Rumor Mill: New Bungie Property At X06
Spong says its sources at Microsoft indicate that a new, non-Halo Bungie game will be announced at X06 very soon:
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Spong says its sources at Microsoft indicate that a new, non-Halo Bungie game will be announced at X06 very soon:
Those who've complained that Rampancy hasn't updated in quite some time are quite correct. While I've no excuse, I do have a reason, and the reason is that the flow of information about Halo 3 has recently slowed to a trickle, and that trickle has now been over-analyzed, much as two boys with twigs might poke and prod at a rivulet of sudsy water running through a patch of sand without ever deducing the existence of a car wash.
While the various fan forums contain far too much rampant speculation to digest, let alone refute, the Halo Story Page provides a convenient place to separate the wheat from the chaff before setting it, too, aflame.
To wit, today's contributions regarding the Prophet of Mercy, Master Chief and the Flood, and Cortana.
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I have been looking all over the web these days. Not just for sheet music for POTC, but for something else. Search enginges barely do good these days. You must pay money (usually) to have your site appear when a tag is typed in. So I looked the old fashioned way; looking. Few websites that deem themselves "Halo encyclopedias" are just that. It took about an hour. not to easy. But I found it. The script of Halo 3 (or,not script) is long. Very long. I took me two hours to read it, and doesn't battle. It's just the cutscene scripts.
I have been looking all over the web these days. Not just for sheet music for POTC, but for something else.
Search enginges barely do good these days. You must pay money (usually) to have your site appear when a tag is typed in. So I looked the old fashioned way; looking.
Few websites that deem themselves "Halo encyclopedias" are just that. It took about an hour. not to easy. But I found it.
Gravemind is not an easy character to figure out.
From his initial appearance on the scene, as the rumored "big plant thingy" players who downloaded the leaked French copies of Halo 2 reported seeing, to his cliffhanger-inducing interrogation of Cortana, not much was revealed about him.
Some fans can even be forgiven for questioning whether Gravemind is, in fact, related to the Flood at all. Halo 2's cutscenes only strongly suggest this, without actually stating it. The Art of Halo here rescues us, referring to Gravemind as the "Flood hive mind".
What exactly does that imply? What does Gravemind want? Given that all these events have apparently played out in the past, with the result that the Halo system was used and all life eradicated, but with the Flood preserved dormant for the cycle to start all over again thousands of years later, what other outcome can be hoped for?
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[image:10245 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0] Bungie gave the community a gift of a seven minute documentary about the making of a two minute trailer for Halo 3, and the repayment they get? Gawkers looking over their shoulders, pointing at the screens being worked on by Bungie employees and proclaiming one or more "new species".
Keep in mind, this is the same Bungie that wouldn't even admit the game existed until a few weeks ago, even though it'd been under development for months. This is the same Bungie that kept the existence of the Flood a secret until the launch of Halo. This is the same Bungie that revealed nothing about the Flood being in Halo 2 until a French version of the game leaked, even though everybody already knew the Flood were probably in the game. The same Bungie that said everything was done but the cardboard boxes while they frantically re-tweaked Marathon levels. The same Bungie where Frankie did the majority of a studio tour of Bungie from the adjacent alley rather than have to check and make sure that the camera didn't accidentally give away the identity of the project Bungie was working on-- Halo 3-- even though the vast majority of the civilized world that even cared what Bungie was working on already thought it was Halo 3 anyway.
And people now think that not a mere glance, but a leisurely look over the screen of a Bungie employee showing characters on the screen is some kind of a magnificent revelation.
For the complete article click "read more" below.
This image from the documentary describing the process of creating the Halo 3 Announcement Trailer sparked much speculation: are these familiar species in new costumes, or entirely new species? The former seems more likely but some fans cling to the latter.
Like everyone before me has asked-who's that?
[img]http://rampancy.net/rampancy_files/images/dudeface.preview.jpg[/img]
And even more so...do I see a face? Assuming that Cortana's mouth and the other black spot are eyes of the other face...is there a second face in this image?
[img]http://rampancy.net/rampancy_files/images/shield.thumbnail.jpg[/img]
A power loss at Bungie didn't stop Frankie from doing a Weekly Update-- although it did end up necessitating an ASCII Mister Chief.
This week's update is more about Halo 2 playlists and music than about Halo 3 though, as it has some notes about the next PLAY! concert in Philadelphia as well as the major matchmaking playlist changes that are coming up.
Well, as fans of the Webcam can appreciate, the power went out in our building about an hour ago, so I am typing this from the basement of a Kirkland abattoir. And that, ladies and gentlemen is why it's short and lacking any real art. I lost an entire day's work. Sorry. I don't have access to our servers. So the Bungie guys and gals took the afternoon off and headed to the local Tiki bar.
This week's Halo 3 Weekly Update by Frankie has more about Halo 2 than Halo 3, but that's no reason not to read it. At least, not a good reason. There's good news and bad news. The good news is, Halo 2 for Vista won't require DirectX 10. The bad news is, the Clan playlist is going away due to underutilization.
E3 brought up a lot of confusion about Halo 2 for Windows Vista, which is hardly surprising. We'd been working on fixed platforms (Xbox, Xbox 360) for so long, that we'd almost forgotten the vagaries and complications of discussing a PC product. I guess that's going to be the case for a while! Two games to update you on!
San Jose Mercury News columnist Dean Takahashi has written a second book about Microsoft's foray into the console gaming business. Released as an eBook, The Xbox 360 Uncloaked: The Real Story Behind Microsoft's Next-Generation Video Game Console also offers some interesting perspectives on the development of Bungie's Halo franchise.
That the fate of the new console should be tied to Bungie's flagship game is certainly no shock; since 2001 Bungie's series of shooters have been system-sellers for the Xbox, and Halo 2 has had a stranglehold on the top spot in Microsoft' Xbox Live online gaming service since it was released in late 2004.
Takahashi's book claims that Bungie became caught in a struggle between the hardware and software sides of the Microsoft Games Division over how to best promote both the platform as a whole and individual games, and that eventually Hamilton Chu, Pete Parsons, as well as other Bungie staffers, and Ed Fries, who spearheaded the buyout of Bungie by Microsoft, were all casualties of it in one way or another.
The below text is a sort of "executive summary" of the book, including many the points where the stories of Bungie and Halo intersect with the business of Microsoft Games Studio and the division of Microsoft that makes the Xbox and the Xbox 360. Excerpts from Takahashi's book are reproduced here with permission of the author. All quotations and paraphrases of statements by personnel currently or formerly of Microsoft or Bungie, whether identified by name or not, are taken from the book; no one contacted for this article wished to comment for the record at the time of its publication.
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