Cooperative Myth II Tourney
The Tulkas Challenge is a Myth II Soulblighter Co-operative tournament being run in conjunction with PlayMyth.
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Rampancy
Death by intelligence.
Recent Videos
| Title | Date |
|---|---|
| Pathways Into Darkness Part 3 | 08.18.24 |
| Pathways Into Darkness Part 2 | 08.03.24 |
| Pathways Into Darkness Part 1 | 07.27.24 |
| Little Kitty, Big City | 07.20.24 |
| No Man's Sky: Adrift | 07.13.24 |
| Destiny 2: Final Shape Part 4 | 07.06.24 |
| Destiny 2: Final Shape Part 3 | 06.29.24 |
Sheet Music
| Title | Transcriber | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Halo 5: Advent (String... | cwhiterun | 06.07.16 |
| Halo 5: Blue Team (Str... | cwhiterun | 10.22.15 |
| Halo 5: Light is Green... | cwhiterun | 10.20.15 |
| Halo 5: The Trials (St... | cwhiterun | 10.12.15 |
| Roll Call - Price Paid | pimpnmonk | 06.02.14 |
| Behold A Pale Horse Fo... | pimpnmonk | 01.24.14 |
| Farthest Outpost/Mercy... | pimpnmonk | 12.30.13 |
Rampancy Podcast
| Episode | Date |
|---|---|
| Sony Acquires Bungie (mp3) | 02.02.22 |
| Let's Play Mass Effect 3 #27 Final... | 06.02.17 |
| Anger, Sadness and Envy Ep. 27: Craig Ha... | 05.08.13 |
| Anger, Sadness and Envy Ep. 25: Destiny... | 03.05.13 |
| Anger, Sadness and Envy Ep. 24: Halo Ann... | 04.21.12 |
| Anger, Sadness and Envy Ep. 23: Halo Ann... | 06.26.11 |
| Anger, Sadness and Envy Ep. 21: The Wint... | 04.18.11 |
The Mythical Halo 3
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.
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The Zombie Is Escaping
Online gaming magazine The Escapist has a nice piece on Stubbs the Zombie; Escapist writer Joe Blancato talks with Wideload's "writer guy" Matt Soell about the grisly genesis of Stubbs; Soell also gets to talk about one of the underlying themes of the game:
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Impressions: Uprising
I've always thought that someone or someones at Bungie had a serious penchant for parallel constructions. Where many other reviewers looked at the reuse of level geometry in Halo 1, I saw narrative purpose. The idea of a journey out from the Pillar of Autumn and then returning there was reinforced by the territories that were crossed twice. Each of the repeated levels undergoes major changes in its repetition.
The spic-and-span Truth & Reconciliation environment in the Covenant cruiser finds its mirror opposite in the leaking, burning, Flood-infested wreckage from which you retrieve Captain Keyes' neural implants. The bright and brisk snowscapes of Assault on the Control Room over which you glide in Warthogs, Scorpions and Banshees along with your marine support troops as you mow down everything the Covenant can throw at you is mirrored perfectly by the dark and bitter cold of Two Betrayals, as you slog through pitched battles between Flood, Covenant and Sentinels without any of your compatriots for assistance. If you thought that the Pillar of Autumn was a bit beat-up when the Covenant blew it out of the sky over Halo, that's nothing compared to what happened when Guilty Spark made it the site of his last effort to stop you from preventing the installation from being activated, while the Flood try to repair the ship to use it to escape and the Covenant try and stop them.
So it is no surprise to me that I see similar patterns at work in Halo 2. Once the Arbiter is introduced, he and the Master Chief alternate starring in levels, first two by two and then one by one. Some of the environments also follow a pattern. The Chief defends a space station, the Arbiter attacks one. Some of the Arbiter levels hark back to levels in Halo 1 that had no parallel there. Quarantine Zone is a good dark parallel for Two Betrayals or Assault on the Control Room, as an outdoor snow level with vehicular combat near an important installation-- in this case, Delta Halo's library. Sacred Icon itself is an improved Library, as a better-lit labyrinth, arranged vertically instead of horizontally.
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Impressions: Gravemind
Ever have one of those days?
That's what went through my mind when I started playing Gravemind.
Halo 2 has other tough spots; the second hangar bay in Cairo Station, sniper alley in Outskirts, and Nothing But Jackal in Delta Halo. When I first played Gravemind, however, was the first time I backed off my intention to complete the game the first time around, all the levels, at Heroic difficulty or better. After banging my head against the wall that is the opening room of Gravemind, I restarted on Normal so I could get past the level and finish the game in time to write something about it before people stopped caring.
Most of the time in Halo 2, you've got a choice of weapons with which to face your foes, or recourse to go back somewhere and get them, or at least a place to hide. The audience chamber of Gravemind has none of these things. The only exit to the room won't open until you clear all the enemies, so you can't speedrun it. There are no areas that aren't exposed to fire from some angle-- and that includes the upper seating areas that Brutes will lob Brute Shot grenades into. When you start the level, the only weapon you have is a single needler, and the only dropped weapon available to you... is another needler.
UPDATE: I guess Gravemind is popular again all of a sudden, so I'm lucky posting at this precise time; Ducain at High Impact Halo has just made good on a promise to jump to the top of the level, the high building at the beginning of the outdoor areas after the marine rescue.
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Stubbs Nominated For Horror Saturn
Gamasutra has a story covering the nominations for the 23rd Annual Saturn Awards given by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films. Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse by Wideload Games was nominated in the Best Video Game Release: Horror category:
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The Good, The Bad, And The Cheap
Since I've already been called out for being petulant this week, I thought I'd do a follow-up on Uwe Boll's whinefest from yesterday where he takes a few swipes at his critics, just as I've taken a few swipes at those trying to let the air out of the tires of my favorite defenseless lovelorn zombie, Stubbs.
Aside from his complaint, most likely valid, that many who criticize his films haven't actually seen them (a sure bet for films that don't succeed at the box office, I'd imagine) Boll also suggests the following series of logical propositions as a counter-argument (click read more from front page for the complete article):
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The Reimagining Business
The Bleat has an excellent hypothetical exchange between the Doom movie scriptwriter and a Hollywood producer:
Producer: Of the game, maybe, but you know, we’re in the reimagining business here. Value added. People go see this expecting demons from hell, we give them something else, shake them up.
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Boll: Halo Will Be A Failure
Eurogamer is carrying an interview with film director Uwe Boll about videogame movies. The thrust is basically that when his videogame adaptations have failed to succeed critically or to make good theatrical box-office numbers, the reasons have largely been a lack of support from the developers of the original game and an unfairly hostile press.
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Style Over Substance In Stubbs Reviews
In the first part of my review of Stubbs, I lamented that most gaming media outlets were giving the game less attention than it deserved. That is still so. It was fortuitously released around Halloween, which gave many mainstream outlets an excuse to mention the game, but for the most part the hardcore gaming press dismissed it as a game with a cute premise and a nice soundtrack but just not much to write home about.
Without meaning any disrespect to Robert 'Apache' Howarth at Voodoo Extreme (a site I generally find to be a cut above most gaming sites, even if it is part of IGN) I found his mini-review of Stubbs a good example of what's wrong with game reviews in general and reviews of Stubbs in particular. So I thought I'd annotate a version of it here.
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