Head To Head, With A Side Of Lag
For those cursed with lag-- or those looking to create havok with the rankings, annoy their fellow players, and risk the ire of Bungie by performing the standby cheat-- the Head to Head playlist is for you.
For those cursed with lag-- or those looking to create havok with the rankings, annoy their fellow players, and risk the ire of Bungie by performing the standby cheat-- the Head to Head playlist is for you.
Frankie is back at Bungie now with a brand-new Weekly What's Update. This one covers the teleporter glitch on Relic (it's "being taken care of"), demos for Halo and Halo 2, and what Sketch would look like if he ate all the pies.
Xbox Live users in #hbo have begun reporting that the second set of Halo 2 downloadable maps, Terminal, Backwash, Elongation, Relic, and Gemini, are now available for download for $11.99. Thanks Tex.
An Associated Press story from Beijing describes the country's first "officially licensed clinic for Internet addiction". The story's headline at Yahoo News misleadingly refers to "addicted video game players"; while the story mentions that much of the time the heaviest Internet users spend at their computers is playing games, the clinic itself does not appear to be specific to games but rather to Internet use in general.
A lot of goings-on in the Halo 2 Map world recently. Of course, the Killtacular Pack which was released as a split between two free maps and two premium maps is now available in its entirety for free from Xbox Live; Containment, Warlock, Turf and Sanctuary.
With both SketchFactor and Frankie off gallivanting (no doubt accelerating at 32 feet per second per second, naturally) Shishka was left alone at the switch this week, and submitted three QuickTime 3d screenshots of Terminal in lieu of the What's What Update for last week.
Torlough of the Geezer Gamers has put up a story and a video on cheating in Containment; XBL players with modded Xboxes are apparently modifying the downloaded map files to produce various effects such as flying Warthogs and an incredibly fast Master Chief, and using them to cheat in matchmaking. Thanks HBO.
The latest featured article at Bungie.net is all about the upcoming expansion map, Terminal. The map is based on the New Mombassa area from the campaign and features a runaway maglev train designed to complicate matters on a regular basis. But hey, at least the trains run on time.
J. Paradise recently began a series over at DailyGame called Confessions of a Girl Gamer, cataloguing some of the less-fun aspects of multiplayer gaming on Xbox Live. As a female gamer, she noted some of the less pleasant behaviors of the majority of the other gamers on the system, who presumably are male, if common sense and all known statistics can be trusted.
While most of her complaints are entirely valid and each of the behaviors she describes is undoubtedly annoying, I thought there were one or two points which deserved to be responded to, given the criticism the gaming industry receives almost daily in the current political climate for promoting sex and violence. Before this and other articles get referred to in an attempt to heap the charge of promoting sexism among America's youth gets piled onto the heap, it might be worth thinking a little further on some of the topics J. Paradise raises.
Kotaku today asks if female gamers are going to generate the extra revenue needed for the industry to grow, based on
Mindquirk Software has released version 2.02 of Xbox Live Friends for Mac OS X. This version fixes a problem with auto sign-in that appeared as a result of changes at Xbox.com
For various reasons it's been hard for me to keep up with news posting lately; many thanks to trav himself (formerly Sistimatic) for picking up the slack. Here are some recent items of note: