We won't summarize the whole Halo 2 Preview at UGO, pointed out over at HBO by Louis Wu, but we'll just mention a few of the more... ahh, interesting bits of... ahh... information. Some of these aren't new, some of them are, and some of them... well...
The following story by SketchFactor is running over at Bungie.net-- go have a look! It's basically an interview with Jaime Case Griesemer, Design Lead on Halo 2, and Tyson Ferrex Green. For the new Bungiefen, they both ran a Myth site together called the Codex several years ago, and Ferrex was one of the founders of Rampancy, then called The Core.
Well, we're not in the lofty company of mirror sites like Mythica and o1, that pump out Halo videos by the terabyte, but we've done what we could in the past few days.
So far, we've meted out about 28 Gb of the high quality WMV, about 6.5 Gb of the high quality QuickTime, and 4.5 Gb of the low quality QuickTime versions of the Halo 2 demonstration at E3.
The official, high quality version of the Halo 2 demo shown this year at E3 will be made available to selected websites this coming Friday; we know it's true because SketchFactor said so at Bungie.net, plus a little birdie told us.
Nick has put up the six new Halo 2 screenshots up in the HBO forum, at full size and without watermarks. HBO's own tireless Louis Wu notes that Shacknews did the same yesterday.
Lorraine Mehve R. McLees posted in the HBO forum the other day, just to clarify a couple of comments people were making on the Official Xbox Magazine cover art. The work is, indeed, hers-- but she was so tired after finishing it that she forgot to sign it.
Gaming Age's Marcus Lai has summed up his reaction to the Halo 2 demo shown by MS at E3 thusly: Halo 2 Rocks.
We've never known Marcus to be wrong before. But then again, we don't know Marcus. So don't take our word for it.
Mnemesis over at Bungie Sightings has posted his impressions from the Halo 2 demonstration at MS' E3 press conference. He seemed pretty impressed, especially with some of the new wrinkles the sequel is sporting:
There are other stories on the PC held by MS at E3 (everybody with us so far?) at HomeLAN Fed, TeamXbox and Eurogamer.
Reuters has reported that Microsoft's Home and Entertainment division, which produces the Xbox and contains developers like Bungie Studios and others that make games for it, lost $190 million USD in Q3 2002, which ended on March 31. This compares to a loss of $97 M in the same quarter the year before. Quarterly revnue was nearly cut in half, dropping from $943 M to $493 M.
BusinessWeek Online has a story where author Andrew Bunnie Huang claims to have pre-sold over 400 copies of his controversial, as-yet-to-be-published title Hacking the Xbox: an Introduction to Reverse Engineering . Huang is self-publishing the volume on May 27.
In the Reuters Technology section on Yahoo News, there's a story summarizing the events of Microsoft's press conference at E3, and it does, of course, mention the Halo 2 demonstration.
Not to be outdone, IGN also has some new Halo 2 stuff up-- thanks to Louis Wu at HBO, where we noticed the news. Their full trailer footage, like GameSpot's, are for paying subscribers only, but they have some free teaser clips.
gamer90 over at Subnova pointed out some recent Halo 2 items at GameSpot, including two new trailers, six new screenshots, and a new preview article. Enjoy.
A PlayStation emulator called PCSX has been ported to the Xbox, allowing owners of modchipped Xboxes to play PSX games that have been ripped to their Xbox hard drives. The story is at Slashdot.