Rampancy

Nick has put up the six new Halo 2 screenshots up in the HBO forum, at full size and without watermarks. HBO's own tireless Louis Wu notes that Shacknews did the same yesterday.

Lorraine Mehve R. McLees posted in the HBO forum the other day, just to clarify a couple of comments people were making on the Official Xbox Magazine cover art. The work is, indeed, hers-- but she was so tired after finishing it that she forgot to sign it.

She pointedly decided NOT to clarify whether or not the figures standing next to the Master Chief on that cover are merely marines or other Spartans. However, anyone who's seen any of the recent trailer footage (who, us?) may note that the marines in it are wearing green armor not unlike the Chief's, which may go a long way towards explaining the Spartan-like appearance of the other figures on the cover.

Mnemesis over at Bungie Sightings has posted his impressions from the Halo 2 demonstration at MS' E3 press conference. He seemed pretty impressed, especially with some of the new wrinkles the sequel is sporting:

Rounding a street corner, we get our first glimpse of the Brutes. They were pretty dark, but quite large and evidently strong. The MC got out of the Warthog to dispatch them, but a bunch of shots to the body didn't do anything, and a punch in the chest didn't either. Luckily, a well-placed grenade under a vehicle caused enough of an explosion to eliminate that particular threat, so the situation ended happily.

Then something miraculous happened. A couple of Ghosts were coming down the road towards us, and things looked pretty grim for the MC, when he jumped up onto the wing, and with one hand hanging on to the cowl, pushed the Covenant driver out and took his place! Man, that was incredible. I could watch that part over and over.

Be sure to check out his writeup.

Earlier this year, unnoticed by us here at Rampancy (fancy that) the long-standing disputes over the ownership of the source code for the popular Hotline chat and pira.... err, file-sharing client and server seem to have come to an interesting conclusion, with the open-sourcing of the code for Hotline 1.x and the publication of the protocol specifications. The new project has been renamed OpenSprings. Apparently the code is available either under GPL or a commercial license. The commercial version of the app is still being maintained by HotSprings, Inc., which apparently now owns the code.

Personally, we at Rampancy are still using the very excellent FrogBlast clone for OS X, having abandoned the official Hotline application after it was no longer possible to close or hide the ad-banner-bearing toolbar. However, if you're game to give it a try, you can download the newest version, 1.9, of the official client and server from the Hotsprings, Inc. download page. Versions are available for OS X, Mac OS Classic , and Windows.

Incidentally, Rampancy still operates its own Hotline...err, HXD server, at hotline://rampancy.net.