Rampancy

Slashdot is reporting that Bungie's audio team of C Paul Johnson, Marty O'Donnell, and Jay Weinland won the Best Audio award at GDC 2005 for Halo 2. In most other categories, though, Half-Life 2 stole the show. Thanks Louis Wu.

*_mc* mrsmiley at Halo Babies writes that he and Gruntsbane put together five new Halo Babies emoticons they said "no Halo forum should be without." We interpreted that as a direct order and installed them. For the sake of convenience, the codes needed to use these at R.net are the same as those at Halo Babies.

Fourteen new screenshots for Wideload's upcoming Xbox third-person action game, Stubbs the Zombie in: Rebel Without A Pulse have showed up on stubbsthezombie.com, and were later picked up by GameSpot. There's also a new page of videos showing the game in action on the Stubbs site, and a writeup of what Wideload is showing at GDC at GameSpot.

The Game Developers Conference has kicked off with J. Allard's keynote address, and the web is atwitter with news about Microsoft's next console, despite the machine itself not yet making an appearance. Here are a few links to items floating through the ethernet at the moment:

• Major Nelson has entries in his blog, (keynote kickoff, new UI including screenshots, MP3 podcast of the keynote address and finally a good old-fashioned transcript.)
• AGEIA Technologies announced their NovodeX Physics SDK for the new Xbox console.
• Xbox Live will be integrated even more tightly into the new box according to Joystiq, which is still using the Xbox 360 logo with stories even as it touts that "Xbox Next" seems to be the official moniker, at least according to some PowerPoint slides they've seen. They've also got show floor pictures.
• Lists of Xbox 2's features, including the emphasis on High Definition TV, at Eurogamer, Xbox365, SPOnG and GameSpy (second of two parts, as mentioned yesterday) and Voodoo Extreme, which apparently got it before the address from a leaked press release.