Ryan ‘Mhaddy’ Matthews dropped us a note about needing fresh blood at the Junkyard. The boilerplate was a bit too long for our front page… but it’s a good cause, so we’ve put it here. If you’re interested in working on a solid gaming site, check it out!

A couple of weeks ago, a site called Xboxweb put up a Halo preview, and in it, they mentioned a multiplayer mode called ‘Ogre’. Ogre first surfaced in a print preview in the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer UK, which hit the newsstands on June 6, 2000. It was described as a unique multiplayer mode:

“For example, Halo features a mode named Ogre, where one player takes the role of a massively powerful bio-mechanical character covered in weapons who has to take out a series of objectives. Meanwhile, everyone else has to try to kill them. If someone manages to zero the creature, they take the role next time. If no-one does, he keeps it and continues to enjoy the megalomaniacal power rush. Muhahahahaha.”

Understandably, folks got excited. In an attempt to clarify whether this mode (which was never mentioned again, after this article) actually made it into the game, Matt Soell was pestered… and he replied with this:

No, Ogre didn’t make it in. You can set up a similar game (where one person is “it” and has some special feature or handicap which is transferred to the player who kills him) but there is no suit of weapons and no “objectives to take out.”

Matt sounded rather disappointed as he relayed this info… but to me, the basic gamestyle seems quite similar. So – in the torrent of hoped-for features whose demise we’ve recently been learning about, a rock in the river – Ogre, or something a lot like it, IS still in the game. Thanks, Matt!

Just in time for Halloween and Thanksgiving, Tom Van Sinden sends in a pair of holiday-themed desktop images, in a couple of resolutions each… Trick or Treat is gonna be on MY desktop for a bit! Check ’em out in our Wallpaper section.

Eric Trautmann, MS Content Developer, drops by to pass along a tantalizing tidbit about the Halo backstory – there had been some forum speculation about the credibility of the plot – why, for example, would the Covenant go to the trouble of a ground war against the inhabitants of Reach, rather than simply wiping the human population out from space, and then just going down and taking the information they needed from remaining computers? Someone suggested that maybe the humans had wiped their navigational databases, to prevent this information from falling into Covenant hands… and Eric confirmed that this, indeed, is what happened – the process was named the Cole Protocol, after the admiral who implemented it. Slowly, it comes… The book will be on shelves in two weeks.

Mr. Temper points out on our forum a new print review of Halo, in Game Informer magazine – he supplies links to scanned pages, and includes written text for those who can’t read the small print in the pics. The upshot – they liked it…

A boatload of updates coming… bear with me as I write ’em up, one by one. First up: the TGS movie. Many people have been complaining about a couple of features of this movie – first, that there are three separate cov kills at the start that use the same bit of soundtrack (same covenant grunt, same background chatter), and second, that the Covenant commander who’s taken down with a pair of sniper rounds (and a miss between them, to boot) doesn’t show a lot of smarts in terms of saving his own hide. Matt Soell was kind enough to jump into our forum with a pair of responses – here’s what he had to say about the repetitive soundtrack, and here was his AI reply. Hope this clarifies a bit! (And for those who were wondering about the much-vaunted Covenant commander, taken down with a measly pair of sniper rounds:

Which brings up another point: whoever was playing in this footage was playing at something less than the normal difficulty level. It’s not that easy, folks.

Heh – makes me wish even more for a film mode. 🙂 Go read ’em for yourself!

And the battle for leadership of the Halo SETI Marines continues… this week, charleya tops Int_21, 265 to 212 units (and to think, there was a time when the entire TEAM didnt’ crunch that many units in a week) for La Crunch Honneur, and cdm3 leaps over 38 team members for the Frogblast Award. How are you doing? Check the 7 day stats page!

JimPa|NsE drops us a note to let us know that he’s written a new Halo preview for Halo Network – Babelfish tortured it, but if you read German, you should go visit.

Down, but not out… Battleground: Halo has mirrored the .wmv version of the new TGS film on Fileplanet – grab it there if you’re having trouble with Gamespot’s servers. Thanks for the heads-up, Bounty!

Quick note from Bounty, over at Battleground: Halo – they’re not ignoring all the weekend’s news, or sleeping; they’re having technical difficulties. The news system seems to have stopped taking submissions (since Thursday night)… he’s hoping all will be back on track by tomorrow. Hang in there!

For those having trouble getting through to Gamespot’s servers, or simply on lower-bandwidth connections, we’ve put together a screen capture page, showing some of the more interesting features of the movie. You can check it out here. Enjoy!

Thanks to vein13, who pointed out a new movie at Gamespot. (It’s the Halo Trailer 1 – Direct-Feed entry on their Media Index.) It seems to be an extended version of the IGN movie mentioned yesterday. It’s available as a downloadable wmv file, a downloadable mpeg, or streamed .asf formats (in several speeds). It’s 320×240, and just under a minute long… and it has some very nice footage. There are a couple of points brought up in this post, and this one… I’ll probably be putting up a screen capture page in the near future. Check it out!

And the money keeps rolling in… from every side. Fanatic sends in another desktop image for our overflowing Wallpaper coffers… check it out!

Thanks to Harry Al-Shakarchi, who noticed an article over at IGN Xbox, on the Game of Show at TGS 2001. The winner was Dead or Alive 3… but the article asks:

You were thinking Halo, right? Unfortunately, in terms of what’s being shown at TGS for the Xbox, the Halo demo is pretty conservative, especially considering some of the more epic outdoor environments they could have chosen for a show demo. Still suffering from some frame stutters, the game offers some incredible moments at the show, but not the guaranteed gaming promise of Dead or Alive.

Those pesky frame stutters… Thanks for the heads-up, Harry!

Thanks to Noah “MigraineBoy” Brimhall, who pointed out that Halo got a couple of mentions in the November issue of Wired Magazine, during a story on Flextronics, the company that Microsoft outsourced the manufacturing of the Xbox to. (Eep – ending sentences with prepositions again…) I’d found it a pretty interesting article, but not all that Halo-related… but Noah noticed a quote I managed to miss:

So what about the games? Though the console pushes the envelope graphically, its first line of games isn’t nearly as inventive. With the exception of Halo and Fusion Frenzy, most of the launch titles feel like souped-up versions of the games you know by other names.

(Fusion Frenzy has been mentioned the past as a game that has sucked up the spare time of Halo Dev Team members… Jaime Griesemer, in particular.) They also picked a Halo screen as a representative Xbox screen… nice exposure!

Once again, new screens means new desktop images. Three came in overnight – one from Sikora, two from Shaun Brookman. You’ll find all three in our Wallpaper section.

Come Get Some… another new desktop, this time from Deimosâ„¢, poison crazy lush from Subnova.com. Find it in our Wallpaper section!

Hand-drawn desktop from RAZORBACK – check for it in our Wallpaper section.

Thanks to Fuolornis Fire Dragon, who noticed that IGN has a new Halo movie from the Tokyo Game Show. His post will give you a nice rundown on the contents – you can grab the film from this page (the Halo link is here, but there are other goodies you might want to snag).

Funky color shifts in RAZORBACK‘s latest desktop, Binary Code – you’ll find it in our Wallpaper section.