louis Wu 18:28:32 UTC)
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Wikipedia never sleeps
Heh – rapture is amused by how quickly Wikipedia info is compiled – check it out, there’s already a pretty comprehensive page on Halo Wars. (rapture also wanted to point out that the new H2 for Windows screens are browsable at halo2pc.org – though if you happen to be browsing in Safari, the page is invisible.)(Louis Wu 15:08:16 UTC)
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The Life Obstacles of Special Ted, Episode 4
Haloplayer, of Injured Knee Productions, sent the MPRRS ‘The Life Obstacles of Special Ted, Episode 4’, a video depicting the troubles Ted has in the fast food and automotive sales industries. Poor Ted. Funny stuff – grab a copy in WMP9 format (34.4 mb) or QuickTime format (34.2 mb).(Louis Wu 14:16:59 UTC)
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X06 Humpday Challenge (sort of)
Sneaking in under the radar, SketchFactor posted a Humpday Challenge writeup yesterday, missed (by our readers, anyway) until this morning, when hnc wondered about it. It’s not Halo, this time around – they played Shadowrun and Gears of War – but the end result (Bungie gets battered) was pretty much the same. Well, that’s not TOTALLY true. Sketch and Frankie played against bots in Shadowrun… and got demolished. Then Frankie played Sketch in Gears of War – and Frankie won. (Hmm…) Anyway, fun read, take a look!(Louis Wu 13:47:37 UTC)
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He’s hit bottom, and just started digging
Foo Mo Jive points out new content at Podtacular.com. Episode 82 has been posted, with guest host Stuntmutt, who is so self-effacing that the Podtacular boys have started a ‘save Stuntmutt’ fund. (It also covers stuff like the Bungie Podcast, Halo news, a glitch roundup, and more. This was all recorded on Sunday, which means the X06 revelations from yesterday aren’t mentioned.) And Halo News 6 is up, the latest episode of a new parody machinima news show, in both YouTube (Flash) and iPod (mp4) versions. Get to downloading!(Louis Wu 13:39:52 UTC)
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Down the Road
One of the biggest discussion topics flooding our forum at the moment (and flooding is the right word; we’ve jumped from an average of about 200 posts/day to about 800 in the last 24 hours) is the idea that Halo content is now being created outside of Bungie’s direct control. This may or may not turn out to be a bad thing, in terms of the quality of Halo game content down the road… but many of the issues have been laid out by Hawaiian Pig, on our forum, and Narcogen, at Rampancy.net. Both are good reads; check ’em out.(Louis Wu 13:32:22 UTC)
