Warrant Officer Jim Trebour Poirot rigged the last cord, drove the light tank a last dozen feet, whispered a final goodbye, and exploded in holy flame.

Vector40 sends us the third (and probably final) chapter of his piece, ‘HaloStory’ – you’ll find it in our Fan Fiction section. (It reads best all together.)

Five years is a long time in this industry. I expect that music will respond to the playersÕ actions where appropriate and will encompass all the musical styles that have ever existed. The fidelity will surround the player and the mix between sound effects, dialog, and music will be comparable to the cinematic experience.

Definitely worth the read.

In the end, we’re still interested to see what Bungie will do with the finished version of the game; whether its vast outdoor environments can be put to good use and whether the variety and pace of gameplay can live up to the standards set by the graphics engine. But we’ll probably wait for the Internet-capable PC version to get REALLY excited.

Fair enough – let’s see if any opinions change after E3.

For the indoor areas, other more suitable weapons come into play, such as alien blades and plasma-swords.

(And don’t forget the foreign cutlasses and the xenolithic falchions.) Pretty amazing what sites’ll put up…

CoreMagazine.com: This is always a hard one to estimate, but can you roughly guess what percentage of the Xbox hardware you’re tapping into for Halo?

Matt: We’re trying to max it out. Since the day we got the game running on the Xbox the goal has been to push the hardware and see what we can do. We’ve hit a couple limits, but we’re still using devkits operating at 50% of planned capacity.

Definitely worth a look-see. Pax.

[…] Creamer’s team created a written overview of its various elements, assigning a tester to each of them. One tester, for example, is responsible for the game’s multiplayer aspect, making sure that different types of controllers, or joysticks, perform the same way in the console’s plug-in slots.

An interesting peek at the inside – nice to see that all bases are being covered. Check it out!

“That game looks great… it’s just, uh, Microsoft, trying to push it out for launch, you know, I read their online updates, and they’re like, oh, we got the jeep working again, like, a couple weeks ago, and I’m like, guys… you guys are gonna be, uh, you’re not gonna get any sleep between now and launch of that thing… it looks like a great game, but they’re really gonna have their balls to the wall to get it done for launch…”

He goes on for a bit longer, picking his words very carefully, then moves on to how sad he is about the fact that multiplayer won’t be in place at launch. In general, it’s a good listen… apologies to Cliffy for the literal transcription above (I figured it was easier than cleaning it up 🙂 ). Let’s hope he’s wrong about his ‘6 months of crunch time’ estimate.

The Pelican and the Covenant dropship are working in-game, and now have ground effects (i.e. when taking off they displace lots of dust, etc.)

Either the human dropship got a name… or there’s a new human flier on the block. Check it out!