The latest news about the Halo series of games from Microsoft
From philorion7:
Spartans are forged in the fire of battle. Part of classified ONI Section 3 Victor group Zoe spent her career dropping deep behind enemy lines of both human and Covenant for assassinations sabotage and recon sorties. Paired with Peter 059 performing ops that later would be deemed Headhunter teams mostly attributed to Spartan 3’s.
From Rooster Teeth:
In today’s episode of Achievement PIG, Ray takes on Ryan in a battle of the Rs. Who will be the WINNERRRRRRRR?
Editor’s note: Language is mature. Proceed with caution.
The Bungie webmaster (never positively identified but vaguely described as a gorilla in a cowboy hat) seems to have been supplanted by Deej doing an impression of Alaistair Cooke. This would appear to be the first in a weekly series leading up to what we hope will be the Destiny reveal at GDC in March 2013. Like the Webmaster and the Mailbag, Deej is here dealing directly with missives from Bungiefen. Although this fan seems a bit confused about who made Halo 4…
Halo is a fictional universe. However, sometimes we catch sight of things in real life that remind us of our favorite science fiction video game franchise. This particular series, titled Halo in Real Life, showcases those very moments. Enjoy the subtle Halo references sometimes spotted when out and about in the real world, and if you have a picture you’d like to submit for possible future inclusion, send it to bsangel[at]halowaypoint.com!
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From Darren OHare, who captured the image and is the voice of Thomas Lasky: I worked on a TV pilot recently and we shot on a Navy Destroyer, and the name of the ship was… USS Halsey.
From Machinima:
If this doesn’t get you pumped for Halo 4, I don’t know what else can. Enjoy!
From The Halo Council:
The Halo Council and Gamers Outreach Foundation are proud to announce the Halo Council & Gamers For Giving Halo 4 4v4 Tournament taking place in Ypsilanti, MI on February 17th. The entire event will take place at the Eastern Michigan University Student Center from 10:00 AM Saturday, February 16th to 10:00 PM Sunday, February 17th. Yes, you read that correctly. The entire weekend will be filled with non-stop gaming and eSports competition in the name of charity from Halo 4 to Call of Duty Black Ops 2.
Information
• $1,500 1st Place Prize / $750 2nd Place Prize
• Entry Fee: $25 Per Player
• Players will need to bring their own WIRED Xbox 360 controller.
• Monitors and consoles will be provided.
• Astro Mixamps will be provided at each station.
• Headsets are optional and must be provided by players.
The goal is to raise $15,000.00 to help support Gamers Outreach initiatives in 2013. All event costs and tournament prize pools are underwritten by our partners, which means your entry fee directly supports Gamers Outreach programs. Hope to see you there!
From MythicTyrant:
The iconic Master Chief awakens after a four-year slumber to find that a rogue group of Covenant known as “The Storm” have stumbled across the Forward Unto Dawn. Worse, they are about to collide with an unknown mechanized Forerunner shield world. Your mission? Repel the Covenant troops and survive entry into the new world!
Some people show their love for Halo by playing the games. Others get a relevant image permanently placed upon their body. Enjoy this particular example of a Halo-related body modification, and if you have a picture you’d like to submit for possible future inclusion, send it to bsangel[at]halowaypoint.com!
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Halo sleeve, as seen on Darren |
From Channel 9:
On the way driving from my hotel to work this morning, I swung by 343 Industries’ super-secret hidden space command facility to meet Angus, Caitie, and Hoop from Section 3, the team that creates the services backbone for the Halo game series including Halo Waypoint.
We talk about how the Halo 4 game uses Windows Azure Service Bus in various ways, including the flow of all multiplayer game statistics from the console game into Waypoint, and how Service Bus helped the Halo team dealing with the massive traffic peak occurring on and within a few days of the game title’s release.
From The Halo Council:
Arena Gaming & Bonafide Boarding recently announced their 3rd event for January 25-27th, 2013 in Chicago, IL. The league will feature Halo 4 for the first time, and this will be the first major event to have practice teams ready to fight it out for 1st and $7,000+ in prizes.
The event will be set up with a six pool play, each with eight teams. You will play each team best of three in your pool. The top four from each pool based on record will advance to Saturday. If there is a tie, the tie breaker will be a five minute Slayer game. Saturday will then be a 24-team double elimination bracket. We are still figuring out if it will be best of five or three. We will have a veto system so game one can be either Oddball, KotH, or Extraction. Game two will be CTF. Game three will be Team Slayer. For the five game series, it will be CTF, Team Slayer, Extraction, Oddball, and Team Slayer.
Hope to see you there!
From HC SLIK:
This is a Halo 4 montage produced by HaloCommunity.com, using clips provided by our members. Enjoy!
