My Halo News.com

The latest news about the Halo series of games from Microsoft

  • New Wallpaper, dying for modification

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    Louis Wu
    in
    Eric ‘Siva’ Salzman adds another entry to his ‘Curves’ collection – and this one has been left mostly open, so that someone could add a “stats” sidbar about the Pillar of Autumn to the image. (If you’re interested, contact Eric and he’ll get you a layered Photoshop file to work with.) The recent Wallpaper additions have been gorgeous! (Nothing like fantastic screens to start with…)

  • MPZ Halo is back

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    Louis Wu
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    fAt1 drops us a note to let us know that 1) MPZ Halo is back, with a brand-new makeover, and 2) MPZ as a whole is now open to the web – no login required. Check ’em out!

  • Xbox Halo self-contained

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    Louis Wu
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    Interesting tidbit – as of now, the Xbox Halo app is not capable of using downloaded levels. This means that (unless Bungie supplies a patch that allows this) even IF the PC version ships with a level editor, the Xbox version won’t be able to take advantage of any created mods. (It also means that Bungie wasn’t considering releasing Xbox-version-compatible mods anytime soon.)

  • Umm… okay.

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    Louis Wu
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    Hmm… this one’s a bit odd… Sikora sends in a new ‘combination’ image for our Miscellaneous Art section. Take a look…

  • Halo on your desktop

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    Louis Wu
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    The artwork continues to pour in. This morning, we received another desktop using the Pillar of Autumn shot (in 6 resolutions!), and a 3ds max-rendered marine helmet (made into a cool Halo desktop) – you’ll find both in our Wallpaper section. Keep ’em coming!

  • Halo SETI Team 7 day stats posted

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    Louis Wu
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    Blam!… The Halo SETI Marines climb a notch to number 52 in the Battle of the Teams. Int_21 pours on the steam, as 243 units crunched bring in la Crunch Honneur AND the Frogblast Award for this week’s top performer. How are YOU doing? Check the 7 day stats to see!

  • PLAY IT

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    Louis Wu
    in
    The final (?) Weekly Halo Update, capping a full year of updates, has been added to the Halo Update Database. A fine tradition… we’ll be sorry to see it end. Word of the week – ‘Chucky‘. Known only as The Bear in weekly updates since June 29, he’s finally Chucky again… we missed you, Chuck. The two new screenshots have been added to the Screenshots section, as well – filesizes are a bit different than the versions available at Haloplayers, because we recompressed them from the originals – they’re a bit cleaner than before. (We’re not taking anything away from HP – they did a fine job. We were just willing to spend a bit more time. 🙂 99% of our visitors won’t be able to tell the difference.)

  • Art inspires art

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    Louis Wu
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    New screenshots, especially ones this cinematic, inspire new desktops. We got two today – check ’em out in our Wallpaper section.

  • Yeah, yeah, we know.

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    Louis Wu
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    I didn’t think this was anything that folks didn’t know, so I didn’t report it – but I want the mail to stop now. Various people in various forums posted information about the Marathon symbol on the side of the Pillar of Autumn in the latest screenshot – Harry Al-Shakarchi was one of the first to make a nice graphic for it. The first public comment came within 10 minutes of the shot first hitting the web, and discussions have been raging for two days about it. Please – no more mail, telling us you’ve found it, okay?

  • The End is Near

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    Louis Wu
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    Joseph E. Haake sends in an interesting modification of the Pillar of Autumn screenshot released last week. We’ve added it to the Miscellaneous Art section, though in retrospect, it would probably make a great desktop image…

  • New Wallpaper submitted

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    Louis Wu
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    Shaun Brookman sends in a Halo collage, in three sizes – see the range of where Halo has been, and how far it’s come! It’s available in our Wallpaper section.

  • 1st Anniversary Halo Update Finally Posted

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    Rampancy – Se7en Years Of Halo
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    Two screenshots, some backstory, and detail galore



    In the Haloplayers on Friday– and now Haloplayers to read the update and check out the screenshots to find out what the secret is…






  • Halo Update… mmmm

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    Louis Wu
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    MASSIVE Halo update, finally, at Haloplayers – GO NOW. Two gorgeous screenshots (in two resolutions each, to be nice to the bandwidth impaired and the broadband-enabled both), an entertaining tale giving you a bit of the backstory behind the halo updates, and, finally, a few tidbits that might be recognizable as a Halo Update (but mostly not). They’ve gone out with a bang, folks – go read and enjoy it. Thanks, Matt! (Update: Louis doesn’t seem to be around, so I fixed the links myself. –CZ)

  • Poll smash at VoodooExtreme

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    Louis Wu
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    Thanks to Aginor, who pointed out a new poll over at VoodooExtreme – ‘What Xbox game are you most looking forward to?’ Let ’em know what you think of Halo… but remember, keep it clean and honest. Remember the LAST VE poll… (Halo is currently leading this one, with 43% ofr more than 800 votes.)

