Thanks to MrEiffel65, who submitted a new desktop image for our Wallpaper page. Night is falling…

Congrats to Isolder, who noticed (before I had a chance to find it myself) a tidbit in the October issue of MacAddict about Peter Tamte:

A new company, headed by former Bungie vice president (and previous MacSoft executive director) Peter Tamte, has taken charge of bringing Microsoft’s key games, including Bungie’s titles, to our platform.

I suppose this makes sense = Tamte’s new company, and its mission, was announced at MacWorld during the same speech in which Fries and Seropian asserted that Halo would be coming to the Mac – it simply never occurred to us (or to Isolder, apparently). I guess I’d always thought BUNGIE would port it, once they were done with the Xbox version. Just goes to show you… be careful about the assumptions you make.

Hehe… these guys are nuts. HaloWar has a message from a bunch of guys who are building a Halo mod for Half-life… if they pull this off, it’ll be out before Halo will! 😉 Go check it out.

Oops… $erial-ki!!A sent word that the info about the Halo spot on British digital tv was incorrect. The actual show was called Gameover, and the channel was technology.tv. He’s got it on tape, but can’t upload it… hopefully that’ll change. 🙂

Thanks to $erial-ki!!A, who writes to tell us of Halo on TV:

I was watching Gameplay on the british Sky digital channel dot.TV, and they were doing a review on the X-Box. Surprise surprise, HALO came up, and, to my enjoyment, they did a small feature on it. In this feature (with an interview with Seropian and clips from the E3 movie) Seropian says that HALO is a weapon: certain proof that some of our specualtions were right. Just confermig all the rumours, I know that everyone assumes it is some kind of a weapon anyway.

Interesting… if anyone knows how to get a copy of this broadcast, we’d love to hear about it.

Thanks to Howard Bisoski, who submitted a new theory about the potential uses of the Halo. For good measure, he’s also tossed in some anti-gravity speculation… go take a look!

Thanks to Tom Van Sinden, who created a new desktop image for our Wallpaper page. Ever wondered where you were? Well, if you’re on the Halo, now you know.

Okay, we’ve had a submission of a Halo movie. It’s 5 MB, and it’s basically quick cuts from many of the Halo movies out there, put to a soundtrack from Toonami (on the Cartoon Network). Now… the only real problem is that it’s in Windows Media Viewer format. The latest Mac version of Windows Media Player can’t read this properly… it plays the music, but the picture is black. (Older versions of the program say the bit rate is too high to handle.) It plays fine on WMP v7 on a Win98 box, though. (Be aware that v7 will not install on Windows95 or NT4.) It’s set up on an ftp link at the moment, so you’ll have to download it to your machine to play it. Thanks to neo627 for the submission! Enjoy.

Good Lord. He’s back to Halo clues. Nathan Bitner continues his mad posting spree… a mysterious email contains the following lines:

“Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights.”

And, addressed specifically to Hamish Sinclair:

“Say not, ‘I have found the truth’, but rather, ‘I have found a truth’. For the soul walks upon all paths.”

Has he been drinking again? Or is the fun beginning?

Where Are They Now Dept.: Nathan Bitner rambled a bit this morning, letting folks know what’s up with him these days. School’s going well, the wedding got postponed (cancelled, maybe, if she reads this)… he rants a bit about some big purple gorilla. Hmm. Anyway, Nathan, the Producer job still seems to be open…

Computer and Video Games talked to J. Allard, GM of Xbox development, at ECTS yesterday, and got some details about the Xbox controller:

“I can tell you that there will be no more buttons than on the PlayStation controller [8]. We think that’s pretty much the optimum number of inputs most people can deal with in a console controller.

“Also, we really liked the double slot idea from the Dreamcast controller. In the Xbox handset there is a slot for a memory card and a slot for a voice system, so you can wear a microphone and ear-piece while you play. We don’t want to be messing around with keyboards when it comes to consoles.”

Several people have mailed us recently, asking about the possibility of a keyboard being included, or available… this information would suggest it’s not. Link first seen at MSXbox… thanks to ryu for the heads-up.

[RFAS]Fishbulb posts on our forum that Rebel Force Assault Squad is now recruiting. The site is far more viewable in IE than NS.

Sharp-eyed tulmid noticed an ECTS review at Hardware Central, in which a page was devoted to the Xbox, and Halo was the only game mentioned by name. However… any tech writer who says at this stage that

what Intel processor it will use is still not known (probably to Microsoft as well)

can accurately be said to not be on top of the situation. Nice spot, tulmid!

