By The End Of The Year
Halo still hasn't gotten more than a token mention in the press event so far, except for Moore's statement that fans should expect something new related to Halo 3 "before the end of the year".
Wingnut Forms Game Studio
1Up is reporting that Peter Jackson and Microsoft are forming a new games studio, Wingnut Interactive. The announcement cites Jackson's involvement in Halo 3 and a future Microsoft title.
UPDATE: 1Up has added some details to this item, fleshing out Jackson's involvement. It no longer mentions Halo 3 specifically, but does say:
Live Video Feed from X06
Getting at the live video stream provided by the UK Xbox site seems to be a bit problematic, so here is an akamai cache link:
mms://a1369.l2074835666.c20748.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1369/20748/v0001/reflector:48948?wmcache=0
Nothing Bungie or Halo related so far. As Louis Wu pointed out at HBO there is also a live blog of the event at 1UP:
Rumors Swirl Ahead Of Microsoft's X06 Event
A lot of sources today are spreading news that details of revelations to be made at Microsoft's X06 event in Barcelona, Spain today.
First Ever Bungie Podcast
[image:38939 right hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] There's a lot of goodies in this week's Bungie Update. Not a whole lot of it pertains to Halo 3, except possibly the logo, but that at least is something.
Halo 3 Logo
From the Bungie Update:
"over a period of several months and literally hundreds of files, we have the final Halo 3 logo. We hope you like it and if everything goes according to plan, you’ll see a LOT more of this in the months ahead!
Looks like the color and texture of metal on the underside of the Halo rings; although at a distance, the colors also look like an Earth-like world seen from a distance, the mix of blue, green, and white.
Bungie Announces Halo 3
Bungie announced that Halo 3 is in development for the Xbox 360 and is expected to be released in 2007. The announcement was made at Grauman's Chinese Theater, in Hollywood, CA.
Other than "it takes place in the Halo universe" not much more is revealed about the game.
event start:
05/10/2006
Who would you most want to fight in a Halo 3 boss battle?
The Prophet of Truth
12% (47 votes)
Cortana
17% (68 votes)
343 Guilty Spark
7% (28 votes)
Gravemind
28% (110 votes)
Boss battles suck!
36% (143 votes)
Total votes: 396
You're Not The Boss Of Me
If Halo 3 were going to have boss battles, who would your opponents be?
That's an idea that occurred to me after participating in an HBO forum thread that started out talking about a rather idiotic article wondering if Halo 3 would suck, and ended up morphing into a discussion of boss battles.
I'm not really sure how boss battles got into Halo 2 in the first place. Perhaps somebody asked for them. Perhaps it was felt that Halo 2 needed "bigger" encounters than the first game; conflicts with individual characters instead of anonymous Covenant foot soldiers.
Whatever the reason, some of them worked fairly well, and others garnered a lot of negative feedback, particularly the fights against the Prophet of Regret and Tartarus. Most of the criticism stemmed from the arbitrary and repetetive natures of those encounters; how the rules varied significantly from how the rest of the game was played, and how they evoked stereotypical gameplay situations perhaps better suited for other genres.
With Halo 3, there are still a number of recognizable characters in the story who are potentially sources of conflict for our main characters, the Master Chief and, presuming he returns, the Arbiter. Might any of these be the subject of a boss battle? If so, how might Bungie alter the way those battles work compared to Halo 2?
Click "read more" from the front page for the entire article.
So Much Stabbing, So Little Time
Game-Spectrum, purporting to cover the entire spectrum of gaming, gets a nice interview, along with threats of physical violence, with its interview of Bungie's own Kevin "KP" Paul, covering his turn-ons, turn-offs, and how he sleeps at night knowing all that stuff about Halo that we'll never even know we don't know.
Test Halo 3 Spoiler
This is a test Halo 3 spoiler. You should not be able to see it.
Bungie Update: AI Gunners Will Be Smarter... Maybe
According to Frankie in Bungie's latest Weekly Update, the artificial intelligence in current builds of Halo 3 seems to be quite a step up from the previous games.
HDR The Bungie Way
Eastbeast314 posted up links from Let's Kill Dave to the PPT presentations at this year's GDC, as offered by Microsoft. The Graphics Track (caution, direct link to large file!) includes a portion called "HDR The Bungie Way" about HDR lighting.
Letter To Bungie Reopened
Gravemind wrote up an extensively compendious piece on the Halo franchise, posted it on GeoCities, then linked it in the HBO Forum, with predictable results. When HBO front-paged it the next day, the site quickly exceeded its bandwidth quota. HBO had a mirror up by that time, with simplified HTML for quicker loading.