DoomBatINC created this image for a SomethingAwful Photoshop Phriday feature fusing food and videogames. Certainly, the "long lasting rampancy bar" enriched with "Strauss protein blend" must be how an ordinary cybernetic security guard was able to face down the Pfhor and two rampant AIs over three games without ever once sitting down to a real meal.
San Jose Mercury News columnist Dean Takahashi, also author of books on the Xbox and Xbox 360, has a new column up saying that a small team of developers within Bungie Studios, led by Jason Jones and Chris Butcher, aren't working on Halo 3. They're working on something else:
They are on a small project that is exploring something new beyond the Halo universe. These guys are the cream of the crop in terms of the key talent at Bungie. Without them, neither Halo nor Halo 2 would have happened. Jones took about a year off after the launch of Halo 2, traveling around the world. Now he’s back and is trying to come up with something new.
The next step is clear: we must find out the code name for this project, or invent one ourselves. Any suggestions?
Josh Rodgers and "Stosh" recently joined Bungie officially after spending time involved in other capacities. KP drew the short straw and had to interrogate them about their deviant proclivities, super secrets, scrumptious sandwiches and the use of Mat Noguchi's rage radiation as a source of warmth. Check it out.
Brannon Boren, of Boren's Syndrome fame, laments on his blog that the Wikipedia entry on Bungie Studios casts doubt on the existence of the Halo Bible.
Such a shame.
Normally the very entertaining Halo Story Page is rather like the equivalent of the Bungie fan community putting on funny costumes, lounging in easy chairs and sipping snifters of brandy while contemplating the treachery of Cortana, the inscrutableness of Gravemind and the machismo of Keyes family officers of both genders.
Wait, it's not the equivalent of that, it's exactly that.
However, today they've got something a bit better than that. Yes, hard to believe, but they do.
Joe Staten, along with Frankie and Robert McLees, at the request of mnemesis and Finn, granted the HSP an interview that contains some silliness, some pretty solid information, and some heavy hints about the Halo Story.
Let's sift through some particularly salacious morsels and read between the lines, shall we?
Click "read more" from the front page for the entire article.
Robert McLees said this image is worth a thousand words about the Covenant-Flood relationship.
The latest Bungie Spotlight is on former community member, current Bungie staffer Cunbelin, and his contributions to Halo 3:
Well My most recent item was to remake the classic human crate, better, faster, stronger! Well better at least. I've got a long list of those kinds of items both to be brought up to the Halo 3 standards and new ones to be created. I'd go into specifics but things shift almost daily in priority so it's hard to say what else I'll be working on.
Cunbelin also gets kudos for copping to being a "rampancy snob" in the early days of his Bungie fanhood. The check's in the mail.
If you need any more proof that what goes around, comes around-- usually to end up smacking you in the face when you turn around-- read this story at Joystiq alleging that not making Halo 4 would be stupid. I saw the story linked at HBO. Interestingly enough, the only citation in the Joystiq story for the idea that Bungie has already "disproven" the "rumor" that Halo 3 will be the last game in the Halo series is-- you guessed it-- another HBO post, that one following up on forum speculation that a rumored new non-Halo Bungie title and Eric Nylund's new Microsoft project were one and the same. Nylund has already nicely put the kibosh on this one in his blog; but more to the point, the HBO post that Joystiq cites is the same one debunking the rumor about Nylund and Bungie's new projects.
So a news post at a fansite, citing forum posts at that same fansite, making a speculation based on another gaming site repeating an unsubstantiated rumor and another one citing a vague claim, somehow gets cited as a definitive source for a statement that is in direct opposition to things Bungie has already said more than once, while in the same post discrediting a previous, related rumor-based speculation.
Sometimes I think Hamlet wasn't being ironic enough.
Just in case you've managed to get this far without following me: Bungie has said Halo 3 is it. If they get their way, it will be. They didn't want to make Marathon games forever, they didn't want to make Myth games forever, and now they don't want to make Halo games forever. Halo doesn't need to be, nor should its fans want it to be, the next Final Fantasy. Microsoft will no doubt need Bungie to save its bacon once again, but it will have to be done with new properties; and if everybody is lucky we'll get a glimpse at what one of those might be fairly soon.
