Rampancy

Over on Sector7-Halo.com, their holding a quiz to test out your Halo knowledge. It's a pretty tough quiz, I only got 25 out of 45 right. Good luck!

SketchFactor at bungie.net wants your help. The folks at Bungie are starting to outline how Bungie.net will work with Halo for Mac/PC and Halo 2, read this for the full details. If you think you don't want to help out, then I won't tell you that you can win a prize!

Submissions must be in by 7/14/03

The cat has left the bag, hopped on a train and skipped town. News on how to exploit an integer underflow bug in the security routines of the Xbox dashboard's font loader have been posted at Full Disclosure.

The example code there does NOT, repeat NOT allow for copying games or playing copied games. Full Disclosure isn't going to help you do that, and neither is Rampancy.

What this news does do is usher in an era when Xbox Live gamers may have to worry about the same kind of cheating that PC gamers do, and Microsoft is going to have to seriously start worrying about software piracy on its subsidized gaming hardware. Oh, and Linux computing, too.

According to a Business Wire story on Yahoo Finance today, the Entertainment Software Rating Board has modified its rating system, further dividing violence into four new categories: Cartoon, Fantasy, Intense and Sexual.

The changes will take effect on September 15, 2003, along with changes to the labels on videogame boxes to make them more prominent, visible, and informative than the old labels. Ratings such as M for Mature will also get a minimum recommended age.

What does this have to do with Halo? Well you might ask. The original release of Halo for the Xbox was given a rating of M , rather than T (Teen) more or less at the last moment. As a result, the game's content was quite a bit milder than it could have been before reaching the next level ( AO , or Adults Only ) and yet still suffered the consequences of not being offered for sale in some stores. It was thought that, once Bungie saw the game could succeed with an M rating, that the sequel might well be a bit gorier, or have language in it slightly more colorful than the word crap , which is probably the most explicit word uttered by any in-game character during gameplay.

However, the addition of a minimum age to the M rating may cloud the issue somewhat. Stores may decide that they have their own age thresholds, and this may need to be taken into account when deciding how mature Halo 2's content should be.