Blam! The Halo SETI Marinestake back position #47 in the Battle of the Teams. It was tough crunchin’ marines but we got there. Kudos all round. Team membership now stands at 440 that’s an increase of four new recruits since yesterday. Excellent! Let’s keep the pressure up and watch out for those Covenant airborne battalions. They’re everywhere!

Guns. Lots of guns. Halowar has added a Weapons Guide to their site. Just the ticket for a rainy Sunday. The Covenant Sniper Rifle isn’t featured yet in their Guide though. For more guns action check out the updated weapons page in our FAQ and there is also our Guns Analysis page from some time back. That’ll need updating again. Time for Louis to come in from out of the rain! 😉

The future of PC games development is the subject again in a Daily Radar interview with Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games. Chris offered the same views as John Carmack (see yesterday’s news). Here’s a snippet:

DR: Recently, a lot of high-profile PC developers have said that they are shifting their focus to next-generation consoles and making PC secondary. Is that going to be true of Gas Powered Games?

CT: Dungeon Siege is planned as a PC game, and we are a PC company. Naturally if the market shifts over (completely) we will take a look at making the transition ourselves, but at this time we are quite confident in the viability of the PC games market.

DR: There has been a lot of talk of the demise of the PC industry. Do you think the PC is fundamentally in trouble as a gaming platform, or is this the same talk we hear every time a new console appears?

CT: I think so. I think this business loves the drama of it all. Until consoles can do everything PCs do,and do them well, PC games we will have a market.

Nice to hear these views from top game developers. Thanks to Blue’s News for the heads up.

Battleground Halo has upped two higher quality scans from the Halo preview in PC Gamer Aug2000. You can now get a clearer picture of the new red Covenant craft and the Covenant sniper rifle. Thanks BGH.

Just a heads up on some interesting posts in our forums:

Anthor posts an interesting list of rants and raveson the E3 Halo movie. Thanks to SkyFire360 for pointing us to this one.

TOPGUNN123 notes disappearing bodiesin the E3 Halo movie. It’s not clear how persistent objects will be in Halo but I did find dead bodies useful for navigation in Marathon.

Bagman posts aURL to anXbox articlewhich claims that despite Microsoft insisting that the Xbox will be nothing more than a gaming machine hardly anybody believes them. We may get a keyboard yet.

Thanks to bibendum, who submitted a nice rendition of froggy for our Miscellaneous Art page. He looks so comfortable!

The Halo-Net Shop is now selling t-shirts… and they’re taking no chances.

we’re now printing the Halo Shirts, which have artwork which is fully original to Halo-Net, none of the content is by Bungie , so hopefully they can’t make any complaint about it.

Go on over to the shop and have a look @ the overview of the T-Shirt. http://www.halo-net.com/shop

We will only be allowing pre-orders for the T-Shirts when Bungie have had a look at the overview of the shirts.

Swing by, and see what they’ve got!

Marty O’Donnell of Total Audio offers some points of clarification about the E3 Halo movie on our forums. Here’s what the had to say:

A few points of clarification:

1. The movie on the PCG CD is a copy of the full DVD movie from E3. The show at E3 also included Joseph Staten doing about 5 minutes of live game play, which was different every time.

2. Video and audio fidelity is better on the DVD than on the CD. The DVD also has 5.1 Surround Sound (which rocks).

3. All the voice actors are professionals, this is what they do for a living. Not a single member of the Bungie staff in the bunch.

Thanks Marty.

Dink! The Halo SETI Marinesdrop two places from #46 to #48 in the Battle of the Teams. While we’ve got 436 recruits we’ve also lost some big crunchers. Banzif is the latest to stop crunchin’. Unless we get more marines crunchin’ units we’re going to start losing out big time. Don’t let the team down… crunch a unit today tomorrow it could be you!

John Carmack gives his views on Xbox and the future of gaming on the PC in an IGN Xbox interview. Here’s a snippet:

IGN Xbox: Would you ever consider doing original content for a console?

JC: There are some pleasures to developing on a console that you don’t get on a PC, but I Would hate to leave behind the open-ended, flexible architectures we develop for the PC.

IGN Xbox: If the Xbox provides the PC comforts of development, but the mass-market outreach of a console, what’s to keep PC developers from jumping ship and making console-only games?