SOKAR posts to our forum that his German Halo website is now online – Halo Empire. Due to its heavy use of style sheets, it’s pretty much unreadable with Netscape, so visit with IE. We found it interesting that we’re not on the links page, although nearly every one of their magazine scans was taken off our pages (without attribution). Don’t mind our peevishness, though… Go take a look!

Oops, we missed this one… HaloVault came back online Sunday, with a new maintainer… Vosx. Give him a few days to get up to speed… good to have the site back!

R.net has found an Xbox article on the New York Times website. If you don’t have a NYT login, read the R.net news post for information on seeing this easily. The Times is a bit pessimistic on the Xbox; they think the console market might not last long enough to keep the Xbox afloat:

Brand and demographics may well conspire against Microsoft. Since July 1998, the penetration of video-game consoles in the nation’s homes has begun to decline, to 35 percent from 37 percent.

The reason, according to the San Francisco-based market research firm Odyssey is that the home PC is also increasingly a game machine.

And they also worry that the rate of console speed growth could increase, putting Microsoft (a newcomer with no software titles) at a disadvantage:

While Microsoft will take the performance lead in 2001, it will be with a powerful machine and little software.

Sony could then trump Microsoft with a faster machine in a year or two that could spell trouble for the software publisher: if the video-game business becomes more like the PC hardware industry, Microsoft may find itself locked in a bitter war over profit margins in which it lacks the comfortable software cushion it enjoys in the PC business. Sony has not publicly acknowledged that it plans to speed up the pace but it has quietly sent signals to its developers.

It’s almost certainly too soon to really judge the Xbox’s chances in this lucrative market… but this article certainly brings up some heretofore unspoken fears. Go read it! (Again, check the R.net news post for instructions about access if you don’t already have a login for the NYT site.)

Thanks to Eric (on our forum), Dan Rudolph (via email), and fire phoenix (of Halo Center, also via email) for notification of yet another Halo preview, this time at Jack In. Mostly, it’s a good overview of the game… but they either know a LOT more about this game than the rest of us, or they’re good at making things up as they go along:

Other borrowed touches include the window at the top of the screen as seen in Delta Force that allows you to snipe from a third-person viewpoint. The non-complicated control system of Quake and its sequels. Also included are the class distinctions as seen in Team Fortress, although it will be possible to pick up new weapons and change your role as it is possible in another of Half-LifeÂ’s fantastic mods, Counterstrike. Another aspect taken from Half-Life is the mapping system that means that the area is broken down into sections that link to one another.

Window at the top of the screen? Class distinctions? (Jason has said this won’t happen… at least not in the context of other games’ class distinctions – they’ll be learned, not chosen.) Mapping system with linked sections? An interesting read, even IF this stuff is all just made up.

Blam!… Blam!… Blam!… Blam!… Blam! The Halo SETI Marines climb 5 notches to number 43 in the Battle of the Teams, mostly due to a server reset that changed the way earned units are allocated. No matter… Slashdot is now within easy reach. Unfortunately, Project Blue Book is climbing fast… can the Marines hold on? Check the 7 days stats for the full details on movements.

Seen at GameSpot UK: At this weekend’s ECTS (the European Computer Trade Show), Ed Fries announced some details of the Xbox launch strategy. There will be (at this point) 22 games ready for release with the box itself – seven from within Microsoft, and 15 from 3rd-party developers. It was this passage that caught my eye:

“Virtually everything we are developing will be exclusive to Xbox. We have a separate set of PC developers,” he said. “We’re not looking to port content back and forth between the Xbox and PC platforms.”

The one exception Fries allowed to this rule is Bungie’s much-hyped Halo, which will publish on Xbox, PC, and Macintosh platforms, although even this title will publish first on Xbox ahead of the PC release.

Shame on us for suggesting, yesterday, that Bungie doesn’t hold a place of honor in the Xbox pantheon!

Will nobody actually put their name to any information any more? Last week, xbox365.com posted a story in which “a good source” suggested the Xbox spec had been improved to include 128 MB RAM, instead of 64. A day later (we missed this until now), Spank! did some checking, and found another “source” (unnamed, of course) who said it’s all a bunch of hooey… “The spec hasn’t changed and it won’t change.” Makes you wonder about xbox365’s 40 gig HD rumor, too…