There was a rather ugly little row on the HBO forum prompted by some trash-talking against Halo and in favor of the newly released Timesplitters 2 for the Xbox. However, one good thing did come out of it: Scalrag posted a rather even-handed comparison of the two games, and what he likes/dislikes about each:
Not long after I posted the other item about Marathon not being dead, this headline appears on Gamespot:
New casualty of marathon gaming
No Bungie products were involved, but it seems a man in Taiwan has died after a 32-hour gaming session. It was the second such occurrence, as another man in South Korea died after apparently gaming for 86 hours straight.
Mitb at the Forerunners.org hotline server pointed out to us a news post by Mutha Flictka at Marathon.bungie.org with several updates: a renovation of the Marathon 2 terminal texts at the Marathon's Story page (still a joy after all these years), some more new 3d models for Aleph One at source.bungie.org, and even more updates at the
Several people (pallor, david) pointed out to several sites (HBO, Subnova) that both Halo and Halo 2 were mentioned recently in Rolling Stone magazine. Trent Reznor, the musician behind Nine Inch Nails and who also wrote the musical score for the original Quake by Id Software, mentioned that he got into Halo just before starting some studio work... which ended up being delayed for a few days. There's a scan of the blurb at HBO.
HBO has put up a page called Random Stats with numbers producted by Halo fan Zachary Hahn and his trusty Timex watch. Some interesting notes: The Spartan II runs about 15.5 mph and throws grenades at a tad less than 51 mph. Guess no World Series for Master Chief.
This is way, way off topic, but I found it utterly hilarious.
An article at Kuro5hin has put forth the argument that, along the same lines as financial reparations to African American citizens have been proposed as a backwash from slavery, women should receive reparations for their many years of oppression, as well. Or if not women... their descendants.
Matt Soell dropped into our forum just to clarify one point: Combat Evolved was, in fact, a marketing catchphrase for Halo and not actually part of the title:
Vector40 also posted links to a three-part article entitled Playing To Win at Sirlin.net, a site focused on game design and game theory (part zero, part one, part two).
From Louis Wu at HBO comes word that Bungie fan Deanero captured a special presentation of a 13 minute movie by Bungie entitled Evolution of Halo , which we've now mirrored here and at RHL. It was shown at the E3 Fanfest last month, and includes commentary from Bungie employees Shikai Wang, Marty O'Donnell and Paul Russell.
The latest poll up at Shacknews asks which platform had the most impressive games at E3 this year.
Currently the Xbox is in third place with 419 votes (15%), edged out by the Nintendo GameCube with 533 votes (19%) and getting demolished by the PC (1504 votes, 56%). Despite the console content, it looks like Shacknews really is a PC gaming site.
Trailing the Xbox were the PS2 (167 votes, 6%) and the GameBoyAdvance (56 votes, 2%).
In a forum thread at HBO discussing recent claims that Halo saved game files had been hacked to gain access to infinite ammo and other things, Mat MSN Noguchi had the following to say:
Barak at RealHaloPlayers has posted a note that Mhaddy's site The Junkyard has gotten a redesign, as well as a whole new backend system that features themes. The site has a Halo page but also covers other games like Tribes. Go take a look!
Zandervix over at MBO noticed an entry in the guestbook at HelpDavePindrys.com that notes that Dave (aka Chia) is now home and will shortly begin rehabilitation.
UnknownPlayer.com has posted an interview with Randall Glass, the author of the extremely popular Warthog Jump movie created with Apple's iMovie software and Bungie's Halo:
