Rampancy

Part six of skeifer's series on realism in Halo is up at the Junkyard. This time, skeifer and "Captain Roy Luthan" take on 343 Guilty Spark. This time, the beef is with the end of the level, where Foe Hammer makes you wander through the jungle to 343's tower before coming in to pick you up:

But after all that and finding the new elevator up to the ground level, I would have called in the pelican no matter what, since going out there with the Flood swarming the jungle is suicide. Fog and foliage my ass, since the pelican doesn't use a propellar and has armor on it, just simply knock down any tree that gets in your way from picking us up or have us blow it down with a couple of grenades, but DAMN IT, you're picking us up right outside that structure.

Have to admit he has a point there. Thanks to Ryan "Mhaddy" Matthews for the heads-up.

1Up has a story that brings together a "panel of Xperts" as they put it to talk about what Microsoft needs to do in order to make the sequel to the Xbox a success. One of the Xperts is none other than Alexander "The Man" Seropian, cofounder of Bungie and founder of Wideload Games, scheduled to release a Halo engine game next year.

BDGamer pointed out the article and chose Seropian's quote about the Xbox's size as an example of the text, noting that for Japanese living rooms it posed quite a challenge. Myself, I find more interesting his quote about hardware system power:

If you make the assumption that all systems in the next cycle are in the same ballpark, then it's not too relevant. I mean, Xbox is a more powerful system than PS2, and even though it did well, Sony still whomped it. This cycle wasn't decided by the hardware--timing, marketing, and software did that.

Interesting that backwards compatibility was not addressed...

The BBC has a nice little article on Halo 2 with the usual kind of stuff in it-- will Halo 2 live up to expectations, what are the changes, etc etc. The interesting bits, though, come from Pete Parsons right at the end:

"We have several 100 years of Halo fiction laid out," said Mr Parsons.

and

"After Halo 2 we are planning to do something different. We will do something else and we have a few ideas."

Well, that certainly deals a little bit of a blow to those hoping to see Halo 3 debut on Xbox 2, doesn't it? Thanks Louis Wu at HBO for the heads-up on the article.

Mat "shunji" Noguchi, tools programmer at Bungie, has come up for air after Halo 2 crunch time, and apologized for the recent (if understandable) lack of entries on his blog.

He ends the entry with a "random bit of trivia" for those awaiting Halo 2:

Legendary is hard. Really really really hard. Adamantium hard.

I guess more practice is in order.