Got a burning question to ask Marty O’Donnell? Stop by TeamXbox’s forums and add it to this thread – apparently, the webmaster of Score Central will be conducting that interview next week, and is happy to pass along fan questions. Just remember… don’t ask Marty how old he is.

An interesting little elucidation about level design, from Bungie’s Tyson Green, aka Ferrex (Dead). Bigger levels are better, right? Not always… sometimes, spending more of your finite development resources on making smaller levels cooler is more advantageous than creating huge, boring levels. Nice insight! Check the details (and throw in your own two cents) on our forum.

Wow – a wallpaper bonanza. Enforcer has uploaded no fewer than seven new images, in two major themes. I’ve grouped them, since they’re so similar – you’ll find descriptions of the variations on the main page for each theme. Just go visit our Wallpaper section and it’ll be made clear.

Thanks to a random, 6-month-old thread on the IGN Xbox forum, a new tidbit has come to light – in an interview that IGN Xbox did with John Howard and Joe Staten in April, Joe mentioned a multiplayer mode we haven’t heard of before:

I just got done whupping arse in a game of split-screen “Slayer” with some programmer chumps (it’s all about over-charging the Covenant Plasma Rifle btw), and I can assure you Halo multiplayer is alive and well and definitely a part of the final product.

Slayer… hmm. Wonder how we all missed that when the interview was first noticed?

Thanks to Uriel, who pointed out on the forum that dom, an artist for Megatokyo, has posted an Xbox/GameCube rant. (Scroll down the page to the area below the comic – look for dom’s column.) After reaming the controller, and running down some of the good and bad stuff he saw recently, he hit on Halo:

Finally, the little aliens in Halo may just be the most fun bastards to shoot in a while.Ê They give you such crap when you die (“Not so tough NOW, are ya?”) that you can’t wait to respawn and pop a few more of them so they start scattering and screaming “Run!ʉt’s him!”.Ê When Cortana buys himself an Xbox for DoA3 and Halo, I’ll spend some time with Halo.

Someone with issues, certainly… but a fun read nonetheless.

Narcogen, over at Rampancy.net, noticed an interview with Ed Fries and (Japanese Xbox division manager) Yutaka Haruki at Coremagazine.com. Fries believes that the Japanese will embrace Halo (and other US offerings):

In the United States, 70% of the people who have reserved an Xbox also reserved the game Halo. We expect a similar figure in the Japanese market.

Time will tell…

Harry Al-Shakarchi pointed out this article on TGS 2001 over at IGN Xbox – it’s an overview of the feel of the show. They were taken by the Japanese reaction to Halo:

On a side note, it’s particularly cool to watch Japanese gamers play Halo, trying to figure out the controls as if holding a violin for the first time. The whole concept of playing a first-person shooter seems as odd as playing an in-depth horse racing simulation does to us (sorry, no first-day impressions of Jockey’s Dream).

We’ll see if Halo has what it takes to break through that barrier!

Josh Hampton decided that much of the wallpaper out there was too cluttered for actual desktop images… he’s taken the clean approach. You’ll find his entry in our Wallpaper section.

Aaacourt22 sends in a hand-drawn Marine, suitable for inclusion in wallpaper, if you so choose. Check it out in our Miscellaneous Art section.

The fan fiction of Gordi has attracted a following, as can be seen by reading his comments. Mr Bill Jr V thought enough of it that he set his most recent story in Gordi’s universe – it gives a bit of the backstory of the 6th fleet. Now THIS is cool… fan fiction for fan fiction! Read ‘The 6th‘ in our Fan Fiction section, and be sure to tell Mr Bill what you think!

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!