However, to assume that Halo must continue for another two or twenty games based on being one of the "top thirty" gaming franchises in history is just... stupid.
Expect to see this on Spong in two weeks, and then on Digg the week later, before finally making the cover of Time Magazine when they name Master Chief the Cyborg of the Year.
Spong says its sources at Microsoft indicate that a new, non-Halo Bungie game will be announced at X06 very soon:
Speaking to a Microsoft source close to the management of the entire Xbox 360 project today, we were told that, "As far as things stand, Halo 3 is the last game [in the series] and it's more than just 'a thing to say' which I know came as a surprise to everyone [at Microsoft Game Studios not involved with the decision-making process] when it was announced. A new game from Bungie, not Halo 4, will be announced soon and pre-production has begun. So if you're looking for what to expect at X06, you should be looking at that."
It seems Spong doesn't really believe Halo 3 is the last Halo game, though, as they suggest that George Lucas-style a whole new trilogy will be announced later.
X06 will be held on September 27 and 28 of this year in Barcelona, Spain.
As always, keep your sodium chloride handy while reading.
Gravemind is not an easy character to figure out.
From his initial appearance on the scene, as the rumored "big plant thingy" players who downloaded the leaked French copies of Halo 2 reported seeing, to his cliffhanger-inducing interrogation of Cortana, not much was revealed about him.
Some fans can even be forgiven for questioning whether Gravemind is, in fact, related to the Flood at all. Halo 2's cutscenes only strongly suggest this, without actually stating it. The Art of Halo here rescues us, referring to Gravemind as the "Flood hive mind".
What exactly does that imply? What does Gravemind want? Given that all these events have apparently played out in the past, with the result that the Halo system was used and all life eradicated, but with the Flood preserved dormant for the cycle to start all over again thousands of years later, what other outcome can be hoped for?
Click "read more" below from the front page for the entire article.
[image:10245 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] Bungie gave the community a gift of a seven minute documentary about the making of a two minute trailer for Halo 3, and the repayment they get? Gawkers looking over their shoulders, pointing at the screens being worked on by Bungie employees and proclaiming one or more "new species".
Keep in mind, this is the same Bungie that wouldn't even admit the game existed until a few weeks ago, even though it'd been under development for months. This is the same Bungie that kept the existence of the Flood a secret until the launch of Halo. This is the same Bungie that revealed nothing about the Flood being in Halo 2 until a French version of the game leaked, even though everybody already knew the Flood were probably in the game. The same Bungie that said everything was done but the cardboard boxes while they frantically re-tweaked Marathon levels. The same Bungie where Frankie did the majority of a studio tour of Bungie from the adjacent alley rather than have to check and make sure that the camera didn't accidentally give away the identity of the project Bungie was working on-- Halo 3-- even though the vast majority of the civilized world that even cared what Bungie was working on already thought it was Halo 3 anyway.
And people now think that not a mere glance, but a leisurely look over the screen of a Bungie employee showing characters on the screen is some kind of a magnificent revelation.
For the complete article click "read more" below.
This image from the documentary describing the process of creating the Halo 3 Announcement Trailer sparked much speculation: are these familiar species in new costumes, or entirely new species? The former seems more likely but some fans cling to the latter.
With apologies to Gilbert, Sullivan, and HunterX11 who started it.
We are the very model of a modern Halo IRC,
We've information Forerunner, Covenant and UNSC,
We know the prophet hierarchs and quote the drama ILB,
Play Marathon and Halo, too, sometimes even on XBC.
We're very well acquainted, too, with ICQ and IMDB,
About rampant speculation extremely skeptical are we,
With many useless facts about the status of the great journey.
A power loss at Bungie didn't stop Frankie from doing a Weekly Update-- although it did end up necessitating an ASCII Mister Chief.
This week's update is more about Halo 2 playlists and music than about Halo 3 though, as it has some notes about the next PLAY! concert in Philadelphia as well as the major matchmaking playlist changes that are coming up.
As usual, we've archived this week's update on our Halo 3 Weekly Updates page in our Halo 3 Articles collection.