Every Monday, we feature a community member who does one or more of the following things: routinely goes above and beyond for their fellow forum members, is a positive and active member of the community, and/or sends me mass amounts of cat pictures. This week our Community Member of the Week is Dtape467. Read a little more about this particular fan below, then hit their profile to see why they love duct tape almost as much as Halo!
Gamertag: Dtape467.
Origin of Gamertag: I like duct tape. A lot.
Current clan/community: Halo 4 ARG.
Halo game(s) you are currently playing: Halo 4.
Favorite map, game type and playlist: Adrift, Valhalla, the island map from Halo: CE, SWAT, BTB.
Least favorite map, game type and playlist: Abandon, Solace.
Preferred control scheme: Default.
Halo playing style (offense, defense, sniper, driver, etc.): All!
Favorite Halo character: Kurt, John, Kelly, Osmin.
Favorite Halo book: The Ghosts of Onyx, First Stike, Glasslands, The Thursday War.
Favorite Halo quote: Too many to list.
Anything else we should know? This is my favorite non-Halo quote: “Duct tape is like the force, there’s a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.”
From IINobleBatmanII:
These clips were captured in 48 hours. Special thanks to 343i for making Halo 4 and IINobleNinjaII for great footage. Enjoy!
From Certain Affinity:
This video covers some of the more complex Game Type Labels in Halo 4 Forge Mode. We also highlight how to use the label “EXT_Target” to spawn in objects when an Extraction site is extracted.
Game Type Label definitions: http://www.certainaffinity.com/buzz/forge-game-type-labels/
Just a few quick notes here about the site. I’ll probably write something longer a bit later, but this should suffice for now.
It’s no secret that the code running R.net right now is, in Internet terms, fairly ancient. That’s at least partially responsible for the huge influx of spambots I’ve had to fight off; the latest methods of keeping them under control aren’t available on this version of the platform.
A lot of the special features on the site were enabled either by third party modules or customizations I made myself, which means that just doing a straight-up upgrade to later versions of the platform either don’t work at all, or break lots of things. I’ve avoided any such upgrades now in order to avoid that, but it seems as if the time has come.
As of today, user registration is disabled. This is so I can freeze the database in its current state while I work on performing the upgrade, and make sure that no content or user accounts are lost. Addition of new content, including stories, blog entries, sheet music uploads, and images, as well as comments, are also disabled.
Most, if not all, of the restrictions on anonymous users are now removed. During this migration procedure, it is not necessary to login to download sheet music. This will be changed back once the updated site is online. At the moment there is no precise timeline for how long this update will take, or what portions of the site, if any, may be lost or degraded as a result. Please bear with me; because of the many customizations it may take quite awhile to hit on an upgrade procedure that works.
As for the future of the site itself, without belaboring the point, I became a fan of Halo and an owner of an Xbox console because of Bungie. While it is natural to want a good thing to go on forever, I think works have natural endings, and I believe that Halo, at least for me, reached a satisfying conclusion with Halo 3. ODST was a highly enjoyable side story that I thought was probably the most fun since the original, but Reach seemed to me to be a bit of a footnote rather than a whole new chapter, and while it was very solid gameplay wise, it was the start of a number of changes to Halo that seemed to me very… unlike Halo.
Despite my obvious prejudice, which it would be foolish to attempt to deny, I thought Halo Anniversary would be a good way to get a look at how 343 Industries would move forward with the franchise. While I liked the ability to switch back and forth between original and new graphics, and some of the new graphics were quite nice, overall it showed me quite little. What was great about Anniversary was what was great about the original, plus online coop, but without films– for me, a major sticking point and one of my favorite features in Halo 3. 343 chose to mostly leave the game alone and farm out a new coat of paint for the old game, in the end, telling us very little about the future of the franchise.
Now that the franchise’s future is here, I can’t say I much care for it. I have not played the game, but I’ve watched others play it, and to me, it no longer looks, sounds, or feels like the Haloverse I know and love. That’s fine; I’m sure the game is as good an exercise at pointing guns at things and shooting them, but for me the context is a big part of it.
The upshot of all of this is that the future focus of this site will remain Bungie games, and Halo is no longer a Bungie game. I’m looking forward to Destiny.
From GameSpot:
GameSpot plays through the chapter four, Search and Destroy mission, on the Cyclone map.
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GameSpot – Spartan Ops Episode 6 Chapter 4 Developer Commentary |
From Polygon:
Beginning next week with Episode 6, players will don Mjolnir armor and return to Requiem. This time, with the benefit of observation gleaned from more than 32 million Spartan Ops missions played, 343 will add new twists to the formula established in the first five episodes.
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How 343 Industries hopes to expand Halo 4’s Spartan Ops in Episodes 6 to 10 |
