In a weekly update that was almost uncharacteristically chock-full of real information, including an update on Halo 3's current control scheme, button-by-button, one last morsel was hidden in plain sight, in the desktop wallpaper "teaser image" that features the Halo 3 logo above the glowing Forerunner artifact from the announcement trailer.
Given that Halo 1 was released in November, and Halo 2 was released in November-- was there ever really any doubt?
MTV is into all the things the hip kids do these days, including play videogames. MTV did a video interview with Microsoft's Phil Spencer about Halo, and MTV News has a piece up on Gamecock, the outfit that will be publishing Wideload's next game.
Wideload's Alex Seropian related a story about trying to find a publisher for the company's first game, Stubbs the Zombie:
Promotional video for Myth: The Fallen Lords.
Sometimes, you've got to take the good with the bad. So first, watch KP take on random jerks you don't know who are doing what you can't right now: playing Halo 3. Nobody else showed up for the Humpday this week, so you don't get specific jerks, just random ones.
For most of the past few years the bulk of my attention has been on Halo's campaign play: story, characters, and settings. Partly it's my choice, since it is where my interest in Halo lies, but partly due to circumstances. For most of the past seven years, the Internet connections I had access to were unsuitable for online play.
Recent events, however, have conspired to bring my attention back to online play. The first is the upcoming Halo 3 multiplayer public beta. True to form, it appears that Bungie will have multiplayer ready to show the world before the campaign is finished; so between now and when the beta test ends, most Halo 3 discussion will probably focus on multiplayer aspects.
The second thing is that I finally have a reasonably priced Internet connection that makes it possible to participate in Halo 2 matches. While I still have more latency and less skill than a below-average Halo 2 player, for me, participation is the thing. I've already missed out on far too much.
The last thing was that during a discussion of an entirely different subject, my attention was drawn to Halo2sucks.com.
This is not normally a site I would pay much attention to. There's something incongruous about reading a site that labels Bungie "sellouts" and proudly (if largely incoherently) claims that Halo 1 is better than Halo 2 and this inevitably leads to the conclusion that Halo 2 sucks.
However, then I began to feel that simply dismissing all the points the site tries to make simply because of the presentation was prejudicial; and despite the fear of directing attention somewhere it's not warranted, I felt a need to address some of the points the site raised. Then I discovered what really bothered contributors to that site. More on that near the end.
Keeping a company light on its toes by keeping the core creative staff small and outsourcing the fiddly bits is how Wideload Games is approaching the problem of rising game development costs.
Version 1.6 of Myth II, for which a public beta was available last summer, has now finally been officially released for Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Windows. It's available in the Myth II Updates section of the recently-launched The Tain, an archive for Myth-related files.
I'm way too uncool to even know what that means, but that's how Frankie described Halo 3 in an interview with Eurogamer.
On a more intelligible note, he also said:
Well, we haven't lost a single [new] weapon thus far, but we've improved a few. Our test process is simple. Play it, play it some more, take notes, make changes, play it more.
Despite the chance of getting into the Halo 3 beta if you dusted off your copy of Halo 2 for three hours on Xbox Live this past week, the top game on the service continues to be Gears of War, which somehow manages to get more unique users every week out of the ten million xbox 360s worldwide, despite the fact that there are more than twice as many original Xboxes out there, plus the fact that 360s with hard drives can also play Halo 2.
Members of the PMS and Cavegirls clans came out to challenge the Bungie guys (and friends) in the latest humpday and came away winners, 6 to 5. The Bungie guys complain they were undermanned, but surely they knew that going in? Details at Bungie.net in KfeckingP's post.
With the three days to get in your three hours of Halo 2 on Xbox Live play on an Xbox 360 in already passed, and web registration-- apparently-- about to open, Halo 2 players are poised over their keyboards to attempt to become one of the 13,333 lucky entrants into Phase Two of the selection process for Bungie's Halo 3 multiplayer beta.
A couple days ago I got my newest gameinformer mag. I saw all new screenshots of halo3.I read that h3 may come out in march07.Is this true please notifiy me. The magzine also noted that BUNJIE has new weapons and new character skins for the brutes. They did not reveal info on the elites or the other covenant forces.