...because just like tanks, dung beetles beat everything.
Or so Michael Mann would have you believe in his latest blog entry at the Huffington Post. Mann has bee providing updates on the monstrous menagerie of characters that inhabit Wideload Games' upcoming political party game, Hail to the Chimp. The latest entry talks about how the studio narrowed down the potential cast of characters.
Frankie says that if you post a question relating to Halo 3 in this thread, they'll try to provide answers in the next Weekly Update.
At HaloWars.com there's a new monthly update about Halo Wars, written by Thunder. It's mostly about the game's AI:
Ultimately, the philosophy that we’ve had at Ensemble Studios is that the most fun games are when you think you might lose but don’t. The CPAI should attempt to provide the player with this challenge in each game. We want to set the difficulty levels to where most players will find a challenge, but there will be a level that can beat them if they start making mistakes.
Luke Smith has posted up the last Bungie Weekly Update before the game goes into everyone's (or mostly everyone's) hands: a How-To article on Bungie.net's new features.
Still nothing about fileshare RSS feeds, but it does look like there will be a high degree of integration between your fileshare and the Bungie.net forums.
This week's Bungie Weekly Update-- only two more to go now before the game's out-- is supposedly the biggest ever, at least in terms of kilobytes. Most of the content consists of pictures of Kotubukiya Halo 3 statues and McFarlane Halo 3 figures. The last image is interesting, though, as it seems to show the upcoming revisions to Bungie.net, including the windowed screenshot and recent games interfaces.
Freeverse's XBLA port of Bungie's FPS classic Marathon 2: Durandal recently got an auto-update; you may have noticed the last time you played the game. Freeverse's web page has a news post up about the update. The highlights are:
For a more complete list of changes, see Freeverse's site. Thanks haveblue for the heads-up on Freeverse's post.
Bungie has swapped out the Team Training list for a Big Team Training playlist. This features Banshees when played on Valhalla.
If you've been playing in the Beta since the 11th, you'll have to install an update today to keep playing. If you don't, you might get a message that says the H3 Beta is "unavailable or expired".
You should be prompted to download an update. If it doesn't happen, quit Halo 3 and/or restart your 360 until you get the prompt.
The February Halo Wars update by Thunder has a lot of fuzzy, censored pictures, but we're told flat-out that the game is in a playable state, and has been played by Microsoft bigwigs like Shane Kim. Still, he reports there is "a long way to go" and there is still no officially announced release date.
In a weekly update that was almost uncharacteristically chock-full of real information, including an update on Halo 3's current control scheme, button-by-button, one last morsel was hidden in plain sight, in the desktop wallpaper "teaser image" that features the Halo 3 logo above the glowing Forerunner artifact from the announcement trailer.
Version 1.6 of Myth II, for which a public beta was available last summer, has now finally been officially released for Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Windows. It's available in the Myth II Updates section of the recently-launched The Tain, an archive for Myth-related files.
You know, because of the layers. Layers of detail, like the layers in Frankie's latest Bungie Update. Between those layers are morsels of information: like the fact that every campaign level is now in the game, which is playable "from end to end"; like the fact that the usual levels of difficulty: easy, normal, heroic and legendary, are in the game and being tuned; like the fact that Robert McLees just found Ling Ling.
Okay, it could be cake. Everybody likes cake.
With the onslaught of new Halo 3 information in the past few weeks, I've begun updated our Halo 3 FAQ. At the same time, I'm changing the way FAQ pages are stored and displayed. Currently, only the Halo 3 FAQ is in this system, but eventually it will be used for all FAQs.