Rampancy

[image:4040 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Dolbex has put up his coverage of Gearbox's Fanstock event, as well as provided a review of betas 1.5 and 2.0 of PC Halo on his site Been Mawed. Noticed by Louis Wu at HBO.

[image:4093 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]The new screenshot of PC Halo over at Gearbox is of the red team on Blood Gulch pounding the Blue Base with fuel rod guns. Can't wait until that makes it into Red vs. Blue. We've archived the shot.Incidentally, both Louis Wu at HBO and NightShade at BGH noted that the Halo project page at Gearbox now has a "work items" number at the top; currently it stands at 146.

There's a new "hands-on" preview of Halo for the PC over at ActionTrip. Glad they've got something to do with their hands, we were worried for a minute there. Besides, we'd gotten tired of all the "hands-off" previews of PC Halo from those too meek to actually touch the thing. At any rate, like most PC gamers, ActionTrip falls squarely on one side of the gamepad vs mouse and keyboard debate:

No matter how you look at it the controls are more intuitive on the PC. It's like slipping on an old shoe, it just feels right. The best indication of this is when you operate the Warthog — aiming and driving is a lot easier than on the console. The slow and bulky Xbox controller can hardly stand up to the precise aiming and accurate movement you can achieve by using the mouse and keyboard.

ActionTrip also has a good-sized PC Halo image gallery, although some of the images are only available to "ActionTrip Plus" subscribers. The rest we've archived in the PC Halo Gallery. Thanks for the heads-up to Louis Wu.

[image:4044 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Part the Fifth of Bungie's look at making the Halo 2 E3 Realtime Demo by SketchFactor is online at Bungie.net; this one is about the role of the Engineering department. Which, despite the red shirts, are not to be confused with the Security department. Sketch interviews Michael Evans and Chris Butcher from the Engineering team; the rest of the team consists of Charles "Chucky" Gough, tools author Mat Noguchi, Ben, Bernie, Stefan, Greg, Eamon and Jason. This is the final part of the Making the Halo 2 Demo series.