  • Never the same…

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    Louis Wu
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    Putting the new ‘Commander’ shot to good use, Allenthar creates a new wallpaper for your desktop – you’ll find it in our Wallpaper section, in 4 sizes. Enjoy!

  • Film Capability in Halo ‘Unfinished’, not Impossible

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    Rampancy – Se7en Years Of Halo
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    Perhaps in the PC/Mac version? Please?


    Matt Soell has forum. It seems that it’s not that Halo couldn’t have the capability, but that it couldn’t be finished in time:

    The question is not whether films are possible, but whether they could have happened in a reasonable amount of time. The answer to that question turned out to be No.

    In theory, we could hold off on shipping Halo until we’d added every feature we’d like to include – but by the time we finished, it’s doubtful anyone would care anymore.


    I haven’t seen anybody talk about it anywhere else, but I’d like to suggest that recording capability would have been of far less use on the Xbox version of Halo than in the PC and Mac versions anyway. How many people record films just to watch themselves play? Not many. OK, perhaps you could make a recording and bring your friends over and watch them later– but the real use was always to have a small file you could email somewhere or upload to a website so that any member of the community could watch.

    How would you have done that with the Xbox? Even if Bungie wanted to add a film-swapping capability directly into Halo itself, the Microsoft online service that would need to support it doesn’t even exist yet. What’s more, it might not ever have been designed to handle such file-swapping, given that it could potentially be used as a vector to deliver malicious code.

    Here’s hoping that the extra time to do the Halo release for Windows and MacOS also means time to finish the film feature.






  • InsideMacGames Interviews Mike Donges of Mumbo Jumbo

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    Rampancy – Se7en Years Of Halo
    in


    Myth 3 editors require 3D Studio Max plugin


    RHL resident ax pointed us to this InsideMacGames. Donges works for Mumbo Jumbo, developers of Myth 3, the upcoming prequel to Bungie’s Myth series.

    A lot of the article focuses on what mapmakers can expect from Myth 3. While it will ship with editors for use on the PC and the Mac, Donges warns that to get graphic models into the editor, you need a plug-in for 3D Studio Max– a package that doesn’t exist on the Mac. However, Donges thinks that someone should be able to make a tool to do the necessary conversions.

    For the rest of us, perhaps this is the meat of the article:


    IMG: Are you in beta yet? When do you expect the game to ship?


    Donges: We are currently deep in Beta. The game is slated to ship on the PC by the end of October (as in this year). I’m not exactly certain when the Mac version will ship, but it should follow shortly.


    Great news, as that puts the PC release about three weeks away.






  • New Wallpaper uploaded

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    Louis Wu
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    Joker111481@aol.com sends us a monochromatic desktop for our Wallpaper collection. Similar to, but different from, an older submission by genohunter… check it out!

  • Screenshot requests!

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    Louis Wu
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    Wonga – we’re probably too late, but you never know… Joseph Staten jumped onto our forum about an hour ago, and asked for requests for tonight’s screenshot subject. It’s likely that the job is done… but add to the thread if you’d like! (The update, if all goes according to plan, should be at Haloplayers tonight.)

  • New Halo spoof available

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    Louis Wu
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    Dorram posts on our forum that a new Halo spoof/rant has gone live – it’s two and a half minute long MPEG, available as a 44 meg, 320×240 format, or an 8.4 meg, 144×120 format. Footage from a number of different films has been spliced together, and put to a new soundtrack, with a very cool 3D logo animation thrown in for good measure. Warning – the javascript on the page is pretty Netscape-unfriendly; I was unable to follow the movie link using Netscape (or iCab). Opera and IE work fine, though… A big thanks to Psyrixx and B-Sharp for their generous mirroring of this movie. (The mirror links hold a zipped version of the large movie – it’s 32 MB.) Go take a look!