Dante pointed out in #hbo that Amazon.com now lists a release date for the fourth Halo novel, Ghosts of Coral, by Eric Nylund. Amazon claims it will ship October 31, 2006.
UPDATE: As pointed out below, the date was actually in the Amazon listing almost two months ago. Moving along, nothing NEW to see here.
I AM CRAZY AND I WROTE ANOTHER BANSHEE ARTICLE
LOOKIT http://rampancy.net/info/articles/banshee_handling_v_evasion
Now, look. I didn't really want to do this, but there it is. And there's one last little thing that didn't even warrant inclusion there, so I'm just going to put it here.
I'm speaking, of course, of
See, you play enough, often with people who really just... don't get the juices flowing, and a certain disturbingly sadistic side comes out. Maybe it's just me. But it's there and you find yourself basically toying with folks like a cat with a mouse. Consider this my confession. I'm not going to say that I've done everything here, but I've done everything here.
It should be observed that a number of these are actually useful techniques in and of themselves. Also, the first three of these are basically products of goatrope's depraved mind.
After I completed my last Banshee piece (the narrated video), I felt that I was done with this series. I’d said most of what I had to say, and moreover, it was coming up to the point that I was ready to quit Halo PC in general. I had never wanted to “overstay my welcome” and linger past my prime, growing steadily less effective as a wave of new players continually reminded me of what I no longer could do.
I did in fact make an official “retirement” from the game. However, more than a year later, I found myself still picking the game up from time to time, and recently I’ve been playing regularly again. No matter how poor this game may be, I cannot help but love the Banshee. So here I am, with one final article, on a few last points regarding what I have always called the most critical skills of the capable Banshee pilot: positioning, angles, and fundamentals.
Part Four of vector40's Banshee Handling series is a video that shows various techniques.
Can someone send me sheet music for On A Pale Horse for Piano and Peril for Piano at doctaknocka@hotmail.com? thanks.
Rockslider has put up another piece on Halo 1; this one covers how to lure Banshees into areas they don't normally belong, and the strange behavior they exhibit once they get there. This piece covers level 2, "Halo".
Quite what the explanation for the weird behaviour is, I don't know. I find the grenade chasing business especially baffling. What on earth is there in the game programming that makes them so interested in grenades in these areas, yet not in the valley? Is it actually some sort of 'Easter egg' somebody sneaked in? Seems doubtful; I'm guessing it's some unintended consequence of the Banshee being in an environment that wasn't planned for. If anyone reading this can shed some light on these behaviours or has a theory, I'd be happy to hear about it!
Having just played the first few levels of the original game this weekend, I also noticed some of the same Banshee behavior, as well as some other, related non-Banshee behavior.
I have a feeling that the scripting for Banshee pilots (or perhaps any AI unit using a vehicle like a Banshee, Wraith, or Shade turret) is "overlaid" on top of that unit's basic AI routines. So the normal Banshee behaviors we're used to seeing, such as the dive-bombing and so on, only exists in environmental areas where Bungie expected Banshees to be, and often times wrote specific scripts for specific areas.
Click 'read more' from the front page for the entire article.
WARNING: This article contains spoilers not only for the Halo games but also the Half-Life games, so beware!
I'm not writing about Halo 3 this week.
Really, I'm not. Instead, I'm taking a side-by-side look at two of the biggest FPS games today: Halo and Half-Life.
Before anyone had ever heard of Halo, I was already cursing the luck that put all the games I wanted to play onto hardware I didn't own: namely, the PC of a good friend, where I got to see the original Half-Life and play a bit of it. I was immediately reminded of the first Unreal game as well as Marathon. It seemed to be a game that, while it was a first-person shooter, was unlike most of the games in that genre that were popular at the time: twitch games where character and story took a back seat to action and colored lighting.
We may have neglected it to mention it before, but Wideload Games was nominated for the New Studio award at the Game Developer Choice Awards. The competition certainly seems stiff; ArenaNet is up for Guild Wars, DoubleFine Productions up for Psychonauts, and TellTale Games up for Bone: Out From Boneville. The last nominee in the category is New Crayon Games up for Bonnie's Bookstore.