Rampancy

The past few days have seen installments three and four of Rams Report over at Battleground: Halo. There was a considerable gap between issue 2 and issue 3, as the first two came out before PC Halo was even released, and the last two came out only recently. Issue 3 covered the Halo CE rumor and a plea for a Real Mod; Issue 4, the latest, talks about the departure of Dave "Alpha Male" (or is it alpha male now) Mertz from Gearbox, the near-but-not-quite-simultaneity of the PC and Mac Halo releases, the profligation of Halo comics, and a few other items.

Since Rams was nice enough to bring up some of these subjects before we did (hey, we're lazy, too, try us) it seemed appropriate just to comment on some of them. Not the least of these is the effort required to continue to run an oft-updated gaming site, especially in the face of stiff competition and amid the myriad demands of Real Life.

This rather long-winded piece, which I'm probably going to have to break up into a few installments in a new feature I'll call Narc's Retorts, is called:

Is There A Halo Community?

MacCentral has two notes on the Mac gaming scene, which will certainly be getting slightly more attention from the gaming press as Halo finally "returns home" to the platform it was originally announced for more than four years ago.First, Duane Johnson, formerly of Westlake Interactive (the company that ported Mac Halo, as well as countless other games) is becoming the fourth programmer to join the newly-formed internal development team at Aspyr. Aspyr previously only published games that were either developed or ported by other studios. Johnson worked on Halo, MOHAA, Elite Force and Elite Force II, among others.Next, IDG has announced that the Macworld Conference & Expo will have a Macintosh Gaming Area this year. The conference is being held at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco, CA. Mac gamers will be able to sample Halo, Unreal Tournament, Age of Mythology, Splinter Cell and others on a selection of G5s and 17" iMacs.

Blackstar at Blackstar Productions has received word that he's gotten approval to host another Halo LANfest at the Collins Center in Andover, MA-- the location of last summer's Are You Big Enough LANfest that featured a forty-foot projector screen (as well as several smaller projection areas).This next LANfest will be held next summer. I attended the last one, and can vouch that it was a lot of fun, I'm sure this one will be, too. Blackstar has put up a promotional trailer loosely based on the trailer for Kill Bill.

News of the Mac Halo Gold Master spread everywhere over the past few days; it seems the disc went to duplication on the 5th and is expected to hit store shelves on or near the projected target date of December 11; news broke at HBO, Subnova, Bungie.net, MacCentral and Blue's News. If you haven't already, you can preorder through Amazon and support Rampancy at the same time.