JC: I could imagine it happening, but it will always be so trivial to make a PC “port” of an Xbox game that I wouldn’t expect the PC titles to dry up at all. Microsoft is probably doing some arm-twisting to try to force exclusivity, but it probably won’t hold for too long.

IGN Xbox: Where do you see PC game development going in the age of next-generation systems?

JC: The cornerstone advantages that PC’s have over consoles is that they are much better mediums for communication between players, and for content creation.

Good to hear John’s views on this.

Xbox technology-head, Seamus Blackley, discusses console hard drives and why developers are having an Xbox love affair in an IGN Xbox interview. Here’s a snippet:

IGN Xbox: Did you have the same problem convincing developers of themerits of the Xbox that you did convincing the general public?

SB: No, I think that the main problem with consumers is that, to date, we have been primarily talking with developers. And the problem is talking to consumers and saying ‘because the platform is so great for developers, and because they like the platform so much, you’re going to see better games, and therefore you’re going to be happy.’ And that’s kind of an awkward message to get out. Our decision all along has been to let the games speak for themselves, so as you start seeing games coming out, and we start to announce developers, and you start to see samples, that’s when we’re going to start talking to gamers, and talking to consumers about what it’s going to be like. One of the things that we’re very shy to do is over-hype Xbox at all. We have a very strict policy of under-promising and over-delivering, so we’re not going to talk about how great it’s going to be until we have something to show you.

Matt Soell has a few words to say about the XBox, keyboards and the future of the online Bungie fan community on the Marathon’s Story page. Will the Xbox have a keyboard? The PS2 will have one. As Hamish would say ‘Veritatem Dies Aperit’ or something.

Alan Stott of Halo Centerwrites to say he has posted a full explanation of events in the Halo-Net Shop Controversy. Having said all this they are still taking pre-orders for the Halo Stickers it seems?

Nate Birkholz airs his views on the situation between Bungie and Microsoft in a MacCentral article called Game Guru: Reflections on Bungie and Microsoft. Here’s a great quote:

Large publishers are, by nature, somewhat conservative, and they prefer to maintain a healthy measure of control. Most developers hear at first that things aren’t going to change, but then the corporate babysitters, excuse me, “representatives” show up, and things start a slow slide. Other developers have successfully resisted the tides of change in similar situations, but it is exceedingly difficult. As a friend of mine at another company said months after his company were acquired by a large publisher, “My wife said she liked me just the way I was at first, and that she wouldn’t try to change me; next thing I know I don’t have season tickets to the hockey games anymore, but I do go to the symphony a lot, and my Camaro became a minivan.”

The article is well balanced though with some serious comments about Microsoft’s role, “killer apps”, the loss of good friends.

More Halo movie mirrors:

3D Action Gamers (Thanks Frans)
Meccaworld (Thanks luxor)
3D Downloads
Stomped
JosephAW’s site 18MB version for 56k users (gone now)

Haven’t grabbed the Halo movie yet? Then never fear Bravehamster is here! Kudos to Bravehamster who sends the following good news:

I brought the E3 halo movie into WMP and managed to get 30+ screenshots taken. Some pretty good ones in there, got all the major points of interest. Anyways, here’s the link, for your readers who don’t have the bandwidth to download the whole movie:

http://www.bravehamster.com/halo/

Nice work. 🙂

Mirror mirror on the net… The E3 Halo movie has appeared on the net in a number of locations. Try here for now:

Fileplanet. (Thanks Charles Fitzhugh)
Battleground: Halo (Thanks Bounty)
Halo Vault (Thanks luxor)
Halo Center (Thanks Yrro)

More as we get them.

Some good stuff going down over at the Marathon’s Story page. A review of Iain M. Banks’ new novel Look To Windward. Halo is clearly influenced by Banks’ scifi novels. There’s also more Halo backstory, some comments on Bungie’s third game Phoenix, the Xbox keyboard or lack of it,the amusing The Official SA Guide to Making a Successful FPS and Marathon pants. Anyone know what the ‘t’ in ‘storytpagepants.html’ URL stands for?

The full E3 Halo movie release confirmed! Thanks to nikozomofor writing to tell us that his issue of PC Gamer (Aug 2000) arrived and the cover CD contained a 160 MB Halo movie (9 mins 42 seconds long).

Seems the Halo-Net Store was laboring under a misimpression… in this forum post, they suggest that the situation might not be as they’d understood it. Bungie licensing still costs money.