The phenomenon that was the I Love Bees ARG, or Alternate Reality Game, well and truly wrapped up this weekend. Players who followed through to its conclusion (some of them, anyway) were treated to a "training session" where they got to see Halo 2 pre-release, and some won copies of the game. Others received commemorative DVDs with the content of the audio drama on it, as well as other things.
We've all heard that the Halo 2 levels are much bigger than those in Halo 1, and that all of Halo 1's levels could, in fact, fit inside a large part of a single Halo 2 level. And yet rumors that the game ends too quickly have persisted.
Rapture at cooked gamers tries to dispel the rumor but ends up perpetuating it; he says that he feels the game ended rather quickly, but attributes this to his skill...
Check out cooked gamers' spoiler-free campaign preview.
The NetNinja Bee Log notes today that at 17:00 EST on Sunday, November 7 there will be an IRC chat with the Puppet Masters of the I Love Bees alternative reality game on the server irc.chat-solutions.org in the #apocalypso channel. The chat will be logged and moderated. For those without IRC clients, Unfiction also has a Java-based web client.
The following is a transcript of my experience at the I Love Bees Training Exercise in Schaumburg, Illinois.
The news items are flying fast and furiously in the last few days before Halo 2's launch, so in order to keep up we'll be posting news summary items where necessary. These items were pointed out at various other gaming sites, including HBO, Sector 7, Halo Planet, GameSpy and IGN. This weekend's summary so far:
It looks like one of the features I personally had hoped to see when Bungie.net became integrated with XBL is coming to fruition: RSS feeds for individual stats. Right now an XML button for an RSS feed of "recent games played" is visible on the Stats page of Bungie.net users that have linked their gamertags. It looks like the button only appears on your own Stats page, so to get the feeds for other players you'll have to ask them. As I haven't been able to play any games yet, I don't know what kind of information is in the feed, but still, the idea is pretty sweet.
Some have reported that select few attendees at the I Love Bees "training" events have been receiving special items. Some received commemorative DVDs, others got Limited Edition copies of Halo 2 before anybody else. Lucky buggers.
[image:8567 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] XLNC has put together another collection of excellent HUDless screenshots from PC Halo, proving that even with less than a week to go before the release of the sequel, fans are still getting enjoyment from the first installment. We've created a third gallery for XLNC's screenshots especially for this collection, and here it is: XLNC Series Three.