Rampancy

Blackstar of Blackstar Productions, that yesterday released a video of the Offensive Tetraboxing LANfest held by HBO's Louis Wu, mentioned in the HBO forum that a second part of the video will also be available soon.

Spenser posted in the HBO forum that the answer to a FAQ item on the website of Infinium Labs, the company currently purporting to be developing a driveless gaming console called the Phantom, will have a shooter similar to our favorite game available at launch: reportedly a two chapter "Halo-like" FPS game. It is in response to a question about whether or not the Phantom system has a lot of games. Initially developers were claiming 17,000 titles available at launch. That total has since been raised to 30,000.

Currently the company is better known for having showed up at E3 with nothing but an empty plastic case to show and then threatening to sue HardOCP for publishing an article suggesting that maybe the whole thing is vaporware.

Bringing the story full circle, the threat of legal action emerged after Kevin Bachus, formerly of Capital Entertainment Group, joined the company as chief operating officer. Capital Entertainment Group was a company Bachus formed with former Xbox officer Seamus Blackley.

Warning: both the Infinium Labs and the Phantom websites (even the so-called dialup versions) have such horribly over-done Flash interfaces that currently we can't even get them to load or work well enough to verify Spenser's report; YMMV.

[image:6820 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Over at Blackstar Productions, Blackstar's highlight film for the Offensive Tetraboxing LANfest held on January 31 and February 1 by HBO's Louis Wu is now ready. It's called HALO: Offensive Tetraboxing and it's clocks in at a little over 9 minutes and 93 megabytes. It's encoded in MP4 and requires QuickTime to view; if you watch the QuickTime versions of Red vs Blue then you should be all set.

The word is that this is going to be the most sophisticated yet of Blackstar's fan films, with extensive use of rendered effects, including "original renders of the entire ringworld not seen in any Bungie version" according to the author.

[image:3572 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Back in the day Craig Mullins was responsible for a lot of the absolutely kick-ass art associated with Bungie Software's products, most notably their series of SF 3D shooters (sounding familiar?) for the Mac; yes, Marathon. Featuring a mysterious protagonist (who either does or does not turn out to be a cyborg, depending on who you believe) whose actions are directed by even more mysterious AIs, some rampant, towards the discovery of high-tech artifacts and weapons produced by a long-gone advanced intelligent race... hey, we have played this before, haven't we?

[image:6813 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]At any rate, Mullins produced the chapter screens for the Marathon games, including some of the most enduring images of that game's unnamed central character. The Master Chief is someone we're more familiar with: after all, we know he's a cyborg, and we even know his name. But that doesn't stop Mullins from again coming up with an enduring image of him.

Thanks Deimos of Subnova and Louis Wu of HBO for pointing this one out. We've added the image to our Craig Mullins gallery.