update

David Bowman, Design Lead at Certain Affinity, dishes on the Age of Booty blog about their upcoming pirate-themed XBLA game of the same name (previously called Plunder) and some of its influences, including Settlers of Catan.

There is no release date yet, but the game is speculatively expected out in the second half of this year.

Hippieman sent me a message on XBL a couple days ago.. the two downloadable netmap packs for Marathon:Durandal, the XBLA version of Bungie's classic Mac and PC scifi shooter, the grand-daddy of Halo, are now online in the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Version 0.20.2 of Aleph One, the open source engine for playing Marathon games on MacOS, Windows and Linux, has been released.

A new version of Aleph One, the open source engine for playing Marathon, is available. It fixes a few bugs and all current players are urged to update.

Frankie has posted at Bungie.net that the long awaited AU1 for Halo 3 should be online in the "wee hours" on Wednesday, which is pretty much right now.

In this week's Bungie Weekly Update, Tyson "Ferrex" Green gives an exhaustive explanation of how Halo 2's melee system worked, how Bungie addressed its flaws in changing the design for Halo 3, how that design change led to complaints from the the playerbase, and how the Halo 3 Auto Update, due out later this month, will address those concerns.

Bottom line would seem to mean more simultaneous kills, and fewer situations in which the outcome of a near-simultaneous melee contest seems random:

For those of you uninterested in the precise details, the upshot is this: if you close for a melee attack and are at a clear advantage (or disadvantage), the outcome will be clear. If the outcome is unclear, too close to call, you will likely trade kills with your victim. But you should no longer watch your opponent saunter away for no clear reason (and if you do, check the film—it tells all.)

The update is chock full of other technical discussions of things like the Commando shoulders bug, cheating, host migration, and the like.
In particular I found the spread of hit points for the Halo player-- 45 for the body and 70 for the shield-- to be interesting.

I had always thought that since the elimination of the health bar and health packs after Halo 1 that far more hit points were on the shield than the body, but the difference here is less than 100%. And they recharge, too, which I was never sure of.

There's also a Mister Chief masterpiece made to benefit charity. Even if you stopped reading the BWU because Halo 3 came out, you'll want to read this one.

...because just like tanks, dung beetles beat everything.

Or so Michael Mann would have you believe in his latest blog entry at the Huffington Post. Mann has bee providing updates on the monstrous menagerie of characters that inhabit Wideload Games' upcoming political party game, Hail to the Chimp. The latest entry talks about how the studio narrowed down the potential cast of characters.

Frankie says that if you post a question relating to Halo 3 in this thread, they'll try to provide answers in the next Weekly Update.

At HaloWars.com there's a new monthly update about Halo Wars, written by Thunder. It's mostly about the game's AI:

Ultimately, the philosophy that we’ve had at Ensemble Studios is that the most fun games are when you think you might lose but don’t. The CPAI should attempt to provide the player with this challenge in each game. We want to set the difficulty levels to where most players will find a challenge, but there will be a level that can beat them if they start making mistakes.

Check out the update in the Halo Wars forum.

Luke Smith has posted up the last Bungie Weekly Update before the game goes into everyone's (or mostly everyone's) hands: a How-To article on Bungie.net's new features.

Still nothing about fileshare RSS feeds, but it does look like there will be a high degree of integration between your fileshare and the Bungie.net forums.

This week's Bungie Weekly Update-- only two more to go now before the game's out-- is supposedly the biggest ever, at least in terms of kilobytes. Most of the content consists of pictures of Kotubukiya Halo 3 statues and McFarlane Halo 3 figures. The last image is interesting, though, as it seems to show the upcoming revisions to Bungie.net, including the windowed screenshot and recent games interfaces. All the toy images are in our new Halo 3 Toy gallery.

Freeverse's XBLA port of Bungie's FPS classic Marathon 2: Durandal recently got an auto-update; you may have noticed the last time you played the game. Freeverse's web page has a news post up about the update. The highlights are:

• Survival mode in demo
• More sensitivity controls
• FOV setting (for people with motion sickness problems)

For a more complete list of changes, see Freeverse's site. Thanks haveblue for the heads-up on Freeverse's post.

test blog.

test blog edit. roar.

Bungie has swapped out the Team Training list for a Big Team Training playlist. This features Banshees when played on Valhalla.

If you've been playing in the Beta since the 11th, you'll have to install an update today to keep playing. If you don't, you might get a message that says the H3 Beta is "unavailable or expired".

You should be prompted to download an update. If it doesn't happen, quit Halo 3 and/or restart your 360 until you get the prompt.

Just a warning-- you will NOT be able to watch any of your old saved films after you do this update, but you will NOT be able to continue playing in the Beta until you do install the update. So if you've got any movies that you're especially fond of, watch them now, then update.