More contradictions to the Daily Radar UK bit last week: xbox.ign.com interviewed Kevin Bacchus, Director of Third Party Relations, about how he sees outside publishers fitting into the Xbox scene. One unhappy thought:

“For some publishers though, there’s a conversation we need to have about how you make use of a system that has no mouse and has no keyboard, and that really is designed as a platform for very intense, action-oriented games. “

Halo with no keyboard will NOT be the same game as Halo with a keyboard. And if the console version is built around a no-keyboard scenario, what sort of time will be added to the PC/Mac port by the need to rework the control mechanism (and indeed the gameplay)? Read the whole interview here.

More Xbox news… in contradiction to speculation by Daily Radar UK last week, MSXbox asked Michael Abrash, Microsoft programmer, about his statement that the Xbox will ship with 64 megs of RAM. Michael said

“… I would have liked to have seen 128 Mb myself. […] Anyway, the decision is made, and it’ll be interesting to watch what developers do with their 64 Mb!”

Stop by MSXbox for the full quote.

For those still confused as to why Bungie programmers (and many others) are so excited about the Xbox, when it seems it’s just a box with a bunch of PC parts that will be nowhere near cutting-edge by the time the Xbox is released, XboxFaction has put up a small feature on fixed-spec (console) vs. open-spec (pc) systems. Check it out. Thanks to Blue’s News for the heads-up.

Thanks to Trask, who submitted a new background for our Wallpaper page. Take a look!

Halo Center is currently looking for newsies… if you’re interested, send Yrro some mail. Not that there’s a ton to do right now… but who knows, things change.

Yesterday, we posted a news item about an interview with Seamus Blackley, the Director of the Xbox Advanced Technology Team, and we got both email and a forum post lamenting the inclusion of Blackley on the Xbox team. He’s best known for his involvement in the development of Trespasser, a game released in October 1998 with real problems. Last May, Gamasutra printed a postmortem of Trespasser written by one of the game’s designers, that explains clearly where the game development went wrong. A sentence near the start caught my eye:

The pie-in-the-sky concept for Trespasser was an outdoor engine with no levels, a complete rigid-body physics simulation, and behaviorally-simulated and physics-modeled dinosaurs.

The article as a whole points to more similarities between Trespasser and Halo (remember that this was written before Halo was announced), and Wyckhoff’s conclusion was that

“…just as there are no successful anarchic world governments there can not be any successful development teams without management.”

To the best of our knowledge, the Halo team hasn’t yet filled the Producer position vacated last fall by Nathan Bitner. Definitely worth a read… and feel free to add your comments to Forensic’s thread on our forum!

Mojo reminded us that we’d forgotten his comic site, Bungie Jumping, in our links round-up yesterday. Heh… his latest comic pokes fun at a pillar of the fan community… stop by and take a look! (Bungie Jumping has been added to the Funnies section of our Links page, as well. Sorry, Mojo.)

Gamecenter.com interviewed Seamus Blackley, director of the Xbox Advanced Technology Team, about where Microsoft sees themselves fitting into the console market.

GC: How confident are you about Microsoft’s foray into console gaming?
S. B.: We try to put 300 percent into everything we do. We’re here until 10 p.m. every night. I’m never home. We have this feeling that we’re coming from behind and we have to get everything right. We’re always second-guessing ourselves because we need to get everything right for the worldwide launch next year. We have a great team, a great console and a great game lineup for Xbox. We think about the gamer who walks into the store and buys an Xbox and thinks, “Why am I happy I bought an Xbox?” Then we think of it as a business model.

The HBO spin: Microsoft is aware of the tenuousness of their position… there’s a lot riding on the success of this platform. For us, here, if the Xbox fails, we could care less about Microsoft’s loss… but what happens to Bungie?Thanks to BGH for the heads-up.

Thanks to all the folks who’ve told us how broken our news archive is… it’s been fixed. Not only that, but searching has gotten easier. You can still use the search box on this front page… or you can jump over to the archive and grab a particular day, or a particular month. Finding old news was never so easy!

Woohoo! Shame on us for not noticing sooner. Battleground: Halo, dormant for a bit, is back in the saddle, with new updates, a comic, and a new bit of fan fic. We were getting nervous there… 😉

Thanks to Haloplayers, who noticed an article at Daily Radar UK detailing the (current) specs of the Xbox. On the plus side: a scaled-down, stable version of Windows 2000, (maybe) 128 MB RAM, and a keyboard and mouse standard… This is all speculation on DR’s part, but it’s backed up by some educated guessing, and the current XDK. (For example… the beefed-up RAM prediction comes in part from the fact that support for virtual memory is not built in… so enough real RAM will be a priority.) One juicy rumor: nVidia, in addition to making the graphics chipset, is on board for the sound card as well. An interesting read!

Due to circumstances beyond our control, we missed our SETI update yesterday. We’ll do a 2-week update next week. In the meantime, however, the SETI Halo Marines need to realize that they’re falling behind the TidBITS team… after weeks of being 4-500 units behind, the gap has now grown to over 600 units, and continues to widen. How will you find the Covenant at this pace?

Thanks mightily to Mark Levin, who has updated the HBO FAQ to reflect recent information. Tons of good stuff… stop by and take a look! (If you want to nitpick, do so in this thread on our forum.)

Kudos to Harry Al-Shakarchi, who snagged this from ShugaShack (who, in turn, got it from Telefragged)… The latest issue of the British gaming mag Edge has an article on the Xbox, and a sidebar contains comments from developers about the platform. Joseph Staten was quoted as saying the following:

“Throughout Halo’s design process, we’ve had to face tough choices about limiting the game’s scope to accommodate lower-end PC systems. Now that we’re making the game for the X-Box first and foremost, we haven’t thrown away our old performance guidelines, but we certainly feel a lot more comfortable committing to high-poly models, more detailed textures, a litany of shader effects, inane physics – all the really sexy things that X-Box is capable of. Tackling a game as ambitious as Halo, it feels really good to have a clear hardware target. Even better, one that allows the whole team to create stuff that’s a lot more complex than we originally planned.”

Which makes one wonder… will the PC and Mac versions be up to the same level of quality as the Xbox version? And if so, will the system requirements be much higher (relatively speaking) than Bungie’s been known for in the past? Thanks, Harry.

Rockhound sends word of a new Clansite, Germany Clan. This one’s a bit different from other clansites… it seems to be a meta-site, a gathering place for German clans in preparation for clanwars against other nationalities. Divisions are to be 6 to 8 soldiers… if you speak German, feel free to correct any misimpressions I’ve gotten from Babelfish. 🙂

Thanks to Pr@iler, of Halo.ch, who gently reminded us that we’ve mentioned quite a few new Halo pages in our news in the past couple of months, but have been lax about adding them to the Links page. Hopefully, we’re updated now. (The General Sites section has been alphabetized, as well.)

Thanks to fire phoenix, who whipped up a new banner for our Banners page. Nicely done… go check it out!

Thanks to MrEiffel65, who posted on our forum about a new German Halo site, CoD Halo-News. (No relation to the German site HaloNews.) Looks an awful lot like Battleground: Halo to me… Check it out!

Thanks to Brad Custer, of Custer’s Corner, who sent in a new desktop for our Wallpapers page. This one comes in more resolutions than any I’ve seen yet, you should find a version that fits your desktop.

$erial-ki!!A is back in the writing game, and has released chapter 6 of his Halo work-in-progress, this one titled “Mutiny and Dissension.” You’ll find it on our Fan Fiction page. Enjoy!