SimplyDave has taken a close look at the new press pics, and has come up with some nice discussion fodder. Read. Discuss.

Poll updates: Halo still trails several games, including even Doom, in VoodooExtreme’s ‘what game would make the best movie’ poll… and it continues to be beaten by WWF and Pro Skater 2x in UGO’s drool factor poll. Heh… you guys have forgotten how to smash polls. 🙂

As a few thousand of you seem to have noticed, we came back online around 4 hours ago – hopefully, the telco guys found and solved ALL the problems. In the meantime, catch-up. Poking around on the Xbox press site turns up some other very interesting information… worth a look, until they turn off access.

Kudos to Char over on the Rampancy forum for spotting an archive of high quality Halo screenshots (TIFF format) over at xbox.com. The screenshots are the nine most recently released ones. Judging from the URL this is the Halo press material from the Games Developers Conference (GDC) 2001. The screenshots are huge so if you have a fast line grab them before they shut the shop!

Well, even though nobody can see this, we can still add it to the archived knowledgebase… Hamish Sinclair dug out and sent to us the jeep pictures we alluded to on Sunday… the ones that had been posted a bit over a year ago, but had disappeared from the net. One of these jeeps is the same as the one Jay Faircloth mentioned last week – the other is a similar design. While these may or may not have inspired Bungie, they show that a classic design will live in many forms. You can see them on this page.

fAt1, of MPZ Halo, writes to say that the latest copy of PC Gamer UK has a teaser for the next issue:

Exclusive, Halo: It’s back, we visit Bungie to get all the latest news and incredible screenshots of this stunning new tactical shooter!

That issue should be on the stands on April 19th, and possibly in the hands of subscribers a few days before that… let’s see who’s fastest with the details!

lookout lad noticed that Voodoo Extreme is running a new poll, asking which game would you like to have a movie made out of. Halo is currently running well behind the leaders. While we think that the Bungie Sin-O-MatiXXX team deserves your support, remember the last VE poll, and try to vote honestly.

Thanks to omer and Bongo, who told us about Blue’s News’ hi-res movie mirror… and then to Blue’s, for the listing of 3D Gamers’ hi-res mirror. The hi-res mirror list here has been updated. Additionally, Halo Center has added the low-res movie, and hopes to add the hi-res version today.

Jaime Griesemer, Designer on the Halo team, popped into our forum to clarify a tidbit for a fan who was concerned about the apparent quality of the enemy AI in the latest movie:

Yes, legit. Not that it wasn’t fully functional, we just set it up so it was a little bit slower and easier, so joe could kill guys when he needed to and hit his marks in time with the music. The AI is much less predictable than it was in the movie.

(He was actually a bit less restrained earlier in the thread – had me chuckling…)

It’s small, yeah, but we try to be complete – we’ve added the latest banner displayed on Bungie’s Halo page to our Banners page.

And the questioning begins… Tom Van Sinden writes

A couple of observations:

(Sat Mar 10 15:26)
That glowing red light is a Microsoft Optical mouse.

(Sat Mar 10 15:47)
THAT looks like four-way split screen… hmm…

We just report what gets sent to us, folks…

Massa wrote to let us know that the lo-res version of the new movie is now available at Halo Network… and he hopes that the hi-res version will be up by tomorrow.

Thanks to Harry Al-Shakarchi, who gave us the heads-up that bungie.com is once more accessible, with the movies moved to a nameless (IP-address-only) MS server. Go on in and see the pics! (And maybe even get the movies…)

Thanks to Pallor for the heads-up – Max Hoberman jumped on to the R.net forum a few minutes ago to suggest that there’d be some relief for the movie congestion problem coming very soon. Great news!

More behind-the-scenes stuff… Marty O’Donnell explains a bit about how the sound worked during the demo. To set the scene, Joe Staten said this in his reply to Mark Levin’s post:

If my shooting style seemed erratic, it’s because I was trying to stay in sync with the music. Notice how the last Grunt in the penetration fight dies “on cue”? To accomplish that I had to miss the Elite with most of a clip.

When I first read this, I said, ‘Huh?’ Marty cleared up what was happening:

I was in the back of the auditorium playing a CD of the music that was made for Joe’s choreographed gameplay. There were four pieces, each with some cool internal hit points (as long as Joe hits his marks) and then I started each new piece to correspond to Joe’s location. The sound engine will do this in the game, of course it won’t be wall to wall music like this presentation was, but it’ll be pretty cool.

Thank God Joe didn’t crash… or fall into that first big shaft. It would have kind of screwed up the choreography.

The things you have to do to successfully demo a game!

Things that make you go ‘hmm…’ Readers of the Marathon’s Story page might remember that in the series of webcam movies Hamish has been posting for a couple of weeks, there was a missing day… and David Candland (part of the Online team) wrote to tell Hamish that that particular day,

“That timeframe is more eventful than one would guess. My oldest son had a soccer game at 4:00 that afternoon. I brought my 2 boys in to the office to kill some time since we were already in town. They played games and got to play the gamestock build of Halo while they were here.”

Today, that missing movie showed up… and it’s interesting, to say the least. The relevant timeframe (as readable at the top of the image) is Sat Mar 10 14:45 to 15:53 (at which point, a divider is moved in front of the camera, obscuring the view)… and as Hamish points out, it certainly LOOKS as though the kids are playing on a PC, with a keyboard and mouse… Remember, we don’t actually KNOW anything about this situation, this is all just speculation, from a series of highly compressed, low-resolution webcam pics, but still… Pax.

Mark Levin posted a long and detailed analysis of the new movie, and cross-posted it to Rampancy.net… where he got a reply from Joe Staten, who clarifies a few tidbits. Both posts are definitely worth a read!

Thanks to Eric Odegard, who found a european mirror for the hi-res Gamestock demo, at FragZone (in Sweden). Let’s hope this doesn’t crush them… 🙂

For those who would like to see the current form of the Halo backstory, we’ve transcribed the voiced-over commentary of Joseph Staten, as recorded during the Bungie demonstration at Gamestock. (This has also been sent to Hamish Sinclair for inclusion on the Official Halo Backstory page.) Quick update: Oops – seems Bachus included this entire transcript in his synopsis, posted last night (and even mentioned by me, on this page). Gotta be more careful…

Thanks to EKSalzman@dstsystems.com, for pointing out a UGO poll – ‘which Xbox game has you drooling?’ Halo is currently third, behind WWF Raw is War and Pro Skater 2x (does that tell you something about their audience?). You know what to do…