Bungie Stat Tracking Excites Software Engineers
TeamXbox has an editorial up on how Bungie implemented stat-tracking, leaderboards, and RSS feeds for Halo 2, and why more gaming companies don't use XML.
TeamXbox has an editorial up on how Bungie implemented stat-tracking, leaderboards, and RSS feeds for Halo 2, and why more gaming companies don't use XML.
The guys at TeamXbox have delivered Bungie their first major defeat from a wholly external group in a Humpday Challenge; read all about the suffering at Bungie.net.
Vector40 notes the winners of the Bungie Tribute Poetry Contest over at The Junkyard; kudos to DarkTyrant, Murph MacManus and Raven3509, the #1, #2 and #3 winners, respectively.
Mjolnir Mark IV has submitted the Marathon's tenth anniversary to the games section of Slashdot, with links to the Marathon Story Page, the Halo Story Page's area on Marathon connections, and Aleph One. So if any of those sites go down today... you'll know why.
Between Marathon's tenth anniversary and this Christmas thing coming up, there's lots to do, necessitating Yet Another News Roundup:
[image:8947 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] December 21, 2004 marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Marathon, the first in a series of three science fiction first person shooters published by Bungie in the 1990s. The games were primarily made for the Macintosh platform, despite a port of Marathon 2: Durandal for Windows and the ill-fated Super Marathon port for the even more ill-fated Mac-based console by Bandai called the Pippin.
Chris Butcher talks about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous network schemes with regards to Marathon, Halo 1 and Halo 2 at How Stuff Works. Thanks HBO.
Although the top honor of Game of the Year went to GTA: San Andreas, Halo 2 and Bungie did pick up two wins at the Spike TV VGA ceremony. Halo 2 won Best First Person Action game and Jason Jones won Designer of the Year. Thanks EyesNoMore at EvilAvatar.
1UP has an interview with Tyson "Ferrex" Green about Halo 2, including his involvement in The Library level from the original game, and the tongue-in-cheek homage to it in Halo 2:
The Library was actually the first mission I was put on when I came here. But the thing that keeps me sane at night is that the library was mostly designed when I got here, so I don't blame myself for that.
According to Voodoo Extreme, Halo 2 was the #1 best-selling console title in November. Oh, and the #2 title? Halo 2's Limited Edition. GTA San Andreas, despite the huge installed base of the PlayStation, ranked third.
Obviously showing off in front of the Frag Dollz took away whatever humility Bungie might have developed as a result of being beaten by the forum mods; triumphant in the latest Humpday Challenge against OXM, the egos run rampant.
1Up has a Bungie retrospective up, covering in detail Pathways into Darkness, the Marathon trilogy, and Halo 1, with a tip of the hat to earlier games as well. Interestingly, the Bungie-published but not developed side-scroller Abuse gets a mention, while the numerous Marathon licensees and the unmentionable Weekend Warrior do not. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.
Achronos noted yesterday morning that Bungie.net's forums are back up; maintenance took longer than expected because of the size of some of the forums. "New Mombassa alone has 51,541 total topics and 623,614 total posts," said Achronos.
[image:8886 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] Given the recent release of the Pathways Redux mod for Doom 3, it seemed appropriate to look for more old school Bungie news, and Izual delivered it: box art for Minotaur, Bungie's dungeon-crawling game, in Halo multiplayer levels: Foundation, to be exact. You can find it in our Halo 2 Tricks Database under Multiplayer.