This week's Halo 3 Weekly Update by Frankie has more about Halo 2 than Halo 3, but that's no reason not to read it. At least, not a good reason. There's good news and bad news. The good news is, Halo 2 for Vista won't require DirectX 10. The bad news is, the Clan playlist is going away due to underutilization.
Another third-party Aleph One map out this week-- Underworld by Jon Irons. Check it out! Thanks, TheBattleCat.
UrsusArctos is using his Rampancy.net blog to wonder about what might be in store for fans in Halo 3, as well as look at the use of artifacts like Arks and the Marathon logo in the Haloverse.
Frankie has taken advantage of the gap between seasons 4 and 5 of Red vs Blue to interview Burnie, much like the Greeks exploited the Trojans' weakness for equine statuary. Within, a plot to eliminate the show's best character is revealed!
At the end of the last season, it looked like we might be getting a new cast member. Can you tell us if you have plans to introduce any other new cast members?
Although they aren't, technically speaking, Halo story canon, the thematic and verbal similarities between the recent Halo 3 trailer and the Cortana Letters from 1999 have resparked interest in the latter; TraxusIV has embarked on an ongoing series of analytical articles that look at those themes and put the Letters into the greater context of the Bungieverse, past and present. The newest article looks at the second letter.
[image:10206 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] KP has hit the ground running at Bungie with a story at Bungie.net that explores the hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) connections between people who cheat at Halo in matchmaking and poor spelling, nonexistant grammar, and general idiocy.
My personal favorite is the one who tried to plead innocence and then make a legal threat:
[image:10203 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] It's only the second-ever Halo 3 Weekly Update, and already the bar is being set pretty high. This week we get a new screenshot, suitable for desktop wallpapery, and an introduction to Bungie's brand-new, bright-and-shiny KP.
This webcam image, spotted by serpx and posted by Louis Wu at HBO, seems to support the mention of Mister Chief t-shirts in a Bungie Weekly Update a few weeks ago.
[image:10174 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] Chris Sohl captured three more interesting images from the Halo 3 Announcement trailer, and we've added them to our Halo 3 Announcement Trailer Sceen Captures page.
Chris Sohl, who captured this image from Bungie's Halo 3 announcement trailer, had this to say about it:
Who is this dude?!?! His faces are less than a second apart in the trailer.
The first face doesn't have a lot of definition at all, so while I wouldn't bet the house that it isn't Cortana, I wouldn't argue strongly against someone who felt that it wasn't, either.
The second is so distorted that it's difficult to say much at all, except that it looks menacing. Sort of like a slee-stack from Land of the Lost.
As for what's going on in the trailer with Cortana, I think there are two possibilities:
Cortana mentions during Halo 2 gameplay a "presence" in the Covenant system that is resisting her, that she thinks is unusually strong for a Covenant AI. Perhaps it is a Covenant AI, or a Forerunner AI, or something else. This face might represent that entity, whatever its identity is.
We know that Cortana is being held captive by Gravemind. But we still don't know much about who or what Gravemind is beyond the "Flood hive brain" description. We don't know what his genesis is.
If, as some believe, the process of the formation of a Gravemind-like entity is what we were seeing in the Keyes blob, it's possible that perhaps in the distant past, Gravemind was also a humanoid. Perhaps it is that face we are seeing here; the initial or primal identity subsumed by the Flood into the body that eventually became Gravemind.
Some of the more conspiratorial theorists may still hold to the notion that Gravemind himself is the Keyes blob, somehow escaped from the destruction of Installation 04 and transported to Delta Halo. As unlikely as that is, this would make the face perhaps Captain Keyes. I don't particularly see any resemblance, but again, the image does lack definition.
Chris Sohl, who captured this image from Bungie's Halo 3 announcement trailer, had this to say about it:
The ghostly "ancient artifact" shows up one additional time, again in a single frame.
Chris Sohl, who captured this image from Bungie's Halo 3 announcement trailer, had this to say about it:
I'm a photo restoration artist, and I decided to extract the clearest picture of Cortana and clean it up from the weird lighting effects. Here's the result. This is the first and best look we have at Cortana in Halo 3, and she's lookin pretty cute... for an AI... *This is not technically a true screen capture; it's about 15% rendition and substitution.
On Monday May 8, registration for the Myth World Cup 2006 tournament opened up. Check their site for details on rules and teams.