Rampancy

The guys over at the Halo Story Page were able to get Eric Nylund, author of Halo: The Fall of Reach and Halo: First Strike, as well as Eric Trautmann, the guy at Microsoft most closely connected to the Halo backstory, to sit still long enough to answer a few questions about the Halo storyline. Some of them are about small details and possible errors. The really interesting bits:

• The "artifact" found on Cote D'Azur that led the Covenant to Reach and Cortana to Halo is an "interesting little chunk of stone" according to Nylund, and contains multiple messages.
• As Trautmann hinted earlier, the answer to the question of who or what would wear a Halo-- already stumbled on by a forumgoer accidentally-- is important. The answer in general would seem to be angel, but what that means I can only guess.

Go take a look, the full article is quite worth it. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

Dean Takahashi has written an article up at the Mercury News right now that purports to be "quietly circulated" specifications for the next version of Microsoft's gaming console, the Xbox. They can be boiled down to several points:

• Three PowerPC processors
• ATI graphics processor
• No hard drive
• DVD or Blu-Ray drive
• 256 Mb of RAM
• Possibly no backwards compatibility

I was considering a wry comment or two in this space about those specifications, but the commentary sooned drowned out the... information, if it can be called that, so I'll be posting that separately in Narc's Retorts.UPDATE: The Junkyard has pointed out a tidbit I didn't know about this article, namely that the writer, Dean Takahashi, is also the author of Opening the Xbox. While the subtitle of this volume, Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution seems to indicate more than a small amount of partiality to the console, one would still think that Takahashi would be "in the know" about possible future Xbox specs, lending a bit more credibility to the story than it might otherwise have. Unfortunately, I still think that's bad news for the Xbox and its fans. Jake 'Evergreen98' Billo at The Junkyard also doesn't seem to think these are good ideas.

Frankie's latest installment of the Bungie Weekly Update is over at HBO right now. This week he stresses that there's no trickery involved in the grandeur that is the new Halo 2 screenshot:

It's really important to point out that this screen is straight from the current game engine. The resolution is a little sharper thanks to the way screens are dumped from the frame buffer, but this is entirely representative of the lighting, polygon counts, bump-mapping and particle effects. There's no trickery or BS here. And of course, this is early stuff, so things will change and improve between now and launch. We basically played the game and took a ton of shots until we finally picked the one that rocked the hardest, and best represented what playing that level was like.

Plenty of more information there, too, about the new Bungie.net site as well as international localization for the game. One wish in that area: subtitles, guys, in local languages and English, please. Thanks to Blackstar for the heads-up.

Word from CobaltNova comes that the Halo Fan Site Awards 2004 have begun; a full list of all ten nominated sites can be found there, but the contest itself seems to be run from Blam-Halo.co.uk, so it's there you'll have to go to vote. Of course, if by chance you've already made up your mind, you can vote for Rampancy right here. No pressure. Thanks MereCatfish.