[image:10049 right hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] This week's Bungie Update starts with some information on Play! A Video Game Symphony that is a rival to the Video Games Live concert series from last year You remember, the one you couldn't go to because so many dates were cancelled. Ahem. Marty O'Donnell and Mike Salvatori will be on hand to sign autographs and hang out when Play! comes to Chicago, which will be on May 27, 2006 at the Rosemont Theatre.

While some are joining Bungie, others are leaving to make their bitemark on the world on their own. GameDaily is reporting that developers from the Halo and Half-Life teams, including Hamilton Chu and and Michael Evans, formerly of Bungie, are forming a new studio called Giant Bite.

[image:10010 right hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] Longtime Bungiefen and former developer at Free Radical Max "mad.max" Dyckhoff has been hired by Bungie as an AI Engineer. What will he be working on? This:

Seriously, Damian and I have a plethora of very cool ideas for things the AI characters can do that will draw you even deeper into the game world. I will be implementing behaviours in characters that will really engage the player – possibly even making them want to marry them.

This has gone beyond amusing into the realm of annoying. Shane Kim, GM of Microsoft Game Studios, responded to a question about Halo 3 thusly:

Shane Kim: I call it The Mythical Halo 3 - we haven't announced any such game yet! Obviously the Halo franchise is very important to us. When you have Bill Gates being quoted fairly constantly, talking about a game, you know it's important to the company. But his recent comments reflect the position accurately. Which is that, if there were a Halo 3 we would be careful about how we announce and introduce it.

Does anybody honestly believe that Microsoft's chairman doesn't know what's going on with a product like Halo and has to be reminded before repeatedly making public statements? Does anyone honestly not believe that what actually went on here is that Gates spilled the beans-- more than once-- and then had to be reined in to respect the right of Bungie Studios to control their own announcements about what games are under development?

Of course Bungie should jealously protect whatever rights for self-determination they received in terms of the buyout; but for everyone else, this game isn't fun anymore. If there is actually a Halo 3 under development, then the final revelation that it does, in fact, exist, is going to evoke universal reactions of "no kidding". If it isn't, then Microsoft has been playing coy all this time when it could have just said it was giving the Halo franchise a rest for awhile to let Bungie work on something else. They haven't said that. In fact, at this time, if it were announced that Halo 3 was NOT under development for the Xbox 360, you'd probably see Microsoft's stock take a hit, as if there's no system-selling game coming out once the supply problems are taken care of, there'll be little reason that all the Halo and Halo 2 fans have to upgrade. They might have survived such negative consequences had they made such an announcement right after the launch of Halo 2. But everyone is expecting Halo 3 now.

Either Halo 3 is currently in development for the Xbox 360, or we've all been so fooled by Microsoft's application of reverse psychology that our brain matter has turned to mush.

Incidentally, Bungie knew that people would be scrutinizing their last update-- a video tour of their offices which for reasons of secrecy doesn't actually feature much of their offices, unless you count Starbuck's, the alley outside, a storage area and the air conditioners part of the office-- for clues about the next project, so the titles "Pimps At Sea" and even "Marathon 4" were prominently featured on whiteboards for our amusement.

Those who wondered how Bungie was going to plausibly explain the presence of Nicole-458, the Spartan II soldier who guards the hangar bay of the Nassau Station in Tecmo's upcoming DOA4 title for the Xbox 360, will get a hearty "shut your noisehole" and a shout-out to the I Love Bees reality game in Frankie's run-down on Nicole, Spartan-458:

Nicole was born in the year 2531 in the city of New Legaspi on Mars. At six years of age she was abducted by agents of the Office of Naval Intelligence and conscripted into the Spartan II program. The Spartan II program was the UNSC's highly successful military project to augment and hone perfect soldiers.

SPARTAN-458's unit was preparing for a classified mission on Nassau Station when the ONI stealth ship Apocalypso tumbled into real-space – being carried along in the wake of a freak slipspace anomaly. The anomaly intersected Nassau Station; creating a semi-stable "bubble" in the space/time continuum on its way back to the 21st Century.

For the time being Nicole-458 is trapped in the 21st century; guarding Nassau Station's secrets with all but lethal force (she realizes killing someone in the past could have dire consequences), waiting for the "bubble" to collapse and hopefully returning her to the year 2552.

The Apocalypso, some of you might recall, was the UNSC craft that the AI Melissa was aboard, and that brought the mysterious artifact to Earth that Spartan-spawn Janissary James had to try and deactivate before it... did something bad.

Whether this mishap involving a cloaking device and a space station (sounds like a line from Hitchhiker's, doesn't it?) occurred before or after Truth's fleet arriving at Earth isn't specifically stated; but as the Nassau's hangar bay happens to include a conveniently-placed Covenant boarding craft, one can only assume the latter. Either that, or this is really just the Cairo's hangar from Halo 2. Wait, did I say that out loud? Nevermind.

Some Halo-related and not-so-Halo-related news for today:

Achronos writes at Bungie.net that the playlist update is complete. Last week's update at Bungie.net detailed all the changes. The bottom line is, if you can still see playlists like Head to Head-- which has been deleted-- you're not seeing the changes, and you need to logout and then login to Xbox Live again.

A few items of note before the holiday break:

• Frankie reported the goings-on at Zero Hour on Bungie.net, including a 7th place, 7-kill Xbox Live performance.
• Coldforged has an Xbox 360 high definition FAQ that you might find useful.
• The Red Herring thinks the Xbox 360 will be good enough to knock Nintendo out of the console hardware business.
• Game Insider has a series of photos from launch lines at Best Buy.
• Kotaku has reports of one Xbox 360 that seems to be broken, crashing while playing PGR3 several times in a row with all default settings, and an Xbox 360 that is definitely broken as a result of an encounter with a sledgehammer.
• GamePro says Bill Gates is standing behind the Xbox 360. (If he stands behind the power adapter, no one will see him--Ed.)
• Nearly lost in all the Xbox 360 launch hubbub, Aspyr has shipped Stubbs the Zombie for Mac OS X.
• Voodoo Extreme is collecting reports of Xbox 360 problems and directing readers to the official support pages.

As of today I've been reinstalled in Rampancy's core after a short business trip to London and environs last week, the culmination (or at least the high point) of which was some Halo 2 play on XBL with Stuntmutt and c0ld vengeance. In the meantime, here are the most important items in the Halo/Xbox 360verse